Has anyone seen this? I found some parts very interesting, some of which I quoted below, as well as a timeline about three quarters of the way down the page.
Gun manufacturer waited months to warn the public its pistol could fire when dropped - CNN
Gun manufacturer waited months to warn the public its pistol could fire when dropped - CNN
When the Army put out a bid for its next-generation pistol in 2015, the weapons industry’s top manufacturers fought for a chance at a mega contract. During testing on April 20, 2016, the military says it discovered that the Sig Sauer pistol would fire on its own when dropped. The examination used a test version of ammunition, similar to a blank. A recent Department of Defense report describes what happened.
“During drop testing in which an empty primed cartridge was inserted, the striker struck the primer causing a discharge,” the report says. “Sig Sauer implemented an Engineering Change Proposal (ECP) to correct this deficiency by implementing lightweight components in the trigger group mechanism.”
It’s unclear when Sig Sauer made that improvement, but it was in place in time for Army testing trials in April 2017, the report says. “The [modular handgun system] with this … modification was submitted as the production-representative pistol for [product verification testing] … (T)he Army entered into PVT in April 2017.”
The Army assured CNN that since that fix, “there is no drop test deficiency” with its new Sig Sauer pistol, which includes two models of different sizes that the military has dubbed the XM17 and XM18.
But that timing means Sig Sauer provided a repair for the military at least four months before launching the same fix for the civilian market. CNN was unable to reach Sig Sauer to ask how many of the pre-upgrade P320s were sold to the general public. But the company told industry journalists that it sold more than 500,000 before it announced the upgrade, and before the Army put the pistol into the field.
This would explain why when Sig supposedly found out about the issue, publicly, they then had a fix for it, within the time of about one day.CNN called large and small gun shops in 20 states in early May. The older version of the P320 pistol was still on store shelves in 11 of the 40 gun shops we reached. And a CNN review of private seller postings in early May on Armslist.com, an online marketplace for guns, found that at least 162 of the 400 models being sold there since March were the problematic older version – easily identified by its thick trigger.
Of the sellers online, only four warned potential buyers about the problem. Three sellers displayed unrepaired guns, yet claimed they had been upgraded. Another seller photographed the gun with the ammunition magazine laid over the trigger area, leaving the prospective buyer guessing whether the gun was upgraded or not.