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Air Force Command Pauses Use of M18 Handguns After Security Airman's Death
For those of you who do not pay attention to small arms development or small arms procurement, the story of the M18 is an interesting one.
Several years ago, the US military published a request for a new sidearm for all of its branches, called the modular handgun system (MHS). They asked for several highly specific features, including the ability to replace grips and change slide lengths at the armorer level.
Multiple companies tendered submissions, including Glock, Beretta, HK, SIG, and a few other smaller players. After years of examination and multiple lawsuits (that are worth examination on their own), the department of defense settled on the SIG P320, which they labeled the M17 and M18, depending on the barrel and grip length.
As a result of the contract, multiple law enforcement agencies across the US standardized on the P320 as a service weapon.
Unfortunately for SIG, users discovered that the P320 was not drop safe. If dropped from several feet onto a concrete surface at the correct angle, the mass of the trigger shoe could cause the trigger to pull itself due to inertia.
While SIG did not issue a recall, it did offer a "voluntary upgrade" program that replaced the heavy trigger shoe with a lighter polymer model, which was the one used on the M17 and M18. This variant did not have enough mass to pull itself when dropped from a height onto a hard surface at a specific angle.
However, the pistol now had a reputation. It was The Gun That Goes Off For No Reason. SIG rapidly found itself playing defense against a torrent of lawsuits where individuals claimed that the pistol discharged with absolutely no user intervention. Claimants argued that since the gun was once, in specific circumstances, able to fire without human intervention, that it was fundamentally and inherently unsafe. Even though no one could ever describe a mechanism for uncommanded discharge, SIG lost two of those cases because they shipped a trigger shoe that did not have a Glock-style trigger safety, which would have hypothetically prevented an uncommanded discharge that occurred due to an undescribed mechanism.
Fast forward to now. A US Airman has died, allegedly because the service pistol fired a round while it was sitting in a holster on his desk.
A YouTuber and a redditor have both claimed to be able to repeatedly create an uncommanded discharge. The "gun community" has taken this as permission to Hate SIG, and has begun to do so with gusto.
Here's the thing: both the YouTuber and the redditor manipulate the trigger in their reproduction steps. The YouTuber shove a screw into the trigger assembly, and the redditor literally pulls the trigger with his finger.
To my knowledge, no one has figured out how to make the gun fire without touching the trigger.
I feel like this series of events has culture war implications.
The first reason is because it seems like a lot of culture war activity seems similar to a concept in the gun world called "fuddlore". "Fuddlore", to those who haven't heard about it, is received wisdom that has only a tenuous connection to reality at best, but is nonetheless extremely sticky in the mind of a certain class of person. An example would be someone saying something like "I'd never use an AR-15 because it shits where it eats and constantly jams". You could show them dozens of long duration tests across multiple environments and duty schedules, from multiple sources with different biases, that all prove the modern AR-15 is a solid, dependable rifle that will keep firing in even the most vile conditions. They'll nod their head, then a week later say "I'd never use an AR-15 because it shits where it eats and constantly jams". In the case of the M18, it's the Gun That Goes Off For No reason now, and it's firmly embedded in the fuddlore even though nobody can figure out how to do it.
You might recognize that same mindset from stories here. I've seen people mention it around politics, romantic relationships, COVID, and Lord only knows what else.
The second parallel to the culture war is that a lot of people hate SIG for a few different reasons. Some are fanboys of other brands. Some think they're cheating on the federal contracts. Others just think they're Too Jewish (don't ask me. I don't get it). The end result is that they're using motivated reasoning to make a point of believing the stories. It feels similar to Scott's old arguments as soldiers story.
I don't if I have anywhere else to go with this, but it's wild to see concepts discussed here show up in a different subculture.
Update:
This is probably worth a top level post
Would be worth evaluating. I'm not sure I have the domain knowledge to add much commentary rather than just adding a bunch of off-color inter-service jokes, though. Do you feel like you can cover it properly?
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In the spirit of acknowledging when I’ve been off target, I will be quick to say kudos to the people who stuck by their guns and said this couldn’t have been a misfire.
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Legally protesting a contract is an incredibly common corporate strategy for the mega contracts. Oracle and Microsoft did this several years ago when Amazon won what was then called the "JEDI" contract for cloud computing at the Department of Defense.
I'm not an expert in the legaleese, but I've seen enough of them happen. From what I understand, the bar to pass an initial review for a protest is pretty low. Once that's passed, the process drags on for at least months and often years. Nobody really cares about who wins or loses. What this forces is for the department or agency who initially offered the contract to suspend or cancel it, and then re-issue another competitive RFP for the exact same services, but under a different contract name.
This lets the losers of the original contract re-try their bid. Maybe the drop prices, maybe the try a different technical approach, whatever. The whole point is that some contracts are so existentially important that various firms will go to whatever lengths it takes just to 'stay in the fight' - even after they've, technically lost.
This is one reason, although nearly most important one, why Federal acquisition and procurement is such a shit show. The process has completely overtaken the product / outcome and so firms that live on Federal contracts have become masters of the process, selling horrible products.
Specifically, the funniest bit of the lawsuits is that HK preemptively filed a lawsuit claiming that the DOD chose Glock without properly considering the other submissions.
After SIG was selected, they quietly withdrew the suit.
That's a pretty good piece of evidence for the hypothesis that Glock saw/sees HK as their primary in-market rival, whereas SIG may have been viewed as a "discount supplier", or just a non-direct competitor. Firms want to win battles they view as being "on their turf." Ford doesn't care if their small car sells less than Toyota or Honda. They absolutely care if the F-150 is losing to Chevy.
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There's significant context behind some of these theories, the main one is that SIG USA is widely believed to be gaming/bribing/conning the US military procurement tests.
Some readers here may remember the release of SIG USA's replacement for the M-16, which was "adopted by the US Army" before being quietly skuttled at the cost of several hundred million dollars. Keen readers may recall that I called all that long before it happened based on nothing but the claimed weight and chamber pressures. It was such an obvious lie that any expert in the field should have been able to spot it immediately. Is that because I'm smarter than the entire Ordnance Corps, or because I'm not being paid to lie?
Some things to keep in mind. SIG USA is not Sig Sauer, it's a spun-off triple-shell corporation built out of the old Sigarms importer. But now they manufacture, and they don't manufacture anything by Sig Sauer. They just license the logo so people will think this start-up gun company that somehow got a military contract in its first ten years is actually a bespoke european manufacturer.
Now, everything OP says about people being unable to reliably recreate the discharge is true. But equally true is some of the more damning stories, some with video evidence, that show 320s going off with apparently no input. The one that killed an airman recently wasn't even being worn at the time, it was in the holster, sitting on a table some feet from any people. There was also recently a case in the state police of my state had one go off, they sent it to the FBI labs, which were able to recreate the discharge, but not reliably.
https://www.survivalworld.com/second-amendment/fbi-report-alleges-sig-p320-can-fire-without-pulling-the-trigger/
Maybe a 20% chance doesn't sound conclusive, and to be fair it isn't. But you can buy other guns that are just as good as the P320 that don't have a one in five chance of putting a round in your leg if the gun jostles just right in the holster.
In the case of the M-16, Forgotten Weapons has a great show on that, basically the corrupt Ordnance Corps tried to sabotage the first major run of M-16s, and they did. But they still couldn't get the shitpile M-14 back, so they reverted the design to the one Stoner told them to use, chrome-lined the barrels and the gun was fine ever after.
The thread I think you should consider is not the conspiracy theory, which was temporarily correct, but the deep corruption of military procurement, and the sort of dirty tricks that go on there.
Is this the FBI report where they cut the slide prior to testing, or a newer test? I'm unable to read the PDF in the article well on mobile.
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Are you talking about the M7 replacing the M4? Because that is being fielded now.
https://www.twz.com/land/sig-sauers-m7-rifle-gets-official-army-seal-of-approval-despite-controversy
Is it a great idea? Probably not at scale, for the same reasons that 5.56 is easier to employ than 7.62 for the average troop--a lighter rifle with 50% more ammo. The Army should have fielded the AR10 over the M14 in terms of modernity/ergonomics, but the AR15/M16 with the lighter round sure is nice. Classic assault rifle vs. battle rifle tradeoffs argument.
I think for the M4/5.56 replacement they should have stuck with something with at least an easy 25-round mag, like 6.8 SPC or 6mm ARC.
The .277 Fury is legitimately a cool round though.
https://old.reddit.com/r/army/comments/1csuwkh/a_three_day_review_of_the_m7_spear/ https://old.reddit.com/r/army/comments/1cry8oq/a_review_of_the_277_fury_training_and_combat/
It's not, but there's a sucker born in the MIC every minute.
And your article says the Army announced a plan to think about maybe at some point asking a guy about ordering a hundred thousand M7s. That's not "fielded" in any way shape or form. My guess is even that won't happen, but if it does there's a kickback.
https://www.army.mil/article/285678/project_manager_soldier_lethality_announces_type_classification_approval_for_next_generation_squad_weapons_ngsw
It's a limited amount thus far, yes, but at least one operational unit has them in hand. Perhaps the Army will back out of its planned purchase of 100k+ of them, but there's no indication of that presently.
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I'll address the culture war point, since other people are far more qualified to talk about the issues with the P320's internal safety. Ron Cohen, the current CEO of Sig Sauer, was previously the CEO of Kimber. There is a perception that he aggressively cut costs and relied on Kimber's strong reputation to sell sub-par products at a premium price point, cashing out before consumers caught on. Now he's at Sig, and strangely enough a formerly well-respected brand appears to have aggressively cut costs and are suffering quality control issues while coasting on their strong reputation... It's starting to look like a pattern. People would be pissed with Cohen no matter what, but the optics of a Jewish CEO deploying the private equity looting playbook on popular brands has resulted in the sort of backlash you'd expect from certain corners of Twitter.
Additionally, a lot of Sig's manufacturing has been outsourced to India of all places recently, and India and Indians have been the subject of a lot of enmity (deserved or not I won't get into here) in recent years. What I will say is that as a gun guy the only gun of Indian manufacture that I'm familiar with is the INSAS, and it doesn't have a good reputation at all. If you were going to offshore gun parts manufacturing to some cheap country Turkey would be a far higher pick on the list, they have a decent existing gun industry.
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Relating to the Youtuber and his screw, if you have a trigger that can get stuck like that, even if unlikely, and it getting stuck means the gun is able to fire through pressure/manipulation on the slide, don't you then have a problem?
As for SIG, I was under the impression that the name was built on German quality that has now been eroded in the pursuit of profit. To that extent I don't think disliking SIG is bad insofar as liking SIG was ever good. Companies can change over time.
Beyond that it's hard to make a point about motivated reasoning when that's all most people have. It's not like the average person can make an independent quality control assessment of SIG products before making up their mind on what 500$ pistol to buy. You are always at the mercy of other peoples biases.
Pulling the trigger to the point that it's just barely not going off and then wiggling it is going to cause problems on a lot of firearms. The trigger should not be pulled as a part of the holstering process, and supposedly the existence or not of a manual thumb safety (standard on the military models) is irrelevant for this kind of failure.
Most of these guntubers are just fucking around until they make the gun go off, without any relevance to the reality of the known cases.
There are so many P320s out there, like 3 million in the US, that the base rate of these discharges is still tiny. In some cases it's just people claiming the gun went off without them having done something stupid. In other cases, it might be poor customization contributing to the problem.
It could be a slight manufacturing defect that is rare, but still enough to cause these discharges in certain circumstances.
Sig has not handled the PR well at all, but it genuinely is still a mystery for what the hell is going on.
It's not, read the FBI lab report and stop weakmanning with the youtubers.
One gun had an issue that has not been confirmed as the same issue for others, this FBI testing was using protocols that significantly modified the gun. Per Sig, further FBI testing did not find the faults.
https://www.outdoorlife.com/guns/fbi-report-sig-p320-uncommanded-discharge/
https://old.reddit.com/r/Firearms/comments/1luobo5/protraband_posts_fbi_file_on_p320m18/
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SIG has absolutely been trying to leverage the fact there is a culture war to shout down people who now believe their guns are unsafe.
The ultimate problem with the P320 is that it's a case study in extreme cost cutting.
Once upon a time, there was the P250. It was a very modern handgun, with a very mechanically simple firing mechanism. This mechanism is inherently extremely safe for the same reason it's safe on revolvers: the trigger pull is heavy, long, and even if the hammer let go and hit the firing pin somehow it couldn't hit the bullet hard enough to fire it. You don't need any other safeties[1] on a gun like this.
But the same things that made the gun safe and simple to manufacture also made it basically dead on arrival- the trigger pull is long and heavy. Not great for accuracy, or shooting all that quickly, or particularly usable by people who don't have a strong trigger finger. Understandably, sales weren't great.
Now, because modern guns cost far more in tooling to make than non-modern guns, SIG might have been in a bit of a hole financially. The plastic grips and triggers[2] for the P250 may be dirt-cheap to make on a per-unit basis, but the moulds for that plastic are incredibly expensive. To a lesser degree, this is also true of the barrels and slides (when you consider the CAD work for the outside and everything forward of the magazine would need no changes).
So SIG's engineers set to work designing a new firing control mechanism to fit in the same footprint as the old one[3]. By doing that, they could sell it as an upgrade for P250 owners, and recover the costs of that tooling- so they reused the maximum number of parts they could get away with and off it went to consumers.
It's at this point the problems start showing up:
[1] The new firing control mechanism is fundamentally less safe than the old one- they went from a gun that's completely incapable of firing a bullet at rest to one that is intentionally designed to do so (which in a vacuum is a perfectly valid thing to do: it makes the trigger pull much better than it is on competing pistols). So, design decisions that were fine on the old gun are all of a sudden not fine on the new gun- now they need a bunch of additional safeties to make sure the firing pin absolutely can't let go when the gun is dropped or when you pull the slide back a little.
This is what the second recall did- they milled out a bit of the slide and added another safety to it so the striker couldn't drop unless the trigger was pulled.
[2] The new firing control mechanism only needs a fraction of the trigger pull force, and a fraction of the total travel distance, to release the striker. Because inertia means things in motion stay in motion, a heavy enough trigger may have sufficient inertia that when the gun stops (by hitting the floor at a particular angle after being dropped) it still has enough potential energy to release the striker on its own. Now, in a vacuum, having a heavy trigger is a perfectly valid thing- if your gun can't fire until the trigger travels a great distance back under 10 pounds of force, there's no problem- but it stops being fine when the trigger no longer has to come that far back and must have much less force applied to it to activate.
This is what the first recall did- they replaced the heavy P250 plastic trigger with a much lighter one.
[3] The new firing control mechanism makes engineering compromises to stay within the footprint of the old gun. Those compromises include things like the effectiveness of mechanical safeties, as well as requiring certain parts be held to much more exact tolerances (because the size they'd normally be isn't possible on a retrofit like this). Now, if SIG kept making those parts to the initial standard, that's fine- but more exact tolerances cost more money. So, if you tell your subcontractors they can take shortcuts, and they do, a design that was just barely safe if made to those initial tolerances is now no longer safe, so the guns fire on their own.
This is why they're fucked now. They've sold so many, at so low a price (enabled both by being able to reuse tooling and aggressive subcontracting), that doing a recall is likely financially infeasible. SIG doesn't know which guns had parts made by which contractor or when they were made, so they can't guarantee that any gun is safe, and taking them all back to put parts made that are actually to standard in the first place is conceivably going to cost them more money than they ever made from the guns in the first place.
I understand they're fucked because initial design had a Glock-style trigger insert safety that would have prevented firing unless it was depressed.
Sig claims some potential customer was against it, so they removed it, and then went on to produce guns which will fire at the slighest shock if a certain combinations of part sizes is involved.
Seems like an incredible management oversight, because the gun designers must have been aware of this, and if the management did not test out how a gun with maximally bad part tolerances would behave, they basically fucked themselves.
That's the least what you should do - the people who engineered the trigger mechanism should have been able to figure out how to avoid this and what's the most dangerous combination of sizes.
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How do smaller companies like Wilson combat make aftermarket grips at a profit? Are they using a different manufacturing technology, charging more, or riding on the original SIG R&D?
The MBA-generalized response to this would be:
When you are selling low volumes to highly motivated customers, you can capture niche's (or "sub markets") by doing a lot of direct marketing and building brand loyalty.
When you're operating at scale (Glock, SIG, et al) you have to go after larger markets with customers who blend concerns beyond ultra performance (i.e. price) and so you start to make some level of compromise. This is where your strategy comes in; are you the "cheap" brand (Taurus, I guess? idk), are you non-innovative but dependable (Glock), are you the innovator (SIG ... I guess?) etc.
The same logic can be applied to a lot of different industries.
As an aside, but it's interesting, this is why there are dozens or hundreds of ultra-speciality rifle manufacturers. Some only specialize in barrels and then plop them on other companies' hardware. Many of these places like to boat about their contracts with the Navy SEALS / Special Forces / CIA whatever. In reality, this can be 1 - 3 guys in their converted garage more or less hand making every product they ship.
They're selling to a price insensitive (gov't dollars!) ultra-niche customer with super high performance requirements and, to no small extent, the "fuddlore" mentioned above. More charitably, customers operating at that level of performance just tend to develop biases that are mentally hard to shake. Does the trigger being polymer-x instead of polymer-y make you shoot better? Probably not, but being mentally comfortable with your gear probably does make you shoot better.
What happens to shops like this is they either go out of business because they lost one key customer (often, their only customer) or they become reliable enough lifestyle businesses for the owners - they make a very comfortable living and work on something they have a genuine passion for. Very few of these companies get purchased by one of the big names in the gun world unless there's something truly interesting going on. Things like actually interesting engineering development, perhaps something patented, or the development of a new product or market. Custom, tricked-out AR-15s weren't really a thing until after the Global War On Terror was several years into its run but, then, dudes who never go to the range were suddenly ready to drop a few thousand dollars into AR mods. Enter Bravo Company Manufacturing and all the others like it.
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From the looks of Wilson Combat's products (in particular) it looks like they're banking on people buying their product to change something about the grip angle of the gun (there are a couple of them that mimic the 1911/DWX) or to have a convenient way to make it heavier.
(Why you'd want to make a plastic gun heavier like that instead of just buying something like a Q5SF Match is another question entirely, but it's not like it costs WC anything to market it as "you could do it".)
For the P365 in particular, the WC grip is a affordable replacement with ergonomics (thickness) that many people prefer. Weights can be added as well, for those who want them, for recoil management.
There's a huge aftermarket parts industry for both the P365 and P320 because of their modularity.
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You spent a considerable amount of words digging away at the foundations of “The Gun That Goes Off For No Reason,” but if it turns out this is true,* would you consider it a gun that goes off for no reason?
*One hopes that everyone discussing this understands that “no reason” means “without purposeful human input.” The guy bumping his desk as he stood up is a reason in the causal sense, but obviously not the sort of thing you want your holstered gun to do.
If somebody can show me a set of manipulations that can set off the primer without touching the trigger, SIG should face criminal charges.
Does this count?
I address that in the original post. He shoves a screw into the trigger assembly. I don't consider that no reason, but I could entertain the notion that it is indicative of a deficient design.
The screw is to demonstrate the effect that quite a lot of holsters might have of putting slight pressure on the trigger shoe. The fact that you can get the gun to fire without pulling the trigger past the sear release simply by jostling the slide is, in firearms terms, completely and totally unacceptable.
That screw is representing a hell of a lot more than "slight pressure" from the holster. It's moving 1mm past the pretravel as measured from the top of the shoe. That's a lot.
Having the sear engaged that much and then jostling the gun is not going to go well on a variety of firearms.
Mmm, going to have to disagree. The P320 has a fairly light trigger pull compared to most DA striker fired guns, 1mm of travel is maybe 2 lbs at most? Probably less.
And no, partially engaging the sear then jostling the gun absolutely should not result in a discharge, thats the whole point behind drop and firing pin safeties. Except as newer videos reveal, the P320s firing pin safety does not actually block the firing pin, and the drop safety is easily defeated by any slide canting, which occurs even under normal trigger pulls.
It appears to be a uniquely terrible design, even compared to other Sig pistols with teething issues, and a possible exception to the "guns dont kill people, people kill people" rule.
Doesn't the stock P320 have about the same trigger pull weight as other in its class? Glocks are like 5.5 lbs and the M18 is like 5.5 to 7 lbs from what I'm seeing.
The "1mm of travel" is not being done at the regular point of measurement if he's jamming shit up top after pre-travel. That's way more movement down where the finger engages the shoe.
Basic errors like this are why I have a hard time taking the critics here seriously.
Engaging the sear nearly to the point of firing and then fucking with it is going to cause problems if tolerances are off from either defects or wear issues. I'm perfectly willing to believe manufacturing/wear defects combined with the inherent design of the cocked striker lead to these problems. That would explain why they're rare.
Also, looking at this Wyoming Gun Project specimen what the hell is wrong with his FCU rails being bent so much? That's not normal. I only have P365s, which is a broadly similar FCU design, and there's nowhere near that level of give, loaded or empty. Like his gun is clearly not safe, but it's an old and clearly beat-to-shit .45 and not an M18. It seems obvious to me that the amount of movement in the slide allows the partially engaged sear to move off the correct path and so it slips.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=OYoxraSP5pY
The issue here is that this gun has like 3 million copies in the U.S. and has undergone numerous rigorous testing and trials. So when some video pops up showing "wow obviously this gun is bad when I fuck with it" I dismiss it by default, because if the issue was so obvious we would 1) see way more issues than we do and 2) this all would have been figured out by now.
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I acknowledge that there is a place for handguns without in-built mechanical safeties. But that place is not as service weapons.
Doesn't the service variant have a manual safety?
Yes it does, it's one of few handguns that I know of with an on/off safety switch, and it's quite annoying. One of a reasons why military people I know who are issued the M17/M18 don't actually use it, and prefer a Glock.
Yeah, ok, sure. Wait until you find out about the M9. Ironically, the M11 (a Sig hammer pistol) did not have a manual safety, just a decocker. (It was not fielded at scale.)
Also, the Glock submission competing with the P320 did have a manual thumb safety, because that was an Army requirement.
https://www.military.com/kitup/2018/01/02/glock-unveils-new-pistol-inspired-army-mhs-program.html
Yeah I've shot the M9 before as well. The Sig is definitely better but it's still not great.
The Sig safety has several problems: it is not particularly easy to hit (especially to put it on fire from safe), its action is in a non-intuitive direction relative to the safeties on most other Army weapons, and it's not actually marked which direction is safe, so guys who don't use it a lot will accidentally have it on safe/fire when they meant the opposite.
You can mock my experience if you like but I sure as hell don't know any direct action guys who use the Sig, most have a personal sidearm they use instead, and some units will have a few random Glocks or other pistols in the arms room that they use on the range to qualify.
"Direct action guys" are a tiny percentage of the U.S. military and frequently do not use standard-issue small arms because they have their own inventory.
I am pretty sure thought that they cannot simply use an actual personally owned weapon for a bunch of reasons about logistics and liability. Why would they pay out of pocket when they get large budgets for sweet custom weaponry?
Compared to the M9 safety, the ergonomics are better, but it's true the direction is different and there's no red dot. With the M9, I think it was SOP to carry safety off outside the wire. Not sure what it is for the M18, but it's pretty common in general to holster with the safety engaged and then disengage it. (The manual safety is apparently not a relevant factor for the discharges.)
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I'm pretty sure there's something wrong with the gun. The guy died, so he certainly wasn't making excuses like "I holstered it I swear I didn't touch the trigger" and it seems likely that respondents showed up and found the gun in its holster in a way that made it clear that nobody pulled the trigger.
Considering how much the military loves to put its people in deathtraps and deny that anything is wrong, I'm pretty sure that there's some serious evidence that the gun is actually bad. And the military bureaucrats certainly don't care what gun twitter has to say about hating the gun when they decide whether or not to ban it.
People do lie about the reasons for things happening.
The fact that the P320 has the issues it does makes it easy for anyone to just blame it on the gun.
He's dead so how can he lie about it.
It's conceivable in principle those who found him lied about intentional or incompetent acts.
I have no idea about this particular case. Nothing has been revealed, officially. It's a best practice to always keep the business end of a gun pointed in the safest direction possible. (It strikes me as strange he would take his gun+holster off and set in on a table pointing right back at him.) Things can get caught in holsters. Glock Leg has been a thing for quite some time now. Base rates being what they are, my bet is on some form of user error over mechanical failure.
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/145640473
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Regarding fuddlore and similar, there's a certain type of person who loves to repeat these sorts of shibboleths regardless of whether they're true. They're a cheap way to signal that you're part of the ingroup and get credibility. Reddit seems to attract these sorts of people since all you have to do is mindlessly paste the fuddlore (bonus points if you add some passive aggression or irony) and you'll be showered in karma.
The early draw of reddit for me was learning fuddlore from different communities.
I think it's a great source to quickly get up to speed on any given hobby or subculture's memes.
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