Up until very recently I never really bothered telling my chain of command about the Sig P320. I honestly thought that all of the member agencies I work with would organically go away from that platform as the problems kept cropping up. I really thought that. I'm naive, obviously.
My leaving my chain of command out of it changed last week. Two things contributed. Firstly, the death of the Airforce Servicemember, and two, the fact that it was becoming abundantly clear that those two member agencies that were using the P320 were going to keep on going.
I understand some agencies' reticence to switch guns. Usually things like that are almost totally driven by budget, and if you're a smaller agency, especially, new guns, holsters, and training is not a cheap endeavor. So any agency looking at this is going to have to balance risk vs. cost. And I know that if you're reading this as an individual and have never dealt with agency level purchasing, this seems nuts to you.
If you've ever seen Fight Club, remember the scene where they are talking about initiating a car recall?
"A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
While that probably isn't factually correct, the sentiment is real. And not just on Sig's part, but also on any given agency dealing with a potential safety issue. When looked at from a very myopic lens, no gun is "safe," so how can a P320 be even less safe? (This is not my professional opinion, please don't read into that.)
So now I'm on a campaign in my professional career to make that stupid P320 go away. The streams have crossed and now I'm not just a part time hater.
Sig, I do believe, is screwed when it comes to the P320 specifically, and their reputation generally. They've denied problems for so long and so hard that now they don't have any trustworthiness or credibility. They'd be best served by making the P320 go completely away. Forgotten Weapons opined that it might be in their best interest to continue to "upsize" the P365 to the scale of a duty weapon and just start selling that instead. I said similar things to a rangemaster of an agency that was fielding P320s several years ago, and he felt similarly.
And now for an opinion that has no basis in fact but is pure conjecture... If Sig had put a trigger safety on the P320 and a plunger style firing pin block, this discussion wouldn't have ever happened. Their wanting to differentiate themselves in the marketplace by not putting a trigger safety on the gun was foolish. Every other striker fired gun out there that I'm aware of uses some sort of inertial disconnect/trigger safety paradigm. (AKA the "trigger dingus.") And the firing pin safety system that Sig is currently using is so very delicate and fiddley that I can't take it seriously. If it were that good, they would've used it on the P365, but news flash, they didn't.
It is entirely possible that the sear could stand some redesign as well, but that's beyond my smarts by a significant degree, so I won't bother with an opinion there.
Anyway, the P320... it is like a dead fish left under somebody's car seat. The car's stinking and the smell is still here.
