Army Times:

Early evaluations of the Army’s new handgun, the M17, last year showed test failures when the pistol was fired with the standard ball ammunition, stoppages, and double ejections.

Ridiculous.  Everyone should have a “high pistol grip.”  They are also having to do this because of the tall slide and high bore axis, and thus the muzzle flip this firearm produces because of the couple, something I pointed out when the Army selected this pistol.

As for not being able to shoot FMJ lead ball, that seems like a real problem.  Double ejections are also a big problem, and firing when dropped makes this firearm completely unacceptable.  Funny, this.  I never have any problems with any of these things or any other failures with my 1911s, or with my new CMMG .45 ACP AR pistol.  I just won’t accept failures.  It’s a machine, and it can be designed and fabricated properly (although I’ll have to say that it’s hard to beat what John Moses Browning did and I don’t think anybody has even come close yet).

Here is the right way to roll out new software.[1] Set functional requirements, [2] programmers go to work, [3] put high end users in a room with it and tell them to break it, [4] repeat parts [2] and [3] until no more breakages.  Only after this do you roll it out to the user community.

The Army should have taken this approach prior to selecting a new pistol.  This must be embarrassing for them.  It should be.

Fox News:

The U.S. Army on Thursday awarded Sig Sauer a contract worth $580 million to make the next service pistol based on the company’s P320 handgun.

Sig Sauer beat out Glock Inc., FN America and Beretta USA, the maker of the current M9 9mm service pistol, in the competition for the Modular Handgun System, or MHS, program.

“We are both humbled and proud that the P320 was selected by the U.S. Army as its weapon of choice,” Ron Cohen, chief executive officer of Sig Sauer, said in a statement to Military.com here at SHOT Show, the world’s largest gun show, taking place this week in the city.

“Securing this contract is a testimony to Sig Sauer employees, their commitment to innovation, quality and manufacturing the most reliable firearms in the world,” Cohen added.

Whatever.  Color me unimpressed.  Go look at the model.  I’m not a Sig fanboi (nor a Glock fanboi), so I hadn’t really noticed the Sig pistols all that much.

This is God’s honest truth.  The first thing I thought when I saw that thing was “The slide profile is very tall and it has a high bore axis and so it will have worse muzzle flip” (well, I say God’s honest truth, but to be completely honest, this thought coincided with the thought “boy that thing is ugly”).

Now to be sure, you can look at the Sig fanboi forums (yes, here are such things), and they swear up and down that Sigs don’t have a high bore axis, and even if they do it doesn’t mean there’s more muzzle flip.  That’s a myth.  It isn’t real.  Seriously, you can’t make this up.  Go look at the forums yourself.

Well, here it goes, so listen up.  The bore axis is higher in this pistol than any I’ve ever seen (distance between bore and web of your hand in Cartesian space, here think the “y” axis, straight up and down).  The greater the moment arm, the greater the force.  That’s engineering mechanics to those who have taken courses in statics and dynamics.

Or to little boys who first learn to work a jack when they change a tire.  Amusingly, Uncle says “I also don’t disagree with picking the Sig. Or if they’d have picked the M&P. So long as they went with a striker-fired, polymer-framed gun that holds a lot of bullets. And isn’t an XD or Taurus.”

Well, that puts me about 180 degrees out with Uncle, since it eliminates 1911 and XDm, the only two guns I would want to take into combat.  I thought about that the other day (“If I had to go to combat, what sidearm would I want to take?”), and while my heart says 1911 because I shoot it better than any gun I have, my head says XDm for its durability, reliability, simplicity and 11 degree 1911-style grip angle.

I could beat on it with a sledge hammer and it would still work, I’m convinced.  All of you Glock owners out there, you realize that your grip isn’t the perfect 11 degrees, right?  And all of you M&P owners, take your pistol (make sure it has no rounds in the chamber first), look at it from the side, and observe the gap between the front of the slide and the frame compared to lack of gap at the rear of the gun.  You can even take your fingers and squeeze the slide together with the frame at the front of the gun.  It rattles.  This is true of all M&Ps.  The slide sits a full 1/8″ off the frame at the front sight.

You see, right?  Did you M&P owners do it like I suggested?  I don’t like that gap for reasons too numerous to outline here.  I don’t shoot 9mm (chamber pressure of around 35,000 psi compared to around 25,000 psi for the .45 ACP), and I don’t have Sigs.

As for other reviews, there is this one from Shooting Illustrated, and in it there are these nuggets.

One of the pistol’s features I really like is the cutouts on either side of the frame, which allow the magazine to be stripped forcefully from the frame when necessary, such as when correcting a double-feed.

Funny, that.  I’ve shot thousands of rounds through my XDm, and I’ve never had a double-feed.  Not a single FTF or FTE.  Not even once.  And then there is this.

My overall complaint about the P320 is a net that I’ll cast over nearly every SIG pistol: a bore axis that results in more muzzle flip than necessary.

Well, like I said.  So to reiterate my take on the Army decision … whatever.  I won’t be getting one.