In a Friday statement, a Department of the Air Force spokesperson said that the unidentified arrested person is accused of making a false official statement, obstruction of justice and involuntary manslaughter.
In this case, the whole "it want off by itself" claim was a lie.
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2025/08/08...
I think we need to await the facts of the case and the judgement. The only public information I've seen strikes me as unusual.
The accused airman is being charged with involuntary manslaughter, which coupled with the extensive issues with the P320 brings up more questions than it answers.
I could come up with my own conjecture based on that information, but there's enough people doing that already.
The fact remains that the P320 malfunctions. There's been countless documented cases, and numerous recorded demonstrations of the issue on YouTube and elsewhere.
This is why I came around to appreciating the California Roster of Handguns regulation. Firearm manufacturers should be held to a higher safety standard.
Originally I thought it was ridiculous that my first conceal carry sub-compact Springfield XD-S came in a case with a large sticker across one side saying it was illegal in CA. At which point I learned about the stringent drop, firing and performance test that was required and how manufacturers will make a separate and specific quality and safety upgrades to the model variant legal in CA. After a fair amount of use I understood why the XD-S was not and is still not legal in CA. Mine had a higher-than-I-am-comfortable-with rate of jamming. I'll be buying CA approved firearms from now on.
Interesting info about the P320 M18:
The P320 M18 has 3 variants: 320CA-9-M18-MS, 320CA-9-M18-MS-10, 320CA-9-M18-MS-CA.
The 320CA-9-M18-MS-CA is the only one legal in CA [0]
According to Sig Sauer site wording, the CA tested version came after the version issued to the military -- thus I am taking a guess that t was not as rigorously tested as the CA version (and probably has fewer safety or other military specific features that make it less reliable)
[0] https://www.oag.ca.gov/firearms/certified-handguns/search?ma...
It can be both Sig and this Airman’s fault at the same time.
Carrying a handgun relies on that rule not being followed and instead the holster preventing anyone from pulling the trigger, but if the gun can go off without a trigger pull all bets are off.
But does it seem a little weird that the two events coincided?
It's not occasional. If you carry AIWB (appendix inside the waistband, a common position), it's routinely pointing at your own leg (and other anatomy) as you move around.
It does strike me as a bit odd to hand a holstered gun to someone while pointing it at them -- as a matter of politeness, if nothing else. But there are other incidents where a P320 is said to have discharged into the leg of someone carrying it in a holster.
Source: many years of carrying a weapon in a professional capacity.
I certainly don't expect I'll be able to address this from someone confidently bragging about years of "professional" experience carrying an unchambered weapon as the only right way to do it on the street, so hopefully you can find a class with someone with a background you respect so it will go through your brain.
I had to take one to get my Texas License To Carry (at the time a concealed carry license). I don't know what they teach in other states, but Texas has strict regulations on when and how to use deadly force. Including when to point a gun at someone.
Basically, not having a round chambered means you're too late to do anything with that gun other than use it an expensive blunt instrument -- or -- be possibly charged for brandishing/intimidation. Either you are being approached/charged at and are in immediate danger of bodily harm or you are not. If you are, you better have a loaded round ready to discharge.
Ofc, there is also the use of deadly force to protect the immediate and active threat to personal property. No real immediate need to have one loaded here. However, I don't think people carry because they are waiting to shoot someone trying to steal their car or other property under the Castle Doctrine. Which if someone is willing to kill another who is stealing their parked empty car, there are bigger talks to have other than if they are carrying with a load round or not. I don't usually keep a round chambered at home, my siblings have offspring that come around and even though it's a bit of a family tradition to learn to learn gun safety and shooting before age 10 -- I still don't care for the thought of a fully loaded gun not in my immediate possession.
Walking around on base for example isn’t even remotely close to one. This isn’t uniquely an American thing but it’s extremely common in the US in a way that absolutely isn’t in any kind of comparable country.
I don’t know what it is exactly, other than maybe the very weird and extremely pervasive “operator mentality” that seems to make everyone extremely horny for pretending situations are much more dangerous than they really are.
If you’re going to carry a weapon it’s really a very basic requirement that you can do some reasonable level of threat analysis and respond to the situation around you as it develops.
Again, I’m not saying those situations don’t exist where it makes sense but they are absolutely the exception and are a very weird thing to pretend are the default. I think it’s a culture problem and people are just scared.
On the flipside, when I got a flat on my bicycle in the city a guy walked up to me with a gun, pointed a gun at me to take my shit, and I would not have had time to rack a weapon (and god forbid it jammed). I knocked the guy's arm and punched the guy which stunned him enough that I was able to run off without him getting a good shot off; I would have had enough time to get off a shot with a chambered weapon (didn't carry at the time) but I never would have stood a chance if I pulled out an unchambered gun.
The only scenario where things start to get ACTUALLY dangerous is you pulling out a weapon and suddenly you’ve gone from a 5/10 situation to a 10/10 situation where everyone is liable to panic and do something stupid. You’re about to go from a bad day to maybe your last day here and for what? There is just no point in that story where adding another weapon to the picture improved things at all.
On a side note, I think there is a LOT to be said for having a strong sense of situation awareness and how to do risk management on the street. I spent a good amount of time years ago living in Nairobi and I was one of the few people in my circle of friends who didn’t have a gun in their face at any point. I’m not trying to say I’m somehow special, I think that can happen to anyone but I wish people didn’t have their entire personal security model centered around having a weapon because it’s actually a really shit plan in real life.
Edit: I don’t know if you’re familiar with Robert Young Pelton but he is a war correspondent wrote a book called the worlds most dangerous places which is part adventure travel guide and part how to stay safe in actually honest to god dangerous places and situations. He just started a podcast based on that book and I think you might get something out of this: https://youtu.be/3dhh5_oJsqQ?feature=shared
And yeah I've been in the third world, including Syria. I think the penalty for me having one in Syria was probably the death penalty (LOL!), I didn't give a shit. Some people did shoot at me, I survived.
But that is just being scared and has nothing to do with actually assessing and managing risk.
I understand that’s become a very normalised thing to do there but is something that would get you laughed out of the bar in pretty much the rest of the English speaking world.
Again, I don’t know what to tell you other than I think there is a paranoid culture problem here where everyone is just terrified of everything all the time and nobody seems to know how to step back from the edge and deescalate or again like I keep saying learning how to ACTUALLY judge and manage risk. It’s an actual skillset that will serve you much much better than a weapon ever will.
The same thing goes for just learning how to not panic if you find yourself in a sketchy situation. The ability to remain calm is hands down the most impressive and helpful thing I’ve ever seen from the actually dangerous people I know and have spent time with in some capacity or another.
Regardless, depending on the situation and specifically in the USAF, you are ordered to either carry with a round in the chamber or not, and you'd damned well follow those orders.
It's beside the point, but I imagine, based on my own first hand experience, that USAF Security Forces typically carry without a round in the chamber, in most situations. I did Weapons Courier duty and I was ordered to carry a round in the chamber and be "locked and loaded" at all times.
Marine Corps order for MP and armed guard standard is round in chamber, weapon on safe, slide forward, hammer down. It stands to reason that is the standard case for all military LEO.
All that to say, anyone who says you shouldn't have a round in chamber is living in a fantasy world.
That was historically a very common military rule, and AFAIK it's still common worldwide, just not in US.
IDF is particularly famous for having empty chamber as the standard protocol, which is why this is often colloquially known as "Israeli carry". And you can say a lot of things about IDF, but one thing for sure: they have operational experience.
Disclaimer: I was not SF. I was merely surrounded by them in a very high security environment. :-)
I feel that the safety versus response time trade off is worth it for me. It could be from my military background, but for me a negligent discharge is one of the worst things I could possibly do with a firearm. I was also raised to never trust a safety and unload my gun when crossing fence lines while hunting.
1) The safety mechanisms on say a glock are different than on a lot of military rifles soldiers are trained on. An Ar-15/M16 can go off without pulling the trigger if the firing pin gets stuck in the channel. That won't happen with a glock because the safety physically blocks the primer from being struck. Also in theory a free-floating firing pin could maybe somehow get slammed hard enough or slam an abused primer enough to set off some military rifles.
2) Some hunting shotguns or military rifles aren't drop safe. Modern handguns are.
3) A military rifle or hunting rifle generally has the trigger exposed at all times you are carrying it. A CCW handgun, you are not exposing the gun and trigger unless you are about to shoot someone.
Now I've never served in the military, other than a rag-tag Kurdish militia. What I would imagine the boot sergeant or whatever they are called do, is tells the soldier they will keep the manual safety on or the weapon unchambered and leave it at that, because explaining the intricacies of a striker-fired pistol vs an M16 to a bunch of barely out of highschoolers from Guam who are already exhausted from sleep deprivation and jarring work-outs would not be terribly productive.
This is precisely one of the issues with Gen1 Glocks that was remediated. The firing pin safety prevents the firing pin from moving forward unless the gun is in battery and the trigger is partially depressed. It doesn't force the pin to move backwards if it is jammed forward (due to dirt). A pin that's jammed will slam fire the gun when racked.
Always rack in a safe direction.
That's the Air Force's accusation.
In case anyone else is interested:
UCMJ Article 119 (Manslaughter): https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/919
UCML Article 118 (Murder): https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/918
But IANAL, and to the extent I pay attention to the law, that kind of basic criminal law isn't it.
Maybe the issue is that the 320 is too close to a competition trigger, and it isn't appropriate for a duty gun. But the gun has been under a microscope for years now, and no one has shown a design defect that causes the gun to fire by itself.
If the gun was able to fire by itself, without the trigger being actuated, then someone should make it happen on video. Shake the crap out of it, bang on it. Take it in and out of a clear plastic holster 1000 times until the supposed defect happens.
Here, the police officer isn't even touching his holster.
Regardless, if there is a defect in that particular gun, they should just demonstrate it. If it isn't the holster, or something in the holster pulling the trigger, make it happen outside the holster.
The range video where they are standing on the line was allegedly a modified gun with non-Sig upper and trigger.
Officer standing and moves slightly and it goes off, with their hands in front of them? (Eyewitness)
And at least 3 others. There are some good compilation videos out there.
A gun in a holster can fire when it is moved and the holster is poorly fit, incorrectly configured, or there anything caught in it like tail of a shirt, drawstring. Also, many police have a flashlight on their pistol, which opens up space quite a bit making it easier for things to get caught inside.
A hair trigger is unsuitable for combat use because of the "errybody be muzzle sweeping errybody up in here" nature of combat.
Those two uses are 99.99% of what the air force needs its pistols to do.
They could give it better tolerances so it has a "good trigger" without "hair trigger" but that will cost a lot of money. Or they could give it an absurd trigger pull like duty guns had in the "good old days" but that will cost just as much money for equivalent results because you'll need to train the force more to get the same accuracy of fire.
Additionally, with the fairly sloppy nature of these guns and the fundamental nature of how handguns work, it's not unforeseeable that they do get clapped out to the point of just going off if you bump the slide right as they age since they're so close to that as is.
Considering how many people need to be trained/equipped and how often the air force fires sidearms in "real" situations both of these solutions are way, way, way more expensive than a few bodies.
2: The trigger is what it is, the military and police departments chose it for what was.
I agree, the police in particular, should use a gun that takes more effort to fire. But don't blame Sig for this, it isn't a design flaw.
There are also manufacturing issues with intermingling parts with different geometries intended for different calibers and building guns with the wrong parts, such as installing a 10mm Auto/.45 ACP takedown safety level in a 9mm gun, or installing a metal injection molded firing pin safety that's out of spec, worn, or contributes to tolerance stacking in such a way that the gun becomes unsafe.
For example, Sig offered a "voluntary upgrade" to fix the well documented drop safety flaw with the P320, and there's video proof of the same guns going off still in holsters.
Sig is going to be playing whackamole fixing these issues if they ever admit to it, so they won't.
As you point out, the drop issue was well documented, and then fixed. So far, no one has identified a cause for the possible uncommanded discharge.
The argument is that there exists a combination of states and tolerances when a P320 is loaded and cocked that could, theoretically, allow the striker to impact the primer forcefully without a complete and full trigger pull, one where you don't feel the break. This could either be while the finger is on the trigger (maybe a police officer pointing it at someone who has a weapon while commanding them to drop the weapon, for example) or not (in a holster).
Inserting that screw is meant to simulate a tolerance stacking issue wherein the pistol's components don't line up together in such a way as to prevent the striker from slipping past the sear.
Is it wonky? Of course. Could you probably do it with other pistols? Probably. Are there police officers and servicemen/women who need a convenient excuse for their negligent discharges? Yes. Should a real investigation occur? Also yes.
This might be true, but nowhere in the article you posted does it say that.
As is classifying all the documents about the pistol and its issues.
There is nothing even remotely credibly related to national security about the P320 or issues related to it.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and the military has a very long history of covering up issues with corruptly procured weapons.
Just one particularly notorious example of many: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Iowa_turret_explosion
> The first investigation into the explosion, conducted by the U.S. Navy, concluded that one of the gun turret crew members, Clayton Hartwig, who died in the explosion, had deliberately caused it. During the investigation, numerous leaks to the media, later attributed to U.S. Navy officers and investigators, implied that Hartwig and another sailor, Kendall Truitt, had engaged in a romantic relationship and that Hartwig had caused the explosion after their relationship had soured. However, in its report, the U.S. Navy concluded that the evidence did not show that Hartwig was homosexual but that he was suicidal and had caused the explosion with either an electronic or chemical detonator.
Policies that people had objected to at the time, but had been pushed through regardless due to ‘stop being a worry wart’/no one wanting to spend the money.
They still have the accident down as ‘Unknown causes’.