SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the next-time-it-will-be-a-light-sabre dept.
The U.S. Army will likely replace its standard-issue sidearm with a Sig Sauer P320 pistol (with undisclosed modifications):
After a long and much-criticized search, the US Army has chosen Sig Sauer to produce its next generation of handgun, eventually replacing the current standard issue sidearm, the Beretta M9 pistol. "Following a thorough operational test, fielding of the modular handgun is expected to begin in 2017," the Army said in a statement announcing the decision Thursday.
The M9's three decades of service since 1985 has occasionally made it the subject of derision among members of the armed forces. "The joke that we had in the military was that sometimes the most effective use of an M9 is to simply throw it at your adversary," Sen. Joni Ernst, a former officer in the Iowa Army National Guard, said last week during the confirmation hearings for Ret. Marine Gen. James Mattis to be secretary of defense. [...] "The Army's effort to buy a new handgun has already taken 10 years and produced nothing but a more than 350-page requirements document micromanaging extremely small unimportant details," Senate Armed Services committee chairman John McCain wrote in a 2015 report on the program's problems.
The Army awarded Sig Sauer Inc. with a $580,217,000 contract. Also at Washington Post, Popular Mechanics, and RT.
More about the Modular Handgun System.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday January 24 2017, @07:00PM
I'm pretty sure a trigger safety is not present: they show the actual gun in the photos in the article, and it's pretty obvious there is no trigger safety there. As for them not being effective, Glock disagrees with you, and they're one of the largest suppliers to police in the world. And a bunch of competitive guns have them too; between the lot of them, that's probably almost all police in the industrialized nations. Relying on the user to do something every time to prevent an accident isn't as effective as just building a passive device into the product; this is pretty basic product engineering. The military's thinking is obsolete.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Tuesday January 24 2017, @09:17PM
I stand by the trigger safety not being all that effective. It will not prevent most ADs from a finger or object of similar size crossing across the trigger and pulling back. Some from object snags yes, but most are from improperly keeping a finger on the trigger when holstering/unholstering and it will not effectively prevent those. These have happened and no passive safety can prevent that. Springfield puts a trigger and backstrap safety on some of their models and people have managed to discharge those by accident as well.
Just because they are popular does not mean they are popular due to that particular feature. Most services like them due to their reliability and lighter weight compared to traditional steel and aluminum frame pistols. There is a reason that Beretta, Sig, and S&W started making polymer frame handguns. It also doesn't hurt that Glock is also aggressive in selling to police departments across the US.