Jake Fogelman at The Reload is reporting that a Kentucky man who claims his holstered pistol fired on its own and wounded him can proceed with his lawsuit against firearm manufacturer Sig Sauer, a federal appeals court has ruled.
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday in Davis v. Sig Sauer that a lower court erred in dismissing Timothy Davis’s product liability claims against Sig Sauer. The ruling, first reported by The Reload, found that the district court wrongly barred Davis from using expert witnesses to support his claim that the P320 handgun was defectively designed due to its lack of external safety mechanisms.
“Although the district court correctly excluded Davis’s experts from testifying about what exactly caused Davis’s P320 to fire inadvertently, the experts’ opinions were otherwise admissible to prove other elements of Davis’s claims—specifically that the P320 is defectively designed and that reasonable alternative designs exist,” Judge Karen Nelson Moore wrote in the majority opinion.
Davis’s lawsuit stems from a January 2021 incident in which he was shot in the leg while getting out of his truck. He claims the gun discharged while fully holstered, without him pulling the trigger. However, law enforcement responding to the scene reported that Davis told officers he was attempting to holster the weapon when it discharged, a key discrepancy in the case.
Davis sued Sig Sauer in 2022, arguing that the P320’s lack of external safety features, such as a thumb or grip safety, made it unreasonably dangerous. His legal team enlisted a gunsmith and a risk-analysis expert who contended that the firearm’s design increased the likelihood of unintended discharges. The district court excluded their testimony as speculative and dismissed the case.
The appellate court reversed that decision, allowing the experts to testify on design flaws and alternative safety mechanisms. However, Judge Amul Thapar dissented, arguing that Davis’s failure to provide expert testimony on causation should have been fatal to his claim.
“In a complex product defect case, Kentucky requires a plaintiff to present expert testimony showing both that there’s a defect and the defect caused his injury,” Thapar wrote. “But Davis didn’t present expert testimony on causation. Thus, his product defect claim should fail.”
Thapar also emphasized that Davis knowingly purchased and carried a version of the P320 without a manual safety, a common feature of modern defensive firearms.
“That’s a feature, not a bug,” he noted, pointing out that Sig Sauer offers models with external safeties for those who prefer them.
Despite the dissent, the ruling allows Davis to take his claims before a jury, adding to a continued legal battle over the P320’s safety. Last year, Sig Sauer lost two jury verdicts related to similar claims, including an $11 million award in Philadelphia and a $2.3 million verdict in Georgia. The company is currently appealing both decisions.
The P320 is arguably one of the most popular handguns in the United States with many outlets noting it remains one of their top selling pistols and is widely used by both civilians and law enforcement agencies. It has been adopted as the standard-issue sidearm for the U.S. military in various variants and is also standard issue in othe militaries and law enforcement agencies around the world.
“The P320 is one of the nation’s most popular handguns. A variant of the weapon is the standard-issue sidearm for every branch of the U.S. military. Since the gun’s introduction to the commercial market in 2014, manufacturer SIG Sauer has sold the P320 to hundreds of thousands of civilians, and it has been used by officers at more than a thousand law enforcement agencies across the nation, court records show,” The Washington Post wrote in a 2023 article about the lawsuits.
The case now returns to the Kentucky District Court, where a jury will ultimately determine whether Sig Sauer bears responsibility for Davis’s injury.
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