Update: Hours after this story was published, the Associated Press reported that a Philadelphia jury awarded $11 million to a man whose holstered Sig Sauer P320 allegedly fired on its own, wounding him. In a statement, Sig Sauer vowed to appeal the decision and blamed the plaintiff’s “own negligence” for the shooting.
Two videos emerged this month showing police officers in Texas injured by their own holstered Sig Sauer P320 pistols. In both incidents, as reported by CBS Austin, the officers say they were doing routine activities during their shifts — one was walking through a park, and the other was retrieving something from his vehicle — when their service pistols fired without the triggers being pulled.
The incidents follow dozens of reports of people around the country being injured by P320 pistols firing unintentionally. But in an interview earlier this year, Sig Sauer CEO Ron Cohen defended the P320 — and called critics “vultures that enjoy picking at a company, especially the companies that are on top.”
P320s fIRING ON THEIR OWN
Since its introduction in 2014, the Sig Sauer P320 has received rave reviews by gun publications and topped best-selling lists by retailers, but its claim to fame was winning the Modular Handgun System (MHS) competition in January 2017, a years-long contest to supply service pistols to the U.S. Army and ultimately all branches of the military. The initial award not only gave Sig Sauer a $580 million contract, but bragging rights for making the official sidearm of the U.S. military, which the company uses liberally to advertise products to civilian buyers.
However, alongside the commercial success, there’s also been a growing number of claims that the P320’s design has dangerous defects. Earlier this month, attorneys representing a police officer in Missouri asked a federal court to certify a class action against Sig Sauer, alleging the gun maker has been deceptively advertising the P320 pistol as being safer than it really is. According to the court filing, P320 owners can experience an unintended discharge as soon as the gun is loaded because it has an extremely light trigger pull and lacks external safeties commonly found on other duty pistols — including Sig Sauer’s military version of the P320.
In a 2023 investigation, The Trace and the Washington Post found that more than 100 people have alleged that their P320 pistols discharged without a direct or intentional trigger pull in lawsuits since 2016. Of those, at least 80 people say they were injured. Since that investigation, at least 23 others have claimed that they’ve been injured by P320s in subsequent lawsuits. The plaintiffs in nearly half of the cases were police officers as well.
In addition to the legal challenges, other videos have surfaced showing unintentional shootings, but perhaps the clearest example comes from Connecticut’s Montville Police Department. During the incident, the department said an officer’s P320 sidearm experienced a “spontaneous” discharge while assisting with an arrest. The bullet narrowly missed another officer. The video shows the officer squatting to grab an arrestee’s legs, and then his holstered pistol fires a round as he stands up. In response, Sig Sauer claimed that the officer’s pistol was not fully seated in the holster, and that the shooting was caused by the officer accidentally touching the trigger. The department opted to replace all of its P320s due to safety concerns.
A number of the lawsuits have concluded with mixed verdicts, dismissals, and settlements, but in June 2024, a Georgia jury found Sig Sauer liable for defectively designing the P320 and failing to adequately warn consumers about the risk of unintentional shootings with the firearm. According to the verdict form, the P320 was defective because it lacked a “tabbed trigger,” a passive safety device used by several competitors that is built into the trigger and blocks the trigger from moving unless fully depressed. Despite the verdict and the $2.35 million award to the plaintiff, Sig Sauer was not ordered to warn the public about potential safety risks with the P320, issue a recall, or modify the design. The company has vowed to appeal and maintains that the plaintiff’s injuries were caused by his own negligence.
additional p320 safety issues
Months after the P320 won the MHS competition, in July 2017, the Dallas Police Department withdrew their P320s from service after reports that the guns could fire when dropped. Days later, a firearm retailer published a video in which a reviewer discovered that multiple P320 variants discharged if dropped at a certain angle.
Sig Sauer responded to those concerns by offering a “voluntary upgrade” for pistols made before August 8, 2017. In a statement, the company touted the “rigorous testing protocols” that the P320 passed for approval by “global military and law enforcement agencies” while admitting that “recent events indicate that dropping the P320 beyond U.S. standards for safety may cause an unintentional discharge.”
That August, a Connecticut police officer filed a lawsuit against Sig Sauer, alleging his department-issued P320 discharged a round when it accidentally fell while he loaded equipment into a vehicle. The incident, according to the lawsuit, happened in January 2017. The two parties settled out of court in June 2018, but the officer tried to reopen the case after discovering company emails allegedly showing that Sig Sauer knew about the drop safety issue years before his injury and withheld it from the court. However, the court dismissed the case in 2023.
A 2018 report later revealed that the Department of Defense identified drop safety issues with the P320 ahead of issuing the MHS award which Sig Sauer corrected.
Then, in April 2018, Sig Sauer faced a class-action lawsuit alleging another issue. This time, plaintiffs argued that the P320 could fire a round even when the pistol’s slide was not fully forward, or closed. In this situation, the explosion that forces the bullet down the barrel could escape the chamber and injure the user and damage the pistol. Sig Sauer settled the case in 2020, agreeing to fix the issue for class participants, but it did not have to admit fault or issue a recall.
missing key safety features
Concerns about P320s firing on their own remain. According to the Missouri lawsuit, at least 11 police departments removed the P320 from their list of approved service pistols because of safety concerns. On top of that, P320 safety is a common thread in online gun forums. But thought leaders within the gun industry have expressed indifference toward the plaintiffs, and, as mentioned, Sig Sauer’s CEO called critics “vultures” and denied accusations that the company uses its customers as “beta testers” — despite courts finding the plaintiffs and their expert witnesses credible. Even in a 2022 case out of New Hampshire that Sig Sauer won, the court found the plaintiff “credible in every respect” as well as expert witnesses who blamed the unintended shooting on “design or manufacturing defects” rather than the negligence of the consumer.
It’s unclear why Sig Sauer has been so resistant to making a feature like a tabbed trigger standard on all P320s. During a deposition in a Pennsylvania case, a Sig Sauer design engineer who worked on the P320 explained that they initially designed the gun with a tabbed trigger but removed it because it was not desired by customers, whom he declined to identify, for reasons he could not explain during the deposition. Yet the company took swift action to address safety concerns expressed by the military during the MHS competition and now uses the military version, which has a manual thumb safety, in advertisements to sell civilian variants.
In the Georgia case that ruled against Sig Sauer, one of the plaintiff’s expert witnesses, James Tertin, who also serves as the director of research and development for gun maker Magnum Research, argued that “[e]ven minimal contact” with the weapon “can cause a hazardous unintended discharge” in his examination of the P320. Still, a solution might be as simple as adding an external safety like a tabbed trigger. During his deposition, Tertin agreed that adding a tabbed trigger to the P320 would make accidental discharges “highly improbable,” and a jury agreed.