Lawsuits against Sig Sauer’s P320 claim the gun fires without a trigger pull, causing injury and even death during normal use.
HIGH POINT, N.C. — The same gun used by more than 1,500 troopers with the North Carolina State Highway Patrol is facing criticism for unintentionally firing without anyone pulling the trigger. A growing number of law enforcement officers and others have sued Sig Sauer over the manufacturer’s P320.
NC officer says holstered gun “unexpectedly discharged”
Longtime High Point Police Department officer Vincent Panico is one of three in North Carolina who are part of a new mass legal action against the company.
“This is a man with decades of weapons experience. He respects guns and he treats them safely and with respect,” the former combat marine’s attorney Robert Zimmerman told WCNC Charlotte. “The gun that was supposed to protect him and protect the community is what injured him when his hand wasn’t even on it.”
Panico’s lawsuit says the officer’s “holstered P320 suddenly and unexpectedly discharged” on April 24, 2023. The officer, who retired in March 2025, suffered “substantial injury” after the bullet struck him in his right thigh, the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit accuses Sig Sauer of “negligence, carelessness, recklessness …” and a “defective design.”
“These guns have no external safeties on the vast majority,” Zimmerman said. “This is a striker fired gun. It is pre-cocked, it is preloaded and it only takes very slight trigger movement for the gun to actuate and fire.”
Another state’s training academy recently banned P320
Zimmerman and his colleagues have spent years collecting videos from across the country that document near misses and actual injuries. They represent more than 100 people in all, most of them law enforcement officers. One of their clients is a Pennsylvania widow who says the P320 killed her husband.
“Our clients are doing normal, everyday activities,” Zimmerman said. “They have guns appropriately in a holster and without their hands touching the guns, without their hands touching the holster, their guns are firing.”
WCNC Charlotte’s content partner in Seattle, KING 5, discovered a Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission’s investigation found enough concern to permanently ban the common service weapon at its academy.
“We cannot afford to have a recruit get hurt,” WSCJTC Executive Director Monica Alexander said. “Everybody says as long as you keep your finger off the trigger, you’re safe and then that doesn’t come true. That is scary.”
Attorney Jeff Bagnell, meanwhile, said the P320 suffers from design and manufacturing flaws and estimates there have been 200 known incidents of uncommanded discharges, many involving highly-trained law enforcement officers. He’s filed about two dozen lawsuits against Sig Sauer, some of which resulted in confidential settlements, Bagnell said.
“I’ve been calling for this gun to be recalled for at least eight years now,” he said.
Sig Sauer: “It cannot happen.”
A version of the P320 is the official handgun of all branches of the United States military. It’s a common duty weapon issued by police departments nationwide, and tens of thousands of civilians own the gun.
Sig Sauer did not respond to WCNC Charlotte’s request for an interview, but the company has fiercely defended the P320.
In a November meeting in Washington, the company offered alternative explanations for why P320s fired in some instances and said lab tests by the company and the U.S. Army have never resulted in an unintended discharge.
“It cannot happen,” Sig Sauer representative Louis Graziano, a former New York City police officer, said during the conference call. “That sequence of components in there and the way that they are engineered does not allow this gun to just fire on its own.”
Sig Sauer reiterated that message on its website in March.
“The P320 CANNOT, under any circumstances, discharge without a trigger pull – that is a fact. The allegations against the P320 are nothing more than individuals seeking to profit or avoid personal responsibility…,” the company’s post said, in part. “In all cases, these individuals have an ulterior motive behind their baseless allegations that the P320 can fire without a trigger pull; they have no evidence, no data and no empirical testing to support any of their claims. They instead choose to misrepresent clear, negligent discharges as a ‘design problem.'”
NC State Highway Patrol not considering change
Zimmerman said money is not the driver, but rather safety.
“We have been asking for five years for something very simple: for Sig Sauer to recall this weapon and make it safe,” he told WCNC Charlotte. “(Our clients) don’t want officers, they don’t want other civilians to be at risk with this gun. The main priority for these individuals is making sure their fellow law enforcement officers are safe and the public is safe, because this is a problem that can be fixed.”
In response to WCNC Charlotte’s questions, the North Carolina State Highway Patrol indicated the agency doesn’t see a problem with the common service weapon.
“We do utilize the Sig Sauer P320 as our current duty weapon as it is issued to the over 1,500 sworn members of the State Highway Patrol…,” 1st Sgt. Christopher D. Knox said. “As an agency, we are continuously in review of our training practices, internal policies and issued equipment to ensure that we are providing the very best in law enforcement services to our state. With that being said, over the course of approximately 8 years of using the first and second generations of this firearm, we have experienced zero spontaneous discharges and are not currently looking to move away from its deployment.”
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