The Sig Sauer P320, sold to the U.S. military as the M17 and M18, has been the subject of more than 100 lawsuits, two jury verdicts against the manufacturer, and bans by federal and local law enforcement agencies after owners, officers, and service members reported the pistol firing without a trigger pull. Sig Sauer denies the gun has any defect and says it “cannot, under any circumstances, discharge without a trigger pull.” Independent testing by the FBI’s Ballistic Research Facility and a growing body of court filings describe a different picture, and the question of whether a Sig P320 accidental discharge is mechanically possible is now being litigated across the country.
What People Are Reporting
Since 2016, there have been more than 100 documented reports of unintentional P320 discharges and at least 80 injuries, according to reporting by Stateline. During a 2023 product liability case in Maine, Sig Sauer acknowledged it had been notified of 350 unintentional P320 shootings between 2016 and 2021. By 2026, plaintiffs’ attorneys said they were aware of more than 500 such incidents.
The accounts are strikingly similar. The pistol fires while holstered, while being carried in a pocket, or during ordinary movement such as walking, sitting, bending, or cleaning. Many of the plaintiffs are police officers who say they were shot in the leg or foot by their own holstered weapon. In at least two military “mishap” incidents reviewed by New Hampshire Public Radio, witnesses stated the service member did not have a hand on or near the trigger when the gun went off. At Fort Eustis, Virginia, a sergeant’s M17 fired after his holster collided with another, sending a round into his ankle. In Okinawa, a Marine’s M18 discharged inside a guard booth with the safety reportedly engaged; investigators who reviewed surveillance footage concluded the guard had not mishandled the weapon.
The FBI took a direct look at the mechanism in August 2024. Its Ballistic Research Facility examined a Michigan State Police M18 that had discharged while holstered on an officer’s hip and found that an internal safety component called the striker safety lock, described as the “last safety in line,” could be rendered inoperable by “movements representing those common to a law enforcement officer.” The FBI replicated the same result on a brand-new M18. The analysis also found uneven wear on the sear and an irregular “ledge” on the bottom of the striker pin hook where there should have been a flat surface.
An internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement report from October 2020 offered a before-and-after comparison. In the 18 months after ICE adopted the P320 in 2019, 12 officers reported unintentional discharges resulting in seven injuries. In the two years before adoption, the entire agency had logged seven total unintentional discharges and one injury.
The Gun, and the Safety That Isn’t There
The P320 is a striker-fired pistol. In 2017, the U.S. Army awarded Sig Sauer a contract worth up to $580 million to replace the Beretta M9 with a Modular Handgun System built on the P320 platform. The full-size variant is the M17 and the compact version is the M18. The Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard all adopted it, and by 2024 the military had issued more than 244,000 of the pistols.
One difference between the military and civilian guns matters for understanding the lawsuits. The M17 and M18 carry an external manual thumb safety. Most P320s sold on the commercial market do not. New Jersey’s attorney general has alleged that Sig Sauer marketed the civilian P320 as the “official sidearm of the U.S. Military” without disclosing that the civilian version lacks the external safety the military insisted on. The Philadelphia jury verdict discussed below rested specifically on the absence of that external safety.
The 2017 Drop-Safety Upgrade
Within months of the Army contract, testing confirmed that the P320 could discharge if dropped at certain angles under specific conditions, and a 2017 Department of Defense report identified the risk. In August 2017, Sig Sauer launched a voluntary upgrade program for all P320s manufactured before that date. The upgrade replaced the trigger, sear, and striker with lighter-weight components and added a mechanical disconnector designed to prevent firing if the slide was out of battery. The work was free, shipping included, and pistols made after August 8, 2017, left the factory with the changes. By early 2020, more than 100,000 P320s had been through the program.
Sig Sauer has consistently characterized the upgrade as unrelated to any claim that the pistol can fire without a trigger pull. The reports of uncommanded discharges, however, continued after 2017 and involve both pre- and post-upgrade guns.
Agencies That Have Dropped the P320
Several police forces and one federal agency have moved to restrict or eliminate the pistol:
- ICE Deputy Director Madison Sheahan issued a memo on July 9, 2025, banning officers from carrying the P320 and directing a transition to Glock pistols “as soon as practicable.” Since January 2020, ICE had directed $2.4 million toward P320 purchases and accessories.
- The Houston Police Department removed the P320 from its authorized duty weapons list after Officer Richard Fernandez sued, alleging his holstered P320 discharged into his leg during a 2025 Martin Luther King Jr. parade detail. Roughly 1,200 HPD officers had carried the gun as their primary sidearm, with 1,600 units in service department-wide. The department’s own 2017 testing had found the P320 discharged four out of 30 times when dropped.
- In October 2025, U.S. District Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer, who oversees the Chicago Police Department’s federal reform agreement, ordered CPD to immediately stop using the P320 after the Fraternal Order of Police argued it could discharge accidentally. About 780 Chicago officers were still carrying it at the time of the order.
- The Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission permanently banned the P320 from its training facilities after a 2024 incident in which a recruit’s pistol discharged while being drawn, injuring an instructor and another recruit. Sig Sauer sued to overturn the ban; in August 2025, a Thurston County Superior Court judge denied the company’s motion for a stay.
- Since 2017, Milwaukee police, Dallas police, and SEPTA transit police in Philadelphia have also removed the P320 from service, along with agencies in Alabama, Connecticut, Florida, Texas, and Wisconsin.
- Air Force Global Strike Command paused all M18 use across more than 33,000 personnel in July 2025 after a fatal on-duty discharge at F.E. Warren Air Force Base. The command inspected all 7,970 M18s in its inventory, found “discrepancies” with 191 of them (about 2.4 percent) involving wear on the safety lever, striker assembly, and sear, and returned the pistol to service on August 25, 2025, with permanent enhanced inspection procedures. Investigators in that case concluded another airman had his finger on the trigger when the gun fired.
Where the Lawsuits Stand
More than 100 lawsuits are awaiting trial in state and federal courts as of early 2026.
In June 2024, a Georgia jury awarded $2.35 million to Robert Lang, the first jury to find the P320 defectively designed. Lang alleged his holstered P320 fired into his thigh while he was removing it from his waistband. Sig Sauer has said it plans to appeal.
In November 2024, a Philadelphia jury awarded $11 million to an Army veteran whose P320 discharged while in his pocket, holding Sig Sauer liable for the lack of an external safety. In June 2025, Judge Damaris Garcia of the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas vacated the $10 million in punitive damages after reviewing evidence of Sig Sauer’s “vigorous quality control and testing,” but left the $1 million compensatory award intact. Both sides plan to appeal.
On May 28, 2026, a divided panel of the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals revived a lawsuit brought by Michael Colwell, a Troy, New York, police detective whose department-issued P320 allegedly discharged while holstered in June 2021, injuring his leg. Writing for the majority, Judge Gerard Lynch held that under New York law, expert testimony on causation is not strictly required where jurors can use “common sense” and examine the product’s characteristics to decide whether a design defect caused the injury. Judge Sullivan dissented.
The law firm Saltz Mongeluzzi Bendesky has filed multiple mass actions representing more than 125 claimants across 45 states. In 2025, 34 new plaintiffs from 23 states joined a filing in Pennsylvania courts; the firm shifted its filings from New Hampshire to Pennsylvania after New Hampshire enacted House Bill 551, signed by Governor Kelly Ayotte on May 23, 2025, which prohibits product liability claims against firearms manufacturers based on the absence of certain safety mechanisms. The law does not apply retroactively to the roughly 80 P320 cases already pending in the state. A group of 76 plaintiffs is coordinating a class-style effort in New Hampshire, a 2022 Missouri class action is ongoing, and a potential class action was filed in Seattle federal court in November 2025 under the Washington Consumer Protection Act. In October 2025, New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin sued Sig Sauer in state court, seeking a mandatory recall of all P320s sold in New Jersey and citing the 2023 death of Detective Lieutenant Walter Imbert, who was fatally shot when his P320 discharged while he was cleaning it.
Not every case has gone against the company. Sig Sauer says nearly 20 P320-related cases have been dismissed. Courts have sometimes excluded plaintiffs’ expert testimony after experts failed to replicate an uncommanded discharge under controlled conditions. In a Puerto Rico case, the plaintiff reportedly admitted to pulling the trigger. In a Massachusetts case, a jury found the P320 “defectively designed” but awarded no damages after concluding the plaintiff had “voluntarily and unreasonably used the P320 pistol knowing that it was defective and dangerous.” A June 2025 federal appeals ruling in Denver went in Sig Sauer’s favor where the plaintiff could not identify specific contact with the trigger.
Why There Is No Recall
Firearms are exempt from oversight by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the result of a 1972 amendment to the agency’s enabling legislation. No federal agency has the authority to investigate firearm design defects or order a recall. Representative Debbie Dingell has repeatedly introduced legislation to establish that authority, but none of those bills has reached the floor for a vote. For the P320, that means there is no federal body that can compel Sig Sauer to pull the gun from the market. The outcome is being decided case by case, in courtrooms and in individual agency arsenals.
What Sig Sauer Says
Sig Sauer calls the P320 “one of the safest, most advanced pistols in the world” and states that it “cannot, under any circumstances, discharge without a trigger pull.” The company attributes reports of unintentional discharges to “improper or unsafe handling” and to “foreign objects that get into holstered firearms.” It hosts a dedicated “P320 Truth” webpage with an animation of the five mechanical steps it says are required to fire the pistol, and it lists its courtroom wins. Sig Sauer also points to continued institutional adoption: in 2025, the Swiss Armed Forces selected the P320 as their official sidearm, the Michigan State Police chose the P320 and P365, and the Texas Department of Public Safety selected the M17. The company says that “despite years of litigation and extensive discovery, no one, including plaintiffs’ ‘experts,’ have ever been able to replicate a P320 discharging without a trigger pull.” The FBI’s 2024 findings and the two jury verdicts against the company cut the other way, and with more than a hundred cases still awaiting trial, the design question remains open.