is far less objectionable than in other guns, because the butt has been subtly re-contoured. The bulk is held to a minimum and the more rounded butt actually feels better than the original 220. That is not usually the case when a single-column design is altered to a double.”
Clapp goes on to say, “I fired the 226 extensively for this book. In the course of several hundred rounds downrange, I came to appreciate another feature of the pistol. The sights are excellent, among the best to be found on any of the myriad of handguns on today’s market. They are big enough to be seen, with a wide, deep notch and a prominent front ramped blade. Some versions of the SIG-Sauer pistols have sights highlighted with dots for better sight acquisition in low light situations. I don’t care for them. Double-action autoloaders have traditionally poor trigger pulls, at least in the DA mode. The 226 defies tradition in that the double-action pull on this pistol is very good. Once that first double-action shot is gone, the single-action trigger action for subsequent shots is fairly light, with only a small amount of creep. As the test results show, the 226 pistol is accurate, too.” (8)
The difference between two generations of P226. First Gen, top: Note that extractor is invisible, concealed inside the slide mechanism, and that the slide pin which holds the extractor is hollow. Current Gen, below, has beefed up extractor mounted outside the slide and securely pinned in place, and a solid steel pin has replaced the hollow one in slide.
Police History
When the big wave of police adoptions of high-capacity 9mm autos to replace traditional service revolvers hit in the early 1980s, SIG was there at the right time, in the right place, with the right product. The P226 took off like a rocket. What had started as a Three-way race between Beretta, SIG, and Smith & Wesson would soon become a wider field as Glock and Ruger entered the market.
Competition was fierce. There were major departments that approved or adopted all these brands. However, as an instructor teaching nationwide and around the world at that time, it was my perception that the SIG pulled ahead, with the P226 being the top seller during that period.
SIG P226 DAO is one of three 9mm pistols authorized by the New York City Police Department, and is seen by many officers as the most prestigious of the uniform guns on their “approved” list. It is almost certainly the most accurate of those three, as well.
Three styles of 9mm SIG P226 magazine. Top, a ten round “Clinton magazine,” once required for officers on NYPD, and useful for training or IDPA competition. Center: original 15 round SIG-Sauer P226 magazine. Below: Extended 20-round SIG P226 mag, popular with SWAT and Britain’s SAS.
The Feds went to the SIG big time in the 1980s. It was one of the very first autoloaders authorized by the FBI for field personnel, and the P226 quickly replaced the high-capacity 9mm auto by another maker on the SWAT teams in every local FBI office in the land. The Bureau had input from British SAS, which traded their trademark Browning Hi-Power 9mm autos for the P226, citing its greater durability and reliability. The ATF and the DEA adopted the SIG, too. So did Secret Service and Sky Marshals, though they both went with the smaller P228 version. The U.S. Marshal’s Service at that time gave its deputy federal marshals wide latitude in their choice of personal sidearm, and a huge number bought SIGs, often the P226.
The wartime draftee training doctrine of the military, the KISS principle (“Keep It Simple, Stupid!”) had rightly or wrongly become part and parcel of most American police handgun training. It was felt that there were enough new skills to learn in transitioning from a revolver to a semiautomatic pistol without throwing in one more, such as the manipulation of a thumb safety.
If the pistol came with a lever on the slide that performed the dual functions of a manual safety catch and a decocking lever, recruits were told that it was a decocking lever only. But, it wasn’t. If the officer used the typical U.S. military slide manipulation technique of grasping it overhand and jerking it to the rear, his thumb on one side and finger on the other tended to push the slide-mounted lever down into the “safe” position. Since he had been taught that the lever was a decocker, not a safety, by definition that officer had not been taught how to rapidly and reflexively off-safe an on safe gun. Thus, he would stand there pulling the trigger and wonder why his pistol was not firing.
The P226 is an extremely controllable gun, particularly in 9mm. The 9mm brass in the air shows that Ayoob is firing rapidly, but note that the muzzle of the SIG is still dead on target for the next shot. Stance is the aggressive StressFire version of the Isosceles, and grasp is the “wedge hold.”
My feeling was that if the lever was going to be used only as a decocker, it should function only as a decocker. The rest of the police community came to agree with me. The SIG-Sauer, unlike its competitors with similar double-action first shot pistols (later known as TDA, or Traditional Double Action), had a “slick slide.” It was simply not possible to inadvertently on-safe a SIG-Sauer, because there was no such device on the pistol.
Moreover, the SIG’s decocking lever was behind the trigger on the frame, not on the slide. This is a more ergonomic placement. Beretta, Ruger, and S&W eventually offered decocker-only models in which the slide-mounted lever was spring-loaded and could not go “on safe.” Nonetheless, there were two downsides to that design. One was that many officers found it awkward to reach their thumb to the slide to decock, and much more natural to bring the thumb down behind the trigger guard to perform the same function with a SIG. (A left-handed officer with a SIG would use the trigger finger to decock.) The other was that a palm-down slide manipulation could inadvertently decock a gun with a slide-mounted lever when the officer didn’t intend for that to happen, as when reloading or clearing a malfunction. This could be confusing in a high-stress situation…and it couldn’t happen with a SIG. S&W copied the SIG-style decocking lever on the ill-fated Model 1076 10mm they developed for the FBI, and put it on some of their other TDA models (distinguishable by the suffix “26” in their model numbers). However, that version of the S&W decocker proved to be problematic, and S&W soon stopped making guns that way.
Author finds the P226 an accurate pistol in general, and likes the fact that it gives consistent accuracy with a broad range of ammo, as with this 9mm example.
9mm Parabellum was the original chambering for the P226, and is still extremely popular.
Current “stippling” on grips instead of checkering pattern is extremely popular among P226 fans. The purpose is a non-slip grasp in the most stressful situations.
The possibility of accidentally engaging the safety of a pistol with a slide-mounted lever was not just theoretical. Circa 1990 in Dade County, Florida, such an incident occurred in a gunfight. Dade County had authorized their deputies to purchase SIG, Beretta, or S&W 9mm autos,
