The Document Sig Sauer Doesn’t Want You to See About the P320

This story begins with research I started a few days ago after reading about the recent, tragic incident involving a United States Air Force airman who was killed while on duty, reportedly while unholstering his Air Force-issued Sig Sauer M18. This firearm is, for all intents and purposes, identical to the consumer P320 model handgun. That incident led me to explore recent litigation against Sig Sauer through CourtListener. I discovered approximately 20–30 federal court cases involving the P320 allegedly discharging unintentionally—either spontaneously or when dropped. Technically, these are two distinct but related issues.

Before long, I came across the case of Sig Sauer v. Bagnell, in which Sig Sauer is currently suing one of the primary plaintiff attorneys, Jeffrey Bagnell, for trademark infringement under the Lanham Act. Bagnell is actively involved in litigation against Sig Sauer regarding the P320.

While reviewing the docket, I stumbled across several recent motions filed by Bagnell to submit documents into the record, including one that Sig Sauer objected to—this caught my attention. The document, titled “MHS Pistol Failure Modes, Effects, and Critical Analysis (FMECA)”, was heavily redacted. However, certain sections, such as two columns labeled “Risk Assessment Matrix Level,” remained visible. These included rows noting risks categorized as “High,” “Medium,” and “Serious.” I searched for an unredacted version of the document but was unsuccessful. The redacted version is available on CourtListener here.

After Bagnell submitted the document under seal (with a redacted version on the public record), Sig Sauer filed an opposition. They argued that the defendant had violated “a Protective Order issued by another federal court,” and further stated that “no good cause exists to receive this as an exhibit in connection with the permanent injunction trial that ended more than a year ago,” which involved “specific false depictions of internal parts and dimensions in the Animation created by Defendants” in the Lanham Act case. Additionally, Sig Sauer noted that the document had been produced “in connection with a completely different case,” and that defendants had explicitly designated it as “Confidential” under that court’s protective order.

The situation became even more intriguing after I read an affidavit filed by Bagnell in a separate lawsuit—this one involving claims of libel and violations of the Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act (CUPTA)—in which Bagnell himself is the plaintiff.

I was curious to understand what made this document so sensitive. Upon closer inspection, I realized that the redacted text hadn’t been removed—only obscured by a black image layer placed over the spreadsheet. Using Adobe Acrobat, this layer could be easily removed. I’ll leave it to the reader to draw their own conclusions, but one particularly damning piece of information is that Sig Sauer appears to have acknowledged as early as February 1, 2017, that the P320 was not drop-safe. However, they didn’t announce the Voluntary Upgrade Program until August 8, 2017—just days after a lawsuit was filed claiming that an officer had been shot when his P320 discharged after being dropped.

For reference, here is the unobscured version of the internal Sig Sauer “Highly Confidential” MHS program FMECA document:

I quickly published the document on my Instagram and Facebook accounts, where it received some public attention. I anticipated three possible outcomes:

1. Sig Sauer wouldn’t notice the document had been made public.
2. Sig Sauer would notice but take no action to avoid drawing more attention to the document (especially given my relatively small Instagram following).
3. Sig Sauer would notice and pursue aggressive legal action to scrub the document from any public court records.

As of yesterday, it appears Sig Sauer chose option #3. This is evidenced by the following motions and affidavits:

In the most recent filing, submitted in a separate case currently in trial over an alleged uncommanded discharge of the P320, Sig Sauer is seeking to seal both the FMECA document and any testimony related to it. They argue:

The engineering details and decisions regarding how to minimize or eliminate potential causes of failure give Sig Sauer a competitive advantage over its competition and trade secrets that would be highly prejudicial to Sig Sauer if exposed to the public.

Additionally, as part of their motion, Sig Sauer included correspondence with the U.S. Army, which expressed the following position:

The Army position would be to oppose the distribution to the public of the
FMECA document as it potentially reveals critical information about the
handgun (design, reliability, performance, etc.).

I expect further motions in the days to come. It promises to be an interesting few weeks for the various ongoing lawsuits involving Sig Sauer. Please share this post and follow me on Instagram and Facebook for updates.