In 2010, a group of weapons technicians gathered at the training academy of SIG Sauer Inc. for a routine test referred to as the “shake and bake.” The technicians, a mix of military and law enforcement professionals, had reached the final round of a course certifying them to repair SIG firearms. To graduate, they needed to strip a couple of dozen pistols, all from the gunmaker’s P226 DAK line, down to their screws and springs. They would scramble the parts in a bin, then set about reassembling each gun from scratch.
The test began as usual; the technicians rebuilt the guns without issue. But when they pulled the triggers, the weapons, which had functioned properly beforehand, no longer worked. Two former instructors who were present told me the technicians had reassembled their guns correctly. (These instructors asked to remain anonymous for fear of professional retribution.) That suggested the problem lay with the weapons. Identical guns should have interchangeable parts. When they don’t, it can indicate poor manufacturing.
That same year, SIG’s chief executive officer and president, Ron Cohen, sat for an interview with the magazine Management Today. Cohen had staged a dramatic turnaround at the New Hampshire-based company. When he’d taken charge five years earlier, it had recently become independent of its iconic German parent, SIG Sauer GmbH. It was sputtering, eking out tiny margins on guns still built with parts from Germany. But under Cohen’s stewardship, sales had tripled, and the company had added product lines and hundreds of employees. In the interview, Cohen extolled the company’s transformation. He compared SIG to Mercedes-Benz, then mused about what it might cost to continue expanding: “How do you grow Mercedes to be four times bigger while not losing your edge of being the quality leader? How do you grow without losing those parts of you?”
Over the next 15 years, SIG surged to the front of a fiercely competitive U.S. pistol market and edged out industry heavyweights for government contracts. But while business grew, so did claims of shoddy manufacturing.
Although the P226 DAK was gradually discontinued, subsequent models faced similar criticisms. By far the greatest number of complaints have been directed at SIG’s current flagship pistol, the P320, introduced in 2014 and available for roughly $500 today. The P320 is the engine of the company’s furious growth over the past decade. But since 2016, more than 150 people have alleged in lawsuits and police records that their P320s fired when they didn’t pull the trigger. Shootings have blown holes through veterans’ thighs, shattered police officers’ knees, and killed a Pennsylvania father. In November 2022 alone, eight people suffered gunshot wounds from their P320s. An additional 18 people reported P320 injuries in 2025, including three Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents injured by their duty pistols, and a Utah man shot through the penis on Valentine’s Day.
While many gunmakers have faced allegations of defect-related shootings, SIG has been the subject of far more than others in the past decade. The disparity has stymied SIG’s growth in the law enforcement market, where the P320 once threatened to dethrone the company’s chief competitor, Glock Inc. In the past few years, at least seven of SIG’s biggest U.S. customers, including the Houston and Denver police departments and ICE, have stopped using the P320 amid fears about officer safety. Dozens of smaller agencies have done the same.
SIG declined to comment for this story, but the company has previously denied that the P320 is capable of firing without a trigger pull. In response to questions for an investigative story about P320 shootings that I co-wrote for The Trace and The Washington Post in 2023, SIG cited accounts of unintentional discharges with other firearms — specifically, 1998 coverage detailing a spate of unintentional shootings at the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department and a 2017 Trace story about accidental shootings at businesses — as evidence that issues with the P320 are neither uncommon nor suggestive of a defect with the gun. (The stories described some shootings in which victims acknowledged having pulled their weapons’ triggers.) “These reports, among others, support three conclusions,” the company wrote at the time. “(1) unintentional discharges are not uncommon amongst both law enforcement and civilians, (2) improper or unsafe handling is one of the most common causes of unintentional discharges, and (3) unintentional discharges occur with several types of firearms and are not unique to the P320.”
The company further noted 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,” and that the P320 conforms to applicable US standards for safety. “The SIG Sauer P320 model pistol is among the most tested, proven, and successful handguns in small arms history,” the company wrote.
The causes of handgun misfires can be notoriously difficult to isolate, as they can result from slight shifts of tiny parts inside a weapon. Internal components may be distorted by temperature, moisture, or general wear, experts say, especially if the parts were not manufactured correctly. The uncertainty has spawned an abundance of theories about what has caused P320s to go off. SIG consistently blames user error. Plaintiffs’ attorneys have demonstrated that the gun can discharge after being bumped or rattled with its trigger only slightly depressed, as it might be in a warped holster or from inadvertent finger pressure. YouTube firearm influencers have published videos purporting to show the same.
But dozens of former employees who worked at SIG as far back as the 1990s told me the most likely explanation for the alleged problems associated with the P320 predates the model altogether. According to more than 100 hours of interviews and to documents I obtained — internal email exchanges, meeting notes, and manufacturing process instructions — SIG has frequently cut corners in ways that affect quality, potentially jeopardizing the integrity of parts used to build millions of guns and hundreds of thousands of P320s. The former employees said that changes set in motion years ago have undermined the reliability of the brand’s products and that Cohen has fostered a culture prioritizing production numbers above all else.
In a press release last March defending the safety of the P320, SIG disputed that design or quality-control problems have contributed to P320 shootings. “SIG SAUER stands behind the quality, safety, and design of all our products,” the release read. It goes on to dismiss criticism as a “campaign to highjack the truth for profit,” mounted by “clickbait farming, engagement hacking grifters.”
Several former employees I contacted stood by the company and dismissed quality concerns as the grumblings of disgruntled ex-staffers. John Brasseur, a former vice president of product management who worked at SIG from 2010 to 2022, says he never felt Cohen’s decisions jeopardized the reliability of SIG’s firearms. “I will absolutely tell you that there was never a time where it was quantity over quality,” Brasseur says.
In many industries, manufacturers must design and build their products to federally mandated safety standards before sending them into the marketplace. But the gun industry is exempt from all federal consumer-product safety regulation. Unlike hair dryers, mattresses, and even BB guns, firearms do not need to meet minimum safety standards. Imagine a weapon that explodes in customers’ hands or fires backward at its users. It would violate no federal gun safety regulation. No government agency has the authority to investigate or force a recall.
Judges and juries have the power to determine whether a firearm is defective, but they’re generally limited to awarding financial damages. Only in extreme circumstances can judges issue injunctions banning products. Three times, juries have found the P320 defectively designed; in two of those cases, victims were awarded millions of dollars. (A fourth jury decided in SIG’s favor in 2022, though the judge in that case called the plaintiff “credible in every respect.”) More than 100 similar lawsuits await trial in state and federal courthouses across the country. SIG, characteristically, has gone on the offensive: In New Hampshire, where most of the cases are filed, the company persuaded state legislators last year to pass an amendment that might bar such claims before evidence can be heard.
SIG Sauer traces its lineage to a trio of Swiss wagonmakers in the 1800s who, after learning the Swiss military needed a new rifle, repurposed their factory to build a state-of-the-art gun. Their design won them a contract for 30,000 rifles. Over the next century and a half, the company cultivated a reputation for premium engineering, building weapons in Switzerland and, starting in 1976, Germany. Armies in Japan, Chile, and Nigeria adopted SIG firearms. So did the U.S. Navy SEALs.
By 1985, SIG had created a U.S. division called SigArms, through which it imported its German-made guns. Then, in 1990, SIG’s leadership took a gamble: To claim a larger piece of America’s vast civilian gun market, SigArms opened a manufacturing division in Exeter, New Hampshire. The weapons made there won praise from gun geeks and competition shooters. In 2000, the German investment group L&O Holding GmbH bought the parent company and quickly spun off SigArms as a separate entity. It became SIG Sauer Inc. in 2007.
The new company continued to source many parts from its former parent, and the arrangement cut deeply into its profits. By the time Cohen took control in 2005, SIG was “about two seconds away from imploding,” he told Management Today. “That is the perfect company for me.”
Cohen, an Israeli American, spent five years as an artillery officer during Israel’s siege of Lebanon in the early 1980s. He credits the experience with hardening him for corporate leadership. Employees who worked directly with Cohen describe him as intense and relentless, absolutely committed to growth. More than one used the word “tyrant,” an epithet used so commonly for Cohen that his admirers felt compelled to preemptively dismiss it.
Unlike his predecessor, who spent much of his tenure at his homes in other states, Cohen threw himself into SIG’s day-to-day operations in New Hampshire. Lukasz Cieleszko, who worked from 2016 to 2023 on a team responsible for overseeing quality at SIG, says that even after nearly two decades at the helm, Cohen involved himself with every facet of the company. “Every time I needed him, he was either a phone call away or I could walk right into his office,” Cieleszko says.
Cohen’s plan to rescue the business was straightforward: cut costs and boost volume. This meant outsourcing component manufacturing to Indian and Israeli firms that specialized in cheaper, faster machining processes than those used in Germany. The switch did not necessarily involve a trade-off in quality. But the cheaper processes — particularly a metalworking method known as metal-injection molding — had to be carefully dialed in to match the reliability and precision of the computerized machining used in Germany.
The manufacturing changes sometimes rankled SIG’s most important customers. A former executive who worked on SIG’s global sales team in the late 2000s says he learned about changes to the company’s P229 pistol only after U.S. Secret Service officials summoned him to Washington to complain that they had not been notified about them. (The former executive asked to remain anonymous because he fears professional retribution.) “They put two parts down on the table and asked me to tell them the difference,” he recalls. He could tell one had been machined in Germany; the other, metal-injection molded in India. “I had no explanation,” he says. In the following months, enough customers registered similar complaints that the executive arranged for two engineers to perform extra quality checks on guns destined for SIG’s premier law enforcement and military buyers. He says guns failing this additional review were rerouted for sale to civilians.
A spokesperson for the Secret Service said the agency could not comment publicly on contract specifics.
In 2009, at a trade show in Florida, SIG introduced one of its first pistols made without German components. The P238 was a 380-caliber “pocket pistol” — a small gun designed to be carried concealed. It drew little attention until six months later, when SIG acknowledged that the gun could fire without a trigger pull when its safety was toggled off. SIG recalled roughly 2,700 P238s, warning customers that a “small number” of pistols “were not manufactured to factory specifications.”
Several employees from SIG’s quality and operations divisions during this time blamed the P238 recall and other quality issues on the company’s push to ramp up production. SIG shipped roughly 100,000 more guns in 2009 than in 2008, according to manufacturing data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. That was an increase of 76 percent. In the next three years, the company increased annual production by 16 percent, then 32 percent, then 58 percent. One former operations manager who worked at SIG in 2010 says that, as the company stretched to meet production targets, he often saw manufacturing staff build guns with out-of-spec parts that had been quarantined for engineering review. He told me the parts were modified before being used, but only enough to enable the finished guns to test-fire. The changes did not necessarily bring the parts in line with their design specifications. “Priority No. 1 was the quantity of guns out the door,” he says.
More than once, employees who raised concerns about quality control say they were pushed out of the company. The sales executive who oversaw SIG’s Secret Service contract says that in March 2012, at a German gun exposition, he attempted to share his worries with Michael Lüke, one of the principals at the company. The executive told me Lüke appeared receptive. Afterward, the executive traveled to the Middle East, in part to apologize to the Jordanian crown prince because SIG had sent unassembled pistols to the country’s military. Although some of the guns had not been put together, they shipped with documentation attesting that they had been test-fired, the executive says. The crown prince waved the papers in the executive’s face and asked how someone might test-fire an unfinished gun. “With great difficulty, your highness,” the executive says he replied. The executive says he met with Cohen back in Exeter, in part to discuss the mishap. Not to worry, he remembers Cohen telling him: This will be your last day at SIG.
Lüke did not respond to requests for comment, but SIG has spoken publicly about managing quality control during this period of growth. In February 2013, Bud Fini, then SIG’s vice president of marketing, told the magazine Manufacturing Today that the company had invested roughly $70 million in new equipment from 2009 to 2013. “We have made huge investments in equipment to increase production,” Fini said, “and we have made major efforts to improve our quality.”
SIG Sauer’s growth under Cohen owes much to the company’s law enforcement and military business abroad. In 2009, SIG secured a deal to deliver roughly 56,000 pistols to the Colombian National Police. SIG lacked the capacity to make that many guns in the U.S., but it found a workaround: It bought guns from its German sister company, relabeled the shipments, and then sent the guns to Colombia. At the time, Germany forbade gun exports to Colombia, deeming it an active conflict zone. After German authorities caught on to the scheme, they arrested a traveling Cohen at the Frankfurt airport. Cohen admitted wrongdoing as part of a settlement and received a suspended 18-month prison sentence. SIG told a firearms blog at the time that its actions were “in compliance with U.S. law.”
Despite its surge, SIG was still producing fewer than half as many guns as leading brands by the end of 2011 — just over 400,000 annually, compared with, for instance, more than a million at Ruger, then the domestic leader. That year, the U.S. Army announced plans to replace its standard-issue handgun, the Beretta M9. In the gun business, military contracts can supercharge a company’s profits. Not only are they lucrative, but they also have the potential to catapult a midtier manufacturer, as SIG was at the time, into the mainstream. SIG decided to go after the Army contract with a military version of the gun that would become the P320.
The Army wanted a striker-fired gun, as opposed to the hammer-fired M9, because of the simplicity of the striker-fired design. (Striker-fired guns rely on a spring-loaded pin to fire each bullet, as opposed to hammer-fired guns, in which the trigger causes a small hammer to swing into contact with the round.) Glock had dominated the striker-fired market since the early 1980s, but its customers had long complained about one quirk: They had to pull the trigger to take their guns apart for cleaning — a design choice linked in lawsuits to accidental shootings. SIG, which had never made a striker-fired gun, wanted to challenge Glock’s supremacy with a pistol that could be more safely disassembled, according to internal company documents and deposition testimony from Tom Taylor, then SIG’s chief marketing officer, in a class-action lawsuit accusing the company of selling defective P320s to Missouri consumers. SIG has denied that accusation. The lawsuit, filed in 2022, is ongoing.
As a scaffolding for the P320, SIG’s engineers used another of the company’s pistols, the hammer-fired P250. SIG was moving to replace the P250 after a series of disappointments. The gun had failed to win the company a contract to arm ATF agents after “a significant number of malfunctions” during tests, according to a Government Accountability Office report. In 2011 the Dutch justice department had canceled an order of modified P250s after a sample of the guns failed quality tests.
The P250 is what’s called a double-action gun: Each pull of the trigger both cocks and releases the gun’s hammer, similar to the draw and release of a bow and arrow. At rest, the gun is not cocked, leaving it less likely to fire if mishandled. As with many double-action pistols, it has internal safeties but no external safety. (The most common external safety on pistols is a thumb switch that blocks the firing mechanism from engaging.)
The P320 and its military variants would be single-action. Single-action guns are precocked, to varying degrees. In striker-fired single-action guns, the trigger draws back the striker only a small amount before releasing it. This gives the guns a shorter, crisper trigger pull than their double-action counterparts. SIG designed the P320 and its military variants to be nearly 100 percent cocked at rest. This meant that an internal malfunction or slippage that caused the striker to release would likely cause the gun to fire.
Many single-action guns are equipped with external safeties to guard against this kind of errant discharge. Early documents filed in the Missouri suit indicate SIG considered adding an external safety to the P320, but the version ultimately sold to consumers did not have one. The P320 has multiple internal safeties, but lawyers and firearm experts have shown in video demonstrations that these can be disabled with minimal pressure to the trigger, and an evaluation by the FBI and the Michigan State Police found that in at least two guns, one of the safeties could fail. In a July press release responding to controversy over the report, SIG wrote that the FBI completed a second test that “resulted in zero instances of failures.”
Multiple quality and manufacturing engineers who worked at SIG from 2010 to 2014 say upper management sped the P320 through important research and testing to finish it in time for 2014’s Shooting, Hunting & Outdoor Trade Show, the small-arms industry’s biggest trade exposition. “They want to move quickly, and they figure, ‘Oh, we’ll deal with any issues that arise once we’re in production,'” says one former SIG engineer who asked to remain anonymous because he still does business with the company. “You can’t do that. As soon as the gun hits production, you have production pressures that you don’t have while in research and development. That’s why you do R&D.”
Internal documents from 2014 show that SIG quality inspectors who checked shipments for parts from outside suppliers were required to look at just three parts per shipment — an unusually low number for shipments that multiple former quality-control employees said regularly contained more than a thousand parts. The U.S. Department of Commerce recommends sampling 32 to 80 parts for similarly sized shipments of manufacturing components.
Jim Shrader, who spent more than 20 years in quality-control jobs across several industries, including a stint as a quality director at the heritage riflemaker Remington Arms Co., told me such a small sample size is dangerously inadequate. “It sounds like either somebody in charge of quality doesn’t understand what they’re doing or they’re being forced into that level of performance to cut costs,” he said.
After the P320’s 2014 release, the gun garnered high praise. The Truth About Guns, a popular gun blog, rated it four out of five stars. The website Modern Service Weapons hailed the P320 as “SIG’s biggest winner to date.” The reception was so enthusiastic that when the FBI decided to replace its agents’ weapons in 2015, it practically wrote the P320 into its request for bids, according to a number of industry trade publications.
The agency carried out a final round of testing on the P320 in June 2016, firing thousands of bullets downrange over several days. SIG had vetted the weapons before shipping them, but at the FBI’s facilities, the guns repeatedly failed to fire. Notes taken by a SIG employee at a meeting with FBI officials after the tests describe an “insurmountable number” of malfunctions. One SIG employee who witnessed the tests says the failures “got to the point where I was embarrassed to be there wearing a SIG shirt.”
“That was probably one of the most humiliating events of my entire professional career,” says the employee, who requested anonymity for fear of professional retribution.
The FBI said it could not comment on meetings held during its procurement process. It also said the agency “did not, and does not, tailor bid requests to accommodate any particular handgun or company.”
The FBI wound up spending $85 million on Glock pistols instead, but the setback for SIG was short-lived. Seven months later, the U.S. Army awarded SIG a contract for 550,000 P320s. The Army uses its own names for its guns, so these were dubbed the M17 and M18. (They vary slightly in size.) SIG offered to build the guns for $169 million — underbidding Glock, its closest competitor, by more than $100 million.
What happened next has been exhaustively reported: Some P320 owners discovered the gun could fire when dropped, a vulnerability caused by a trigger that was so heavy it could depress under its own weight. SIG Sauer had already identified and fixed the problem for the military during standard Army testing but sold the drop-firing guns to the public, according to reporting by CNN. Only after a former Navy corpsman posted a YouTube video in 2017 demonstrating the malfunction in slow motion did SIG announce a voluntary program for customers to “upgrade” their guns. (It later said the program “was not prompted by any particular claim and is entirely unrelated to any allegation that the P320 can discharge without a trigger pull, or other claims of unintentional discharges.”) The company subsequently altered the design of the P320 to ensure that guns manufactured after August 2017 would not fire when dropped.
SIG maintains that even the originally designed P320 is safe to use, and has said repeatedly that it passes all “U.S. standards for safety.” But, again, the government does not impose safety standards for firearms. The Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers’ Institute, an industry trade organization, sets voluntary standards agreed upon by its members — a group of gunmakers that includes SIG. Both SAAMI and the National Institute of Justice recommend safety tests for firearms, but neither organization audits gunmakers that claim their firearms have passed.
In many industries, manufacturers perform what’s called a Failure Modes, Effects, and Criticality Analysis, or FMECA, to assess how their products might malfunction and whether those failures pose a public safety risk. SIG’s FMECA of the P320’s military variants, the M17 and M18, was filed in the Missouri class-action suit. The Trace intervened in the suit to have that analysis unsealed. The document lays out the 34 malfunctions most likely to occur during the lifespan of a given pistol. (This section of the analysis wasn’t specific to SIG products.) Thirteen of the malfunctions, including each of the top five, read, “pistol accidentally / unintentional discharges.” The document notes that SIG included a manual safety on the M17 and M18 to “further reduce [the] probability” of unintentional shootings. Only certain specialty models of the P320 have that safety.
By 2018 work on voluntary upgrades was straining SIG’s production capacity, according to multiple former employees. SIG devoted one of its two buildings in Exeter to processing returns. A former business manager who worked at another SIG factory, in Newington, New Hampshire, during this time told me the drop-fire controversy and the upgrade program had a “dramatic negative effect on sales.” ATF data shows a considerable sales slowdown during this time, though it coincided with an industrywide recession after President Donald Trump’s 2016 election eased fears of tighter gun control.
As sales dwindled, senior management pressured employees to hit ambitious targets for nonmilitary production, former employees say. Firings were so frequent at SIG that employees joked that HR stood for “human remains.”
SIG’s quality team in particular felt the pressure. Several former quality employees who worked in Exeter and Newington from 2016 to 2018 told me that executives and senior management routinely overrode their concerns about faulty or substandard components. They said problems touched many of the parts that controlled how the P320 fired. Springs, which SIG purchased from an American supplier, often arrived in jumbled heaps that needed to be carefully untangled, risking damage to their tension. Trigger bars from India came warped. Slides, barrels, and frames machined in-house failed to meet design specifications. Most of these parts SIG either trashed or reworked, but some were used as is, despite worries from the quality team, employees directly involved in these decisions say. Jeffrey Plona, a supplier quality engineer who worked at SIG in 2018, says that, in most manufacturing settings, quality staff would have authority to determine whether irregular parts should be used. “But I did not have the final say at SIG,” he says.
James Miller, who oversaw firearm assembly in SIG’s Newington factory from 2014 to 2018, told me that he felt confident in the company’s approach to handling faulty parts and that he never felt pressured by upper management to skimp on quality to meet production targets. “We had pretty robust processes when I was there for handling defective material,” he says. “I wouldn’t have let that happen.” Miller added that he could not speak to the handling of parts SIG made itself, which he did not oversee.
Several quality employees I interviewed maintained that, while they never saw the company ship firearms that failed final testing, guns sold to consumers did frequently contain out-of-spec components, which could cause them to function unpredictably. “I’ve been in manufacturing in a quality role for more than 30 years, and I’ve worked in different types of shops,” says one former quality supervisor from SIG’s Exeter factory. “I’ve never seen anything as egregious as it was at SIG.”
By the end of 2018, repeated battles at SIG Sauer over how to handle defective or substandard parts had so rankled upper management that senior quality employees worried they would be fired. More than once, Cohen invited quality staff into his office and joked that he should decapitate them with a sword mounted above his desk, employees with knowledge of the incidents told me. Three say they witnessed Cohen admonish subordinates by lightly slapping them on the back of the head during meetings, behavior the witnesses considered demeaning and unprofessional.
From 2018 to 2020, SIG cut much of the leadership from its roughly 300-person quality team, letting go four quality managers as well as a quality director and a long-tenured head of product quality, Mike DeLisle. DeLisle had worked at SIG since 2011. He declined to comment for this story, but several of his subordinates told me his departure in 2018 left them reporting indefinitely to a manufacturing manager. Haley Baril, who worked as a junior supplier quality engineer under DeLisle, says she found it increasingly difficult to raise concerns about problems with incoming parts until one day, in 2020, she was called into a meeting with human resources and told she was “no longer qualified” for her position. She could either take a demotion or leave the company. She left.
As part of a product liability lawsuit brought by an injured sheriff’s detective in Maine in 2023, SIG recently acknowledged that it was notified of 350 unintentional P320 shootings from 2016 to 2021 — a period during which the company doubled its pistol production. I reported on a lot of these shootings, many of which occurred with SIG’s upgraded P320s, in my 2023 investigation with The Trace and The Washington Post. SIG told me during my reporting that the frequency of shootings did not indicate a problem with its gun. “Independent investigations,” a company spokesperson wrote, “demonstrate evidence of improper or unsafe handling and confirm that these incidents could have been prevented if fundamental rules of firearms safety were followed.” But many former employees have told me that they suspect manufacturing quality as the culprit. Brian Hall, a quality technician at SIG from 2017 to 2020, says that, after working at the company, he wouldn’t buy a SIG firearm. “I would not feel comfortable carrying one of those guns every day,” he told me.
In 2020, the original SIG, the German company, closed. There’s now only one SIG Sauer. By 2022 the company produced the most pistols of any American gunmaker, 1.5 times its nearest competition, Sturm, Ruger & Co. In the years since, both the number of unintentional shootings involving P320s and the number of concerned law enforcement agencies have grown. A Pennsylvania man died in his home last year after his P320 allegedly fired while at least partially seated in its holster, according to a lawsuit filed by his wife. In October a federal judge issued an order saying officers of the Chicago Police Department — the second largest in the country — should stop carrying the P320 because of their union’s concerns about unintentional shootings.
In June 2024 a jury in federal court in Georgia returned a $2.35 million verdict against SIG, finding the P320’s design was defective. The plaintiff claimed his holstered gun fired when he did not pull the trigger, causing a bullet to pierce his thigh and blow out above his kneecap. SIG issued a statement afterward, saying it “strongly disagrees” with the verdict while blaming the shooting on the plaintiff’s “negligent handling.” The company has appealed.
In November 2024, a jury in state court in Pennsylvania returned an $11 million verdict against SIG in another case where the plaintiff, a U.S. Army veteran, said his holstered P320 discharged without his pulling the trigger. As with the Georgia victim, the bullet tore through the veteran’s thigh and exited above his knee. SIG said afterward in a statement, “We strongly disagree with the verdict,” and called the P320 “among the most tested, proven and successful handguns in recent history.” A judge later vacated $10 million of the damages while allowing the jury’s defective-design finding to stand.
In April, five months after the Pennsylvania trial, SIG Sauer dispatched its then-vice president of government affairs, Bobby Cox, to the New Hampshire State House in Concord. Because plaintiffs generally must file product liability lawsuits in either the state where they were injured or the state where the defendant is headquartered, SIG faced a tidal wave of litigation in New Hampshire. Seventy-six alleged victims from around the country had banded together with a single law firm to coordinate their legal efforts there.
Appearing before the state Senate Judiciary Committee, Cox testified in support of an amendment to the state’s product liability laws that would grant gunmakers immunity from suits “based on the presence or absence of” certain external safety features. The measure was tailored to nullify the legal argument used successfully by the plaintiffs in Georgia and Pennsylvania — and now being used in federal court in New Hampshire — that the P320’s safetyless, precocked design is defective. Cox told the senators that the company was “just looking for some help” and assured them the victims’ claims had no merit. “If this gun was defective,” he said at one point, “we would know it.” Cox did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
SIG is the second-most profitable private company in New Hampshire, with more than $600 million in annual revenue and more than 3,000 employees. Republicans control the state’s Legislature and governorship. The Senate approved the amendment on May 8 after less than an hour of deliberation. To defeat the bill in the House, 41 legislators would have to break with their party — a virtual impossibility.
The morning of the vote, Representative David Meuse, a Democrat from Portsmouth, took the rostrum to deliver a five-minute speech. “This bill really doesn’t have anything to do with gun rights,” he said. “It has everything to do with a powerful company that may be in denial about the safety of a key product that wants to stifle future lawsuits by demanding a level of exemption from our product liability laws that we have never granted to any other company in this state.”
His argument failed to move his colleagues. The bill passed 200-161. Only one Republican, Army veteran Brian Taylor from Carroll County, voted against it. Governor Kelly Ayotte signed the bill into law on May 23. Three weeks later, SIG contributed $15,000 to her political committee, the maximum companies are allowed to give. It was the third time SIG had given money to Ayotte, and its largest contribution to her to date, according to New Hampshire campaign finance data. Ayotte did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
After the votes, I spoke with Robert Zimmerman, the Philadelphia personal injury attorney who has represented most of the P320 plaintiffs, including nearly all of those suing in New Hampshire. He sounded bewildered. “I’ve never seen this before — a company that can so easily bend the will of the legislature,” he said.
Anticipating the amendment’s passage, Zimmerman had filed one lawsuit in state court a few days earlier, from a New Hampshire man named Christian Weatherbee. Weatherbee alleges that, in May 2023, his holstered P320 fired a round through his kneecap and into his toe while he walked to the laundry. SIG has denied that a defect in the gun is responsible for Weatherbee’s injury and moved to dismiss the case. Victims injured in other states can file lawsuits in those states. But Weatherbee had no other venue. For New Hampshire residents, the courthouse doors are now closed. Zimmerman has invoked an obscure Pennsylvania law to file suits there on behalf of nearly three dozen additional out-of-state clients, but it’s unclear whether a judge will allow those cases to move forward.
SIG has since turned its attention elsewhere. According to campaign-finance filings, the company has donated at least $315,000 to Florida state legislators since December. More than $250,000 of that arrived in the 24 hours before the start of the state’s 2026 legislative session, during which the Legislature will consider an immunity bill modeled after the one in New Hampshire. Lobbying records show SIG recently hired one of the largest lobbying firms in the state.
