The Gun Digest Book of Sig-Sauer. Massad Ayoob

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      Roy Huntington has been a well-known commentator on police firearms and the law enforcement training scene for many years. His 20-year career with the San Diego Police Department encompassed a number of assignments, including a stint on the Harbor Patrol, where he became the model for a character in a Joseph Wambaugh novel. Now retired from police work and serving as the editor of American Handgunner magazine, Roy worked on a department that limited pistol choice to 9mm and issued 147-grain subsonic ammunition, but gave the officers a number of weapons choices within those parameters. The SIG-Sauer pistol is extremely popular among San Diego cops who buy their own guns. In fact, the P229 9mm is currently the standard-issue sidearm there and Roy purchased his own P225.

      Well trained at Thunder Ranch and a number of other schools he attended on his own, Huntington was well aware that shot placement was more important than round count or caliber. He perceived himself as having short fingers, and didn’t feel that the larger girth of a pistol frame housing a double-stack magazine gave him the exact grasp he wanted for maximum control of his shots at high speed. Modified slightly over the years by the best custom gunsmiths, Huntington’s SIG-Sauer P225 was his choice of a duty weapon. He never felt handicapped in terms of firepower with nine rounds in the gun and a pair of spare magazines on his belt, and never regretted his choice of duty sidearm.

      Lt. Dave Spaulding of the Montgomery County, Ohio Sheriff’s Department is another lawman with a very long resume in firearms training. He has served with me for many years on the Firearms Committee of the American Society for Law Enforcement Training. Dave had broad discretion in choice of sidearm for most of his career. For many years, his choice of duty weapon was also the SIG P225. Like Roy, he had his pistol lightly customized and action-tuned for maximum performance over the years, a prerogative each man enjoyed because each had purchased his duty weapon out of his own pocket. Though he does not have particularly small hands, Dave also appreciates a pistol that lets you get a good bit of flesh and bone wrapped around the “handle,” and gives you a reach to the trigger that affords you maximum leverage in high-speed shooting. It was this that made the P225 so appealing to Dave Spaulding.

      Unlike Roy, however, Dave didn’t finish his career with the P225. While Roy was happy with the performance of the Winchester OSM (Olin Super Match) subsonic 147-grain hollow-point issued by his department, Dave’s agency had less satisfactory experiences with it. After an egregious stopping failure Dave, who was in a position to do something about it, got the department into hotter loads with lighter bullets and higher velocities. Eventually, he just decided to go with a .40 caliber service pistol. The first of the SIG-Sauer pistols to get the American style push-button magazine release located behind the trigger, the P225 is an ergonomic pistol that seems to make a friend of everyone who shoots it. The accuracy is right up there with the SIG-Sauer tradition. In the Gun Digest Book of 9mm Handguns the P225 delivered 2.25-inch groups with Winchester Silvertip 115-grain JHP, 2.5-inch groups with Federal 9BP 115-grain JHP, and 2.75-inch groups with Federal full-metal-jacket ball ammo weighing 123 grains. This very consistent shooting was done at 25 yards. (3)

      The book also illustrated that the 9mm cartridge is less sensitive than some others to velocity loss from shorter barrels. The barrel length of a P225 is 3.86 inches. Notes co-author Wiley Clapp, “An interesting thing happens when you compare the velocities that were obtained in the 225 with those of the 226. There is no statistically significant difference. But there is about three quarters of an inch difference in the barrel length. If you need the concealability of the shorter 225 , you are sacrificing nothing in the performance of typical ammunition. If you have to have the larger capacity of the 226 with its 15 shots, so be it. Still, you could take the bottom half of a 226 (fifteen-shot magazine) and graft on the top half of a 225 (short barrel and slide) – you’d get the best of both – call it a 225-1/2 .” (4)

      Some perceived the 9mm Parabellum chambering itself to be a shortcoming of this gun. Noted Clapp, “…the gun would sell like hotcakes if it were to be made in .45 ACP or 10 mm auto, at least in the United States.” (5) There is reason to believe that the folks at SIG, Sauer, and SIGARMS all had the same assessment. When the next compact SIG came out, the P239, it was chambered for .40 Smith & Wesson and .357 SIG as well as 9mm Parabellum.

      The P239 would cast a dark cloud over the P225. It was seen as a more modern gun, and optionally, a more powerful one, and therefore more desirable. The most recent Gun Digest does not list the P225. Imports to the United States dried up some time ago.

      The persistent rumor that SIG-Sauer has discontinued the P225 is incorrect. Says SIGARMS Technical Director Joe Kiesel, “The P225 is still produced, and will be with us for some time to come. A variant of the P225 is the P6, the German Army pistol, and for that contract alone it can be expected to remain in production. It hasn’t been imported to the U.S. for years, for the simple reason that since the introduction of the P239, there has been virtually no demand for the P225.”

      The P239 is a superb pistol. There is much that it can do that the P225 cannot, such as fire more powerful ammunition. Still, there is a combination of classic lines and exquisite feel in the hand that will make the P225 much missed in some U.S. shooting circles. If you can find a good used one, you’ll probably not be sorry if you buy it.

       Idiosyncrasies

      Over the years, I received complaints occasionally from owners of the P225 that when they loaded it with hot, high-velocity ammunition such as the Cor-Bon 115-grain JHP at 1,350 feet per second nominal velocity, the pistol would occasionally fail to pick up a round. What apparently was happening was that the extremely powerful round was driving the short, light slide rearward so fast, allowing it to snap back forward with commensurately greater momentum, that the slide would close over the top of the magazine before the topmost cartridge could be picked up. The result would be a “click” instead of a “bang” at the next pull of the trigger, because the hammer would fall on an empty chamber.

      I never personally experienced this with a P225, and I never heard of it happening with a P228, which also has a short slide. Apparently, the strong spring in the double-stack magazine of the P228 was always able to push the next round up into place so fast that the fastest slide couldn’t beat it. The P225 magazine, being a single-stack that required less spring tension, was the only gun I heard of this happening with. The subsequent P239 does not seem to have ever had this problem.

      When Spaulding was carrying a P225 on Montgomery County, the agency for some time had both Cor-Bon and Winchester 115-grain +P+ ammunition for the 9mm guns, and he had no problem running plenty of it through his. This incompatibility is apparently a rare one. If you carry hot loads in your P225, be certain to run a lot of them through to ensure proper functioning. If the problem does show up, the best bet would probably be to throttle back to a standard pressure 115-grain hollow-point Winchester Silvertip or Federal 9BP.

       References

1. Grennell, Dean A., and Clapp, Wiley, “The Gun Digest Book of 9mm Handguns,” Northbrook, IL: DBI Books, 1986, P.147.

2. Mullin, Timothy J., “The 100 Greatest Combat Pistols,” Boulder, CO: Paladin Press, 1994, P.187.

3. Grennell and Clapp, op.cit. P.207.

4. Ibid.

5. (5) Ibid.

Chapter 3

      The SIG P226

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