Online gun retailer Omaha Outdoors has halted all sales of the SIG SAUER P320 semi-automatic pistol based on the results of drop-testing they have conducted on the gun. Last week’s news of the Dallas Police Department suspension of P320’s from duty service prompted Omaha to conduct their own drop-testing on the P320 and their results were surprising, to say the least.
Omaha drop-tested four pistols of various sizes and calibers: a P320 TACOPS 9mm, a P320 X-Five 9mm and two P320 Compact .45’s. According to their description of the testing, three of the four pistols had also been torture tested to varying degrees prior to the drop tests.
Omaha found that when the pistols were dropped at a very specific angle — muzzle up, striking the back of the slide — the guns would discharge a significant percentage of the time.
As you can see in Andrew Touhy’s explanation of their findings above, one of the four guns they tested would not fire when dropped. Omaha Outdoors attributes the problem to trigger shoes of a particular weight installed in some models of the gun. According to Tuohy, lighter trigger shoes reduce or eliminate the problem.
Given these results, Omaha Outdoors has decided to suspend sales of all P320 models to the public.
We’ve been in contact with SIG SAUER regarding these results as well and they’ve been extremely helpful in evaluating what Omaha Outdoors claims to have found. However, given the prior torture testing that was conducted on at least some of the guns — which included launching at least one P320 some 50 feet in the air — both SIG and TTAG were concerned that Omaha’s results might not be fair or replicable.
As a result, we have conducted our own drop tests of the P320. Those results will follow soon .