Posted on 04/11/2023 1:21:01 PM PDT by NohSpinZone
One warm afternoon in May, Dwight Jackson was getting dressed for a visit to his favorite cigar lounge. He slipped his holstered SIG Sauer P320 pistol onto his belt, put on a button-down shirt and leaned across his bed for his wallet. Suddenly, he said, the gun fired, sending a bullet tearing through his right buttock and into his left ankle.
"I heard 'bang!'" said Jackson, 47, a locomotive engineer who lives in Locust Grove, Ga. "I looked down and saw blood."
His wife heard the shot from down the hall and screamed. She called an ambulance while Jackson hobbled toward the front door, painting a trail of blood over the hardwood floors.
The P320 is one of the nation's most popular handguns. A variant of the weapon is the standard-issue sidearm for every branch of the U.S. military. Since its introduction to the commercial market in 2014, manufacturer SIG Sauer has sold the P320 to hundreds of thousands of civilians, and the gun has been used by officers at more than a thousand law enforcement agencies across the nation, court records show.
It has also gruesomely injured scores of people who say the gun has a potentially deadly defect.
More than 100 people allege that their P320 pistols discharged when they did not pull the trigger, an eight-month investigation by The Washington Post and The Trace has found. At least 80 people were wounded in the shootings, which date to 2016.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
My 1911 is my bedside weapon. I carry a Browning 1911-380 and practice with a Browning 1911-22. They all work together and none of the 3 have ever gone off by themselves.
Leftwards often go off without warning.
Can someone verify that the P320 is a striker fire design and lacks a hammer? Or not?
Unlike other striker-fired guns, the P320 is "effectively fully cocked at rest", since its striker is under constant spring pressure, which is released when the trigger is pulled. Most such guns, including the P320's military variant, have external safeties (like thumb safeties), which the P320's civilian variant lacks. According to gunsmith James Tertin, this is a rare and "uniquely dangerous" configuration.
From my limited knowledge, this is a totally different design from any striker fire I own. (Glock & Walther). On those designs, the striker (firing pin) is below and forward of the round when a round is chambered. Manipulating/pulling the trigger causes the striker to pull back, then lift to a position directly behind the round before letting loose.
Advertised to be impossible to discharge unless the trigger is pulled or the gun is damaged.
BTTT
Perhaps, but what if there is a lawyer making an unsupported allegation of smoke?
Follows here is a link to TTAG "The Truth About Guns" The article references a phenomenon called "legal momentum" which everyone needs to understand in today's world. At the bottom of the TTAG article there is a tube by Boomstick Tactical where he takes the pistol apart and shows what must fail for the pistol to "go off" by itself. None of the lawsuits provide any mechanical explanation for the uncommanded discharges. However, the dropping incident which led to the recall of the early pistols was blamed on a faulty firing pin return spring. (Please correct me anyone.)
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