The Trace Introduces Brain-Dead Take Into P320 Controversy

The Sig Sauer P320 has had a bad reputation pretty much since it was introduced. First, it wasn’t drop-safe. If it fell and landed just so, it could fire, which is no bueno. Then Sig offered a “voluntary upgrade” intended to address that. I honestly thought that would be the end of it.

But then we got stories of the gun just going off.

Sure, plenty of people blame the gun when they’re the problem and claim it “just went off,” but we got video of it doing just that, which has led to a lot of memes, accusations, and Sig engaging in the absolute worst damage control I’ve ever seen.

But now, The Trace has decided to get into the fray with a piece titled, “A Gun Deemed Too Dangerous for Cops, but Fine for Civilians.”

At the same event, Milwaukee’s police chief revealed that, to offset the cost of the new weapons, the department would be reselling its P320s to a gun dealer. Soon, the old P320s — deemed too dangerous for the city’s officers — would be available for purchase by civilians.

The decision in Milwaukee follows a pattern that has been repeated in cities across the nation as police departments reevaluate their use of the P320 amid mounting concerns about the weapon’s safety. A 2023 investigation by The Trace and The Washington Post revealed that the P320 has gruesomely injured scores of people who alleged in lawsuits that it has a potentially deadly defect. SIG Sauer denied these claims. 

Over the past two months, The Trace surveyed more than 60 law enforcement agencies whose officers once used the P320. More than 20 of those agencies — including police departments in Oklahoma City, Denver, and Chicago — have moved to prohibit the gun because of fears about unintentional discharges. Twelve agencies said they resold their P320s to the public after determining the model was unsafe for officers to use. 

Cumulatively, these departments sent at least 4,000 P320s back into the commercial market.

“If the primary function of law enforcement is to protect and serve, one would think that returning a problematic weapon to the public is not particularly consistent with that mission,” Jonathan Jacobs, director of the Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics at New York’s John Jay College, told The Trace. “The ethical issues here are very, very plain.”

No, it’s not.

See, there’s a difference between what a police department mandates its officers carry and what a private citizen chooses to buy. Plus, police officers are out and about, moving around in ways that seem to trigger–pun fully intended–the issues with the P320, whereas an individual isn’t.

Plus, there’s a big difference between a gun sitting in someone’s safe, that only comes out on range day, for example, and what an officer is carrying around in their holster.

I want Sig to fix the issue instead of pretending it simply can’t happen. We’ve seen it happen. Sig claims it happens with other manufacturers, but I haven’t seen it happen to this degree, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the issue with at least some of those others involves someone monkeying with the internals somehow, thus it wasn’t actually those manufacturers’ designs that were the problem.

The Trace, though, wants to demonize police selling guns back to dealers for resale to the general public.

That’s what this is really about. That’s why they’re framing it like this. It has nothing to do with concerns about officer or consumer safety.

It’s a drum they’ve beaten off and on for a while, all because used firearms are less expensive than new ones, making guns more accessible to millions of people in this country. We know how the folks at The Trace feel about that sort of thing.