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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

These reports are always so hard to interpret. There is a very strong incentive for involved parties to come up with alternate explanations when accidents occur in all accidents, not just gun accidents. In certain types of vehicle accidents it’s common for people to claim the vehicle accelerated by itself or that they were pressing the brake when they were actually pressing the accelerator.

The claimed incident with security footage would be interesting to see, or at least read a detailed report about. I’m curious how they confirmed the safety was on from security camera footage.

Unless I’m missing something, it looks like people who have tried to replicate the problem with repeated tests so far cannot do it. This seems like a goldmine for YouTubers looking to get headlines if they can make it happen.

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That's all true, but you could also compare rates of similar events with other handguns per number in use. There's nothing to my untrained eye obviously radically different from this gun than other common designs, so I'd expect they'd have approximately the same number of incidents per X0,000 soldier-years of use.

There's one difference between the P320 and most of its direct competitors: most handguns with a short to medium trigger stroke and available configurations without a manual safety have a pivot or lever in the trigger designed to prevent unintentional trigger pulls.

The M18, the military version of the P320 does have a manual safety though, and there are reports of it firing with the safety engaged. This suggests that the high rate of unintentional discharges of this firearm are not only due to its trigger being easier to pull than its competitors.

The safety issue with the SIG P320 is real. I’ve seen footage of multiple instances of a P320 discharging in the holster without the trigger being touched; in fact you can find much of that footage on YouTube. There’s a growing list of law enforcement agencies, shooting ranges, training facilities, and now even the US Air Force either banning the P320 or withdrawing it from service. Yes, it’s true that a lot of people (even cops and Alec Baldwin) will negligently discharge a firearm and lie about not pulling the trigger, but the sheer number of reported incidents with the P320 in particular, as well as the massive amount of footage of these incidents (a happy side effect of ubiquitous police body cameras) provides very conclusive evidence.

> The safety issue with the SIG P320 is real. I’ve seen footage of multiple instances of a P320 discharging in the holster without the trigger being touched; in fact you can find much of that footage on YouTube.

Can you share them?

This is the second time I’ve heard the same claim that the videos exist, but then nobody ever has links.

The article refers to one attempt to replicate the issue where the person was unable to make it happen.

Here is one where the gun was clearly holstered and went off when jostled: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSAI_HUZDI0

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