SIG Sauer faces huge controversy after the Minnesota CPB shooting may have been due to an accidental discharge of Alex Pretti's SIG P320.

 

Alex Pretti's SIG P320. New York Post/Police handout. 

SIG Sauer faces a major controversy after the Minnesota CPB shooting may have been due to an accidental discharge of Alex Pretti's SIG P320. New York Post. Pretti was engaged with a fight with ICE and was shot while being detained, raising questions on why it happened after he was disarmed. However, the weapon he was carrying, the SIG P320 has a long history of accidental discharges (AD), when a gun fires with no input from a human. Frame by frame analysis of videos of the shooting suggest that the P320 was the first shot fired, which lead to the other officers opening fire on Pretti. SIG Sauer has defended the P320 despite losing several lawsuits for AD's, which have let people injured or even killed. Many law enforcement agencies have dropped or moved away from the SIG P320, including ICE. 

My Comment:

I'm not going to post the videos of the Alex Pretti shooting but I have seen them enough times to give a good summary. Pretti and a woman were attempting to block traffic (a violation of 18 USC 111). The officers pushed her away and the woman started fighting with the police, drawing Pretti into the fight. Pretti gets maced and inexplicably starts beating on the woman. Police take him down and a CPB officer disarms him. As he is walking away he says "Gun!" and shortly after that it appears that the gun goes off. It did not look like the officer's finger was on the trigger, but there is a puff of smoke and the slide is racked back as if it was just shot and wasn't able to cycle properly. The other offices then shot Pretti and he dies. 

A lot of nonsense has been said about this case, but that scenario appears to be the fact of this case. It is still possible that this was a negligent discharge, a ND, but it does not look like the officer had his hand on the trigger of the gun. Either way, for the police, they had a guy that was fighting them who was armed, a fellow officer yelling "GUN!" and then a shot rings out. They assumed that the shot had come from Pretti, and they were kind of right, it was his gun that went off. 

Though charges were never likely in this case, they are pretty much impossible now unless some new kind of evidence comes out, like an officer confession or something similarly improbable. Given the scenario as it appears, even if the first shot was a ND, a reasonable officer would assume they were under attack from Pretti and would act to end the threat. Indeed, under this scenario, it's a textbook case of self defense. And the officer that disarmed Pretti? How are you going to prove if this is a ND or AD? With SIG Sauer's pistol having a history of just going off, no prosecutor would place charges given how the officer has a built in defense. 

I have very little sympathy for Pretti, he was a domestic terrorist interfering with a police officer and the fact that he started beating up a woman who was on his own side, even despite any confusion he had after being maced, sapped any sympathy I had for him. But his death was an unfortunate one, not so much because he died, but because he's being painted as a martyr when what really happened was just incredibly bad luck. 

What I do support is if his family were to sue SIG Sauer. This is something that the left and right will probably agree on. If it turns out that there is strong evidence that this was an AD, then not only is Pretti's blood on their hands, anything that happens in Minneapolis in response to his death is on them too. Anti-gun people will be happy to hurt a gun company and pro-gun people will be happy that they don't have to worry about getting AD'd to death by someone who hasn't read up on how bad the P320 is. 

I also have little doubt that the problems with the SIG P320 are real. I know some of the cases that were filed against them were indeed actually ND's, but I think there is enough of a pattern that there is something going on. At this point they need to recall the gun and give people their money back. The P320 is unsafe and more people could get hurt and killed if that doesn't happen. 

As for the greater politics of this incident, I have to say that I am sick to death of them. The facts of this case won't matter and neither will the laws concerning interfering with federal police or self defense/use of force laws. The left just wants chaos because they know the feds sniffing around Minnesota will further expose their immigration/fraud/election manipulation pipeline. They have whipped their base up with lies about ICE being Nazis and have activated their antifa cells to cause chaos. The facts of this case won't matter to them at all as the facts aren't their goal. 

As for SIG Sauer, this is a huge disaster for them. This is hugely bad press for them and the company might not survive it. The company already has a very bad press due to the P320 AD problem and it wouldn't be the first time an arms company was destroyed by a similar defective problem. Just ask Remington what happened with the R-700...