When the military picked New Hampshire gunmaker Sig Sauer to supply a new sidearm to replace the Army‘s Beretta M9 in 2017, the company beat out venerable names in gun lore, such as Glock and Smith & Wesson.

Sig Sauer’s next-generation-designed M17 and M18, military versions of its popular P320 pistol, touted as “the future of modular handguns,” won the $580 million contract hands down.

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Since then, more than 450,000 of the advanced pistols have been delivered to the military and are being used by all branches of the armed services.

Over the last five years, there have been 32 cases of U.S. service members claiming their Sig Sauer M18 pistols fired without the trigger being pulled, but there were no fatalities, according to records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by New Hampshire Public Radio earlier this month.

However, on July 20, the death of a 21-year-old airman at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming, involving an M18 pistol, sparked the Air Force Global Strike Command to act.

The command, which comprises more than 33,000 personnel, stopped using the gun pending the results of an investigation.

The Air Force has provided few details aside from confirming that the airman was shot by an M18 and another airman was arrested on suspicion of making a false statement, obstruction of justice, and involuntary manslaughter.

The incident reignited an allegation that has dogged Sig Sauer in recent years: that both the military and civilian versions of the pistol can fire unexpectedly without the trigger being pulled.

More than 100 lawsuits have been filed by individual gun owners, including law enforcement members, all claiming their civilian P320 pistols went off by themselves.

It’s a charge the company has vigorously fought in court and has adamantly disputed in an aggressive public relations campaign.

“The P320 CANNOT, under any circumstances, discharge without a trigger pull. This is verified through extensive testing by SIG SAUER, the U.S. Military, elite law enforcement agencies, and independent laboratories,” says the company’s website, P320truth.com. “Verified incidents of unintended discharges are all attributed to improper handling, incompatible equipment (i.e., holsters), trigger access vulnerability, or a lapse in firearm safety, not to any defect in the P320.”

So far, Sig Sauer has had a mixed record in court.

Of three cases in which a jury rendered a verdict, Sig Sauer won one and lost the other two, including an $11 million award by a Philadelphia jury in a case in which a man said he holstered his P320 pistol, put it in the pocket of his pants, and zipped it up before going downstairs.

“The gun went off and the bullet tore through his right thigh, exiting above the knee, causing permanent injuries,” according to court documents cited by the Associated Press.

Also, last year, a Georgia man who made a similar claim about a holstered P320 pistol discharging was awarded $2.35 million by a federal jury.

The company blamed the verdicts on “jury pools from extremely plaintiff-friendly jurisdictions,” and is appealing.

At the same time, the Republican-led New Hampshire Legislature passed a law to indemnify Sig Sauer from lawsuits over the lack of an external mechanical safety on the P320 pistol, which the company said is not needed to keep the gun from firing accidentally.

Meanwhile, the complaints keep piling up, and there are many other lawsuits pending.

Clearly, Sig Sauer has a PR problem, but is it reality, perception, or, as the company says on its website, “misinformation” from “uninformed, agenda-driven parties”?

“Depends on who you talk to,” said Susan Katz Keating, who, as publisher of Soldier of Fortune Magazine, gets a lot of feedback from her readers. “Personally, I believe there is a problem with it — not every single model — but I think that there is a glitch in the design.”

Keating was quick to admit she is not a gun expert, but she said the “preponderance of complaints” is hard to dismiss out of hand.

“I’ve been hearing them from people, and there have been many lawsuits, many claims from users, both military and law enforcement who say that this weapon has gone off without a trigger pull — that it has just simply fired,” she said.

Keating has teamed up with a legitimate gun expert for some of the stories she’s published in Soldier of Fortune, including a recent article that quoted an attorney who sued Sig Sauer last year for wrongful death. The attorney alleged, based on sworn witness testimony, that the company has known for years that its P320 pistol could fire unexpectedly and without the shooter pulling the trigger.

In a statement provided to the Washington Examiner, Austin Lee, the gunsmith who shared a byline with Keating on one story, said his analysis of the P320 pistol led him to suspect that while the gun is not “inherently unsafe when manufactured and maintained correctly,” its design requires “precise tolerances and regular maintenance to mitigate risks, particularly in high-wear or debris-prone environments.”

Lee is not the first expert to focus on the “sear,” the part of trigger mechanism that releases the striker, which then impacts the the primer of the cartridge, causing it to fire.

Earlier this month, Angled Spade Technologies applied for a patent it said would “further enhance the safety of the P320 platform.”

“Our solution physically blocks the sear’s movement when the manual safety is engaged. something that, to date, has not been a feature of the P320 and its variants,” the company said in a press release, identifying the inventor of the modification as Brian McDonald, a former Sig Sauer employee.

The patent application identifies what it calls an “incomplete and unsafe design,” adding there is a “potential for the sear to be jarred and moved from the reset position to the release position even when the firearm safety is in the ‘safe’ position,” which carries the risk of “accidental discharges even when securely stored in a holster with no action being taken to manipulate the trigger.”

NHPR’s FOIA request also uncovered records revealing a 2022 incident at Aviano Air Base in Italy in which an Air Force investigator concluded an M18 pistol was fired without a trigger pull.

“As a staff sergeant loaded a magazine into his M18 and released the slide — with the gun’s safety on — the weapon fired unexpectedly,” NHPR reported. “Investigators went so far as to fingerprint the gun, finding no prints on the gun’s trigger, according to an Air Force report.”

Investigators then disassembled the pistol and found wear marks on an internal component called the mechanical disconnect, leading them to conclude that “the weapon suffered a mechanical failure … allowing the firing pin to move forward.”

The internet is full of videos showing the P320 pistol firing when dropped, jostled, or holstered at a gun range. However, Sig Sauer has argued the videos are unreliable because factors such as “the holster configuration, positioning of the pistol within the holster,” and the presence of “third-party material” in the trigger guard cannot be determined.

In the FAQ section of its website, Sig Sauer says, “It is important to understand that no one, including plaintiffs’ experts,” has been able to replicate a P320 pistol discharging without a trigger pull.

“This lack of success is directly a result of the design of the P320 and its multiple safety redundancies,” it adds.

However, Lee contended that over time, “excessive movement” between components of the trigger mechanism, “due to loose tolerances or wear,” possibly “could allow the sear to disengage unintentionally, potentially leading to a discharge.”

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“Sig Sauer’s choice of a sear and safety lever system may have been driven by goals of modularity and a lighter trigger pull, but it introduces unique, perhaps unseen vulnerabilities if parts are out of spec or improperly assembled,” Lee said. “The stacking of tolerances from the factory plus the added wear and tear from heavy use are a recipe for disaster.”

“Think of it like a game of Russian roulette,” he concluded. “If every time you loaded a round into the chamber, there was a ‘chance’ it might go off without manually pulling the trigger, would you really want to play? The odds are stacked and not in your favor.”