Well I think it’s more than a bit overblown, but not totally baseless.
There was the initial drop safety issue, and that was very much real and blood in the water. The lawyers will be trying to make dollars off it forever, and police refusing to take responsibility for their screw ups will perpetually muddy the water from things that are actual issues.
I’ll go through the various issues and what I think are real and what I think are BS resulting from dishonesty.
Out of battery kabooms:
These are real, but exacerbated by piss poor hand loads, shitty reman ammo, and awful manufacturers like freedom munitions and AAC.
At the root of it is SIG and their rolling revisions and the resultant variation in chamber support, barrel lockup robustness, and small parts tolerance stacking in the FCU. Most 320s can fire out of full lockup, but not beyond the point where the case has started extraction. Some can when it is a bit farther, and that can lead to a KB, especially with dodgy brass. Some guns that don’t do this are also going to KB because of increasingly bad QC on cheap ammo post all the panic buying and ammo supply crises we have had. The bottom of the barrel in ammo is much worse than it used to be.
You will see more of it from competitors because they have a higher instance of swapping barrels for aftermarket ones. Some of the aftermarket ones derived their dimensions from some of the worse SIG rolling changes. Also people brass hounding at matches that may have people shooting 9mm major may be reloading totally clapped out brass just waiting to ruin their day.
Unintended discharge:
They have happened, but why?
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bad shooter behavior is one of them and likely the primary contributor.
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The design of the drop safety plus shooter behavior. The drop safety on the 320 compare to the designs of the glock and M&P (which are very similar), is rather delicate. It’s a thin piece of stamped steel and a small spring. It NEEDS to be regularly inspected for proper function, and most people treat it like it is a forever part. One of the least talked about NDs and one of the better ones in terms of after incident analysis occurred with the US army and training. A foreign body entered the gun and seized up the fire controls. Young GI di young GI things and squeezed as hard as he could and mangled the drop safety in the process. Gun later discharged due to impact (IIRC impact from trying to clear a malfunction). But wait! some competitors have had this issue and they know what they are doing! Yeah, many don’t and jump into modifying guns they don’t understand how they work. One of the main things competitors want to modify is pretravel because it varies a bit in the 320 and ranges from a fair amount to lots and lots. Enter triggers with pre travel adjustment screws. You can take out all the pretravel! Great, but you also disabled the drop safety. For bonus points, the pre adjustment screws on some of them can work loose and become a foreign body in the gun. This can lead to the above.
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Foreign body entry can result in non standard operation an ND.
I’ve had this happen. The foreign body was the pretravel screw from one of those triggers. I knew to not over adjust it, but it worked itself loose into, rather than out of the gun. In that process I pulled the trigger to see if I could get it to fire, bit not dice. It did bind up worse, and in the course of trying to clear it it finally went bang but not with my finger on the trigger. I was extremely cognizant of the risk and while it was startling, it was not a total surprise and I was handling things in a manner that I would not hurt myself or send a bullet someplace unsafe. Is this any different than any other gun though? I’m not sure and wished I understood the mechanism of failure better, but it’s not like you are going to get a catscan on hand in the middle of trying to clear a jam like that. I can say that analysis after the fact showed no damage or other issues and I recovered the set screw.
- Light bearing holsters can screw you in the dingus.
There have been some discharges from cops. Some on video. They all involve light bearing holsters. Light bearing holsters for fat ass lights leave a HUGE gap by the trigger. Things can get in there and pull the trigger. But it doesn’t happen to glocks!!! it has in fact happened to glocks. But I have a Safariland!! Yeah it has specifically happened to glocks with safariland holsters. Safariland is up to like their 3rd or 4th silent redesign of their light bearing holsters for the 320. Pairing pistols with no external safety with something massive like and x300 and then using it with a holster is asking for problems until someone comes up with a design that works better/differently. That being said, something much narrower like a T6 with a design where rather than covering the trigger guard the holster wraps partially around the grip seem to be a much better design. If you are going with something like an x300 light, you might want to go with the external safety.
- Things that are (probably) bullshit.
So the lawsuits that have been won/settled made the argument the sear design is defective/dangerous. The sear engagement, they say, is uneven and insufficient. It’s no more uneven than anything else, and is sufficient compared to other reliable firearms. But most importantly the striker leg falling off the sear CANNOT set off a round unless the drop safety is disengaged. Anything legitimate, I suspect, is going to have to come down to a defect in implementation or design of the drop safety. Or a foreign body altering the relative geometry of the design.
The one possible exception to the sear engagement thing comes back to something I have seen recommended online several times as well as a possible revision issue. The 320 has two sear springs. Some folks have recommended using different weights at the same time. This can create issues with things moving unevenly, but it should generally function. However some folks have recommended interlacing the two springs and making basically an X out of them. Do not do this. It will greatly shorten the lifespan of the springs and increase the risk of failure taking the form of a broken spring. This impacts the sear’s return to full engagement.
- Things that are actually a concern.
SIG’s rolling updates and the fact some things don’t have a lot of room for error are a potential issue.
My advice:
The gun is basically safe. If something is not working do NOT push it harder. If you want to a DIY drop in trigger job, the right move is the gray guns kit with either the OEM springs or medium springs and the apex tactical trigger bar. The only safe way to reduce pretravel by more than a mm or 2 is the apex trigger bar or breaking out a tig welder and a file and knowing what the hell you are doing.
And whatever you do don’t try to invent the 320 equivalent of the $0.25 glock trigger job.
Also watch the sig mechanic videos if you want to understand how your gun works.
