The worst failure that can occur is one that seems to have happened when all the work has been done “by the book.” In 2010, in the end-of-course test of SIG Sauer called “shake and bake,” weapons technicians took a bin of P226 DAK pistols, stripped them down, and assembled them again to demonstrate that they were interchangeable. Various guns that had been functioning previously failed to do so when the triggers were pulled. Two ex-teachers who were there claimed that the reassembling was right and left behind an ancient manufacturing warning mark: components that were not meant to leave the socket but do.
So has that conflict between bulk and accuracy between SIG as it was a U.S. spin-off based on German parts, and the powerhouse manufacturer of pistols in the country. Ex-employees related a management period in which quality output was valued, whereas quality personnel mentioned confrontations with parts that were out of spec and exceptionally skinny incoming examination. In 2014, one of the internal processes involved an inspection of three parts with each outside shipment, although the shipming reached into the thousands; the U.S. Department of Commerce suggests much larger samples on similar lots. “It sounds like either somebody in charge of quality doesn’t understand what they’re doing or they’re being forced into that level of performance to cut costs,” the quality veteran Jim Shrader said.
The scandal that now surrounds the largest platform of SIG, the striker-fired P320, is at the border of engineering decisions, manufacturing volume, and an industry with a bizarre regulatory blank. Guns have not been subjected to federal consumer-product safety regulation, so there is no government body that could investigate a suspected defect and order a recall. In that gap is filled with lawsuits, departmental memos, and an assortment of voluntary standards handy, but not audited like most other high-risk consumer products.
Out of 2016, over 150 individuals claim in court filings and police documentation that P320s discharged without a trigger pull, and usually when the weapon is in a holster. SIG has always refuted the fact that the pistol can fire without moving the trigger. The most common cause as the company argued in a written response quoted in various litigation cases was that there is nothing unusual in unintentional discharges and that improper or unsafe handling is one of the most common causes. SIG has additionally asserted that no one has ever been capable of replicating a P320 that is firing without a trigger pull, or that the platform itself meets the relevant standards of the U.S.
The controversy of engineering is based on the use of striker-fired pistol to handle stored energy. The design of the P320, critics claim, is fundamentally close to being nearly fully cocked at rest in most civilian versions, and the internal safeties are easily overridden by the tiniest trigger manipulation and the external manual safety is not present in the majority of versions. The risk-analysis documentation submitted by SIG itself on its military versions highlights the reasons this firm made the thumb safety addition on M17 and M18: in an unsealed Failure Modes, Effects and Criticality Analysis, 13 of the 34 enumerated malfunctions were “pistol accidentally / unintentional discharges” and the manual safety was said to be a method to further mitigate this likelihood.
This was followed by a subsequent burst of coverage when an FBI Ballistic Research Facility report was released in which the tests on an issued M18 were conducted after it had been claimed to have an “uncommanded discharge” when holstered. The obtained findings were inconclusive and the paper as such also reported unusual test conditions such as a cut window in the slide that influenced retention of a striker-safety spring. Nonetheless, the episode exemplified the greater issue of the end user: the failure may be hard to replicate when it is an issue of mechanism dependence, and yet it is hard to discount field-wide claims of occurrence as coincidence.
In the mean time, institutions have been left to make their own risk computations. At least seven large customers, such as Houston and Denver and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, have in the last few years ceased to utilize the P320 because of safety concerns, in addition to dozens of smaller agencies. Parallel to this, SIG has continued to hold a market position that is hard to beat; by 2022 it was making 1.5 times the number of pistols that its closest U.S. rival could manufacture. The site is also still riding on the goodwill of its armed versions, which come in form of the M17 and M18 following a contract of 550,000 pistols granted to the Army by the Army.
The lasting teaching is not in the mechanism itself, but in the ecosystem that compels the courts to perform the regulation task of the regulators and compels engineers to demonstrate negativity in court. The discipline of manufacturing in that kind of system, the silent work of sampling plans, traceability and rejecting out-of-spec parts, may be every bit as significant as the engineering genius of a modular fire-control unit. “Shake and bake” failure was not a courtroom display, however, it is a metaphor: interchangeability collapses and confidence collapses with it.
