Gun maker Sig Sauer is being sued by the state of New Jersey. State lawyers opened a $2.5 million dollar lawsuit against Sig Sauer. Their suit claims that the Newington, New Hampshire-based gun maker sold its State Police force defective pistols. And not only that, the suit claims that Sig failed to fix the defects it knew about.
The suit charges Sig Sauer with breach of contract, breach of warranty, and breach of good faith. In 2014, the company sold the state 3,000 handguns that the state claims didn’t work properly. It goes on to say that even after Sig Sauer was informed of the defective pistols, the company failed to come up with a plan to fix the defects over a 16-month period.
Sig Sauer beat out other contenders to provide the New Jersey State Troopers with their P229 Legacy pistols. The guns were apparently tested before delivery, but after delivery they did not perform. The troopers experienced FTE, or failure to extract, meaning that the spent shell casing did not exit from the barrel upon firing, causing the handgun to jam.
An FTE renders the gun unfit for police use, says the suit (and I have to agree with this) because the trooper who can’t fire more than one round due to a gun jam is in a life-threatening situation. So far, Sig Sauer officials have not responded to the suit, which was lodged in mid-May by N.J. Attorney General Christopher Porrino’s office.
Sig’s response that is mentioned says that they made “numerous” attempts to fix the problem and placed blame on the FTE defect first on an extractor pin and then on a factory mold defect and then on an improper coating of the barrel. After these explanations, the New Jersey police stopped communicating with Sig Sauer about the defects. They then returned all of the guns in February 2016. They rebid the contract and awarded it to Glock at that time.
The suit is seeking to have Sig Sauer repay the state of New Jersey the $1.7 million dollar cost of the contract, including $857,000 that the state spent on custom holsters plus all ammunition used in testing and the taxpayer time spent dealing with the defect issue.
Last January, Sig Sauer was chosen by the U.S. Army in a 10-year, $580 million contract to supply the Army with handguns to replace an M9 service pistol made by Beretta USA. The gun the Army’s selected is the P320 handgun. Let’s hope the Army doesn’t have these same problems.
Image of the Sig Sauer P229 Legion Compact handgun from sigsauer.com
