Is Honor Guard Pistol Unsafe If Dropped?

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It wasn’t all that long ago when the Sig Sauer P320 was found to go off if dropped in a certain manner. It wasn’t the usual drop testing, which was probably how it made it through the normal quality assurance and safety checks, but it was such that it could be a potential problem.

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Almost immediately, lines were divided within the firearm community with people trying to either replicate the flaw, or disprove it.

Over time, however, Sig Sauer acknowledged the error and offered a free upgrade to prevent the problem. Now, months later, few people are even talking about it.

So why am I?

Well, because it looks like someone else is having the same problem.

When we reviewed the Honor Guard handgun from Honor Defense we judged it to be a good new option for the concealed carry crowd. It passed all of our reliability tests with flying colors. One test we didn’t administer — and may have to in the future —  is a drop test. As you may remember, after Omaha Outdoor’s report of a problem, we dropped an off-the-shelf SIG SAUER P320 ourselves…and it failed. Now a similar video shows the Honor Guard handgun failing under the same conditions.

The video in question:

Now, a couple of thoughts on this.

First, Firearm Rack’s Patrick Roberts notes that he physically built this firearm in Honor Guard’s plant under the supervision of one of their people. Did this lead to a problem? It’s certainly possible, of course, but not particularly likely. After all, any building problems should probably have been caught prior to completing the build in the first place.

Further, as Patrick notes, the Honor Guard was based on the P320 in the first place. That indicates some of the P320 design flaws may well have crept into the Honor Guard design.

There’s been no word from Honor Defense about this development, but it’s troubling.

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It’s not the only troubling thing in the video, to be honest, but it’s the one we’re going to talk about now.

As noted in the video, some will say, “I just won’t drop my gun.” I heard plenty saying that about their P320 pistols after word went around about them not being drop safe. However, you’re also a fool if you think that drops happen only because someone failed to decide they wouldn’t drop their gun. Stuff happens, and they’re almost never intentional.

That means tests like these need to be taken seriously. They represent a real work potentiality, and we as consumers and firearm manufacturers need to be cognizant of this. I get that both the P320 and Honor Guard passed all required safety testing prior to release, but just as Sig stepped up and made it right, it’s now time for Honor Defense to do so as well.

While Honor Defense can’t offer fixes available on the model of firearm build for DOD use, they could still look at those upgrades and manufacture something similar. Make this right and the company will be fine. Don’t, and it’ll be a different matter entirely.

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