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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.
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.
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?
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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