New Jersey sues Sig Sauer over "malfunctioning" P229's

NJ Staties

It has been confirmed that the NJ State Police were using steel case ammo for for practice purposes, only.

Apparently this is what Sig is relying upon as the defense of this matter.

I would like to know if Sig had a caveat in their contract with the State Police that steel ammo would not consistently function in this specific pistol.

Bottom line will be the contract verbiage especially if there is a statement regarding ammunition.
 
New Jersey sues Sig Sauer over "malfunctioning" P229's

ammo.crafter said:
It has been confirmed that the NJ State Police were using steel case ammo for for practice purposes, only.
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Confirmed by who?

People I've talked to said they use Speer Lawman for training/practice... Gold Dot for duty. Both 124 grain.

NJAG guidelines state that training ammo must be similar to duty ammo.
 
If Sig reps were on hand to witness some of the failures, I'd think they would have a defense lined up. The fact that we know no more than when we started indicates Sig probably has no defense. When Beretta had its problem with slides flying off the frames with military models, it took a long time to get at the truth. Instead of publishing the reason, Beretta actually muddied the waters and ticked a lot of people off in the process.

If you have a Sig P229 of any stripe and it works for you, great. That they replaced the Elite with the Legacy and the problem worsened doesn't bode well for the situation at all.
 
Having lived across the river in PA practically all of my life, I cringe when I think about the "state" of New Jersey and anything to do with firearms. You can't get a NJ license to carry unless your occupation requires carrying a firearm. There are very few indoor pistol ranges there, extremely high liability insurance costs threaten the few that still do exist. Any pistolsmith or armorer with just a half-decent reputation can get a 9mm P229 to run reliably, any of us who own & know these guns understands this to be a fact. Nowhere in the published articles about this suit is there a mention of how well the guns were maintained, or is there a mention of the efforts made by NJSP armorers and gunsmiths to get the defective guns to run reliably.

I used to shoot at PA indoor range with a NJ state policeman who openly admitted that NJ is the wrong state to live in if you seriously value your 2A rights. This is just another example of an uber-liberal, gun-negative political entity trying to get publicity by filing suit against a major gun manufacturer, pure & simple.
 
NJ being a poor place for gun rights may be true, but does it really relate to the performance of the pistols in the article?
 
Sig is all over the place; their legacy extractor worked for years, the new design clearly not so much or its having "issues". Not cool and not what one expects from a top tier company. Can the design work? I am sure others use a very similar style so it should not be rocket science yet it seems to elude solving otherwise they would have solved it for NJSP.


Burned myself by a 226 with the new extractor. I dumped it. From now on with sig I will give it a few years before I buy and new and improved designs of theirs. Also not a fan of the newer sig 226 / 229 mags but these are not why the guns are throwing fte's.
 
Here is an article on three different DHS agencies successfully using the P229 in at least two different caliber configurations;

http://www.tactical-life.com/milita...sauer-p229/#sig-sauer-p229-federal-agencies-2

Seems to me that when the NJSP started experiencing these malfunctions it would have been worthwhile for the officials of the NJSP to investigate what these DHS agencies were doing perhaps differently to armor and maintain their pistols, to insure the service reliability of the DHS-issued P229's. This could have been some valuable information that could have possibly alleviated these problems!
 
Seems to me that when the NJSP started experiencing these malfunctions it would have been worthwhile for the officials of the NJSP to investigate what these DHS agencies were doing perhaps differently to armor and maintain their pistols, to insure the service reliability of the DHS-issued P229's. This could have been some valuable information that could have possibly alleviated these problems!
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Uh, they contacted the manufacturer who should have known how to alleviate the problem. I suspect (speculate) that it is not a design issue but was a manufacturing issue of some type that Sig either couldn't diagnose or didn't know how to fix properly, at least on a large scale.
 
Uh, they contacted the manufacturer who should have known how to alleviate the problem.
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Yea usually when an agency adopts a service pistol from a manufacturer there is some notion that if widespread issues are encountered, as seems to be the claim, that the manufacturer will be the one to address those issues. Whether this is explicitly defined in a contract I'm not sure, but most LEOs I've interacted with have intimated some relationship between the manufacturer and department beyond a barebones, "Here we sold these to you, good luck!" Heck even if I bought a pistol from SIG as a private citizen and started having issues I'd contact SIG. I really don't see the onus as being on the NJSP to fix this themselves.
 
^ lol, true assuming the ejector rod is working properly. But I'm not choosing a J-frame as a duty weapon over a P229. Even if I was looking at a K or L frame for that matter I'm still choosing the P229. There are reliable semiautomatics out there, and heck SIG has made and makes plenty of them.

There's always this tendency in reading such a story for people to say, "Well my pistols from company X have always worked", or , "This agency has been using pistol Y for years with no major issues". That's great and I get that it goes toward establishing a track record on the whole, but it really doesn't say anything about a particular batch of pistols. Every company can and does make a lemon. Assuming it was a manufacturing defect it certainly is plausible that a whole batch of pistols might have issues. Is that the case here? I don't know. But the rare event, even while rare, can still happen.
 
Maybe not a duty weapon, but for my personnel every day life, a J frame is good. Maybe a SA when going on a coke buy, with a J frame as back up.
 
Wonder how many of those DHS guns are the old vs. new design extractor. Also are they tested / returned / swapped out if issues? If so that rate would be interesting to know if one could extract it from anyone.

I also wonder if going to tennifer type barrel treatments had any role; love the treatment over the older barrels however there could be a subtle change here that threw things off.

I don't want to come off as anti improvement however I have seen sig P220's as old as the late 70's and 226's from the early 90's with easy 5 digit round counts and no issues. So what precisely are we improving on? Just curious and sig seems to release a million products... I realize many are variations on a theme however the devil is in the details here clearly so maybe best to slow the roll a little.
 
I trust my 226 (MK25) with my life, never had any issues and it is an awesome gun. But what if a batch has problems. Not one lemon but a box of lemons? The suggestion that the ammo is the reason is, indeed, a suggestion. I will follow this case because I am curious about the outcome.
 
Fwiw, my police academy had about 15 recruits going to Newark, which carries the 229 on duty. From what I remember, the sigs had the most problems out of any of the guns. Most of what I saw were sigs and glocks, with a couple s&w M&Ps and a couple px4 storms. My dept carries the .40 px4.
 
Well, as usual, I'm late to the party...and after waiting 35minutes (and making coffee) for the linked article to load, and still waiting, I'm giving up on it.

Would someone please state the facts about the matter? What did, or didn't happen, what gives NJ grounds to sue??

(ok to state the allegations, as well, as long as you differentiate them from the facts. ;))
 
This doesn't surprise me one bit.

I had one SIG P229 from 2010 commit suicide on me when the slide began eating the frame because it was out of spec. SIG failed to make it right by me because I had purchased it used.

Granted, I took a year off SIG Sauer and purchased the same model Elite Dark P229 but 2 years newer and it's been fine. I also got myself a SIG M11-A1, which has also been great. I have a total of 11,000 through my old P226 (which I sold) and 20,000+ with Classic SIG P-Series in general over the course of 10+ years. So, I went back to them for the sole purpose of being proficient with them. But that bad taste never really left, it's forgiven but not forgotten.

Disenchantment, if you will.

So I carry either my "M11" or Glock 19.
 
Would someone please state the facts about the matter? What did, or didn't happen, what gives NJ grounds to sue??
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Rather than refer to the original article which referred to a different article, how about a summary of the actual lawsuit filed here: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3723773-New-Jersey-State-Police-Sig-Sauer-Complaint.html

According to the complaint, NJSP tested 19 weapons before settling on the Sig 229 Legacy. They ordered 3,000 pistols for $1.844,000. The actual cash outlay was $1,657,000 after Sig purchased the old guns for scrap value through a gun shop. Sig also purchased from another vendor Safariland holsters for $856,680.

NJSP received and then put the Sigs into service in the Summer of 2014. The complaint describes the initial problem:

Many of the P229s sporadically exhibited a
failure to extract. That is, the weapons failed to eject the spent
shell casing from the barrel after being fired, causing the next
cartridge to become jammed behind the casing, and resulting in an
inability to continue firing the weapon (FTE).
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Sig suspected "extractor pins" and replacing them in some pistols. Sig then suggested it might be a "factory mold" (no further explanation given) but then decided that a "misapplication of the coating on the barrels was the cause." Sig shipped new barrels but the same problems persisted.

A Sig rep visited the first of two 2015 officer qualifications and "attributed the FTE malfunctions to the extractor springs" and agreed to ship 250 replacement springs. By the second qualification round, the problem persisted and Sig agreed to ship out springs "from a different model weapon."

Now here comes a strange paragraph (#13) because of the allegation of switched guns (had they not noticed this before?:
At the end of October 2015, NJSP focused on the issue
that the guns they had received, the P229 Enhanced Elite handguns,
were different from the weapons the State Police had initially tested, the P229 Legacy. Though the weapons were the essentially the same P229 model, the parts in the P229 Enhanced Elite, including the extractor system, differed from those in the P229 Legacy. NJSP suspected that the different parts might account for the FTE malfunction, because the Legacy did not exhibit FTE malfunctions when it was tested. . . .
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Sig agreed to replace the Elite models with the Legacy models but did not make the agreed upon deadline ( only 364 of the 750 Legacies provided).

Sig said they would produce only half the 1,000 Legacies that they had agreed to by January 2016. At an academy training session that month, with a Sig rep present, the Sig Legacies "exhibited FTE malfunctions, both when NJSP practice ammunition and when NJSP duty ammunition were used." (my emphasis).

At the end of the month the parties randomly selected 25 of the recent Legacies for testing and:
. . . Sig Sauer representatives immediately ?red-lined" five of the twenty-five P229 Legacies because they were so egregiously noncompliant with Sig Sauer's specifications that they could no longer be used. Five more P229 Legacies were added from the NJSP inventory to the pool to be tested. After the inspection as completed, NJSP members randomly selected five weapons to fire. During the first session using qualification ammunition, three out of the five weapons exhibited numerous FTE malfunctions. All five tested weapons were then serviced by the Sig Sauer gunsmiths. They were subsequently tested again using the State Police duty ammunition. Once again, FTE malfunctions occurred with one of the handguns. The State Police canceled the remainder of the testing session.

20. On January 27, 2016, Sig Sauer advised NJSP that it had completed further testing and. determined that the barrel was causing the P229 Legacy FTE malfunctions.
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By this time, NJ had enough and selected the Gen 4 Glock 19 which also required new holsters. It is asking for the net cash it laid out for the guns ($1.6 million) plus the 856-thousand dollars for holsters plus some other costs.

Now all of the above is a summary of the complaint, with some portions of it quoted. It is not my opinion and it does not tell Sig's side of the story.
 
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