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Chapter 3

The SIG P226

Developed for the military, the P226 became a premier police service pistol.

Introduced in 1983, the P226 evolved from the P220 as a large-capacity 9mm. It was SIG’s entry in the U.S. trials for what would become the nation’s new military service pistol. When those grueling and I comprehensive tests were done, only two handguns stood at the top of the heap: The SIG P226 and the Beretta 92F.

Beretta won the contract. Some said that they had underbid SIG, either on the pistols themselves or on the combined package including magazines, parts, and accessories. Others hinted darkly that a deal had been brokered. Rumor had it that the U.S. wanted to place cruise missiles in Italy, and that Italy in return wanted a fat contract for their military arms industry, which included Beretta.

One thing is certain: the SIG came through the test with flying colors. Even Beretta fans do not attempt to debate the fact that the SIG P226 at the very least tied their favorite gun. Firearms historian Larry Wilson wrote the following in The World of Beretta: An International Legend.

“In winning the contract,” Wilson stated flatly, “the Beretta was one of only two candidates to complete satisfactorily the testing program. The other finalist was the Swiss-German firm of SIG-Sauer.” (1)

Three generations of the 9mm SIG-Sauer P226. Top, the first classic: note unique checkering pattern on grips, internal extractor, hollow slide pin. Center, the next generation: note cobblestone pattern of grip roughening, external extractor, solid slide pin. Below, the latest: same as center gun, but with Picatinny accessory attachment rail integral to dust cover of frame.

Let’s look at the perspectives of some other authorities. Vietnam combat vet and world-renowned authority on military small arms Chuck Karwan commented, “The P226 9mm was designed specifically to compete in the U.S. trials to replace the M1911A1 .45. It was co-winner of the trials but lost in the final bidding process to the Beretta M92F. Many, including the author, felt that the P226 was the better pistol.” (2)

Another noted handgun expert, Tim Mullin, has this to say about the P226 in those U.S. military trials, “This is the pistol the U.S. military forces actually wanted when they adopted a 9X19mm pistols. …(it was the choice of) many elite military units, the most famous being the Navy SEALS. After they broke the M92 repeatedly, they refused delivery of any more Beretta pistols and bought SIG P226 pistols instead. This pistol is also used by many federal law enforcement agencies.” (3)

Top, P226 from the early 1980s. This one has been retrofitted with short-reach trigger and Crimson Trace LaserGrips, and Trijicon night sights installed aftermarket in the mid-80s. Below, its successor: this is the “rail gun” variation, with SIGLite night sights and standard length trigger. Both of these specimens are chambered for 9mm.

Chuck Taylor is another highly respected authority on combat handguns. His take on the JSSAP trials goes thus, “(The P226) was originally designed to satisfy the criteria of the infamous U.S. military Joint Service Small Arms Program handgun trials, wherein many ‘in the know’ claim that the P226 actually outperformed the eventual choice, the Beretta M92.” (4) Appropriately enough, Taylor’s comments on the SIG P226 appear on p. 226 of the book in question, the fourth edition of the Gun Digest Book of Combat Handgunnery.

All these authorities have good opinions of the P226 pistol, and all are on record explaining why. “…while I feel the concept around which the modern high-capacity auto is based to be dreadfully ill-advised, I also feel that the P226 is one of the best-designed and best-built examples of the breed,” says Taylor. “It is extremely well made and finished, featuring a black anodized frame and Parkerized slide, and presents a formidable appearance, backed by solid functionality. It is one of the most accurate self-loaders I have ever fired and possesses well-conceived human engineering features.”

Continues Taylor, “Its decocking lever and slide lock/release are all centrally located for quick, easy manipulation. In addition, it feeds most anything you care to stuff into the magazine, including the latest exotic JHP designs. It field strips in less than five seconds. A rebounding hammer and white-dot-front, white-outline-rear sight combination completes its formidable package…One of the most user-friendly large-capacity DA autos produced, the P226 also points well and presents few edges to cut skin or abrade concealment clothing.

“So,” he concludes, “if you’re one of those who prefers a large-capacity auto, you can’t really go wrong with the P226. In fact, while it’s certainly no secret that I’m not an advocate of the concept, I find the P226 to be a pleasant gun to shoot and prefer it hands-down over all other large-capacity DA 9mm pistols. It isn’t a cheap gun, but it’s well worth its price.” (5)

“The SIG pistols of any style are always quite accurate,” explains Mullin. “They vary from excellent to outstanding in my experience.” He concludes, “I agree with the SEALS: if you can, pick the SIG over the Beretta…You can’t go wrong by selecting this pistol if you are looking for a full-size battle pistol.” (6)

For many years, the P226 was standard with FBI SWAT and was issued to FBI Academy classes, as was the P228.

Karwan quantifies his appreciation of the big SIG 9mm. “Of all the high-capacity 9mm pistols, the P226 has one of the most comfortable and naturally pointing grip shapes. The trigger reach is a little long for some people with small hands but SIG offers an optional short trigger to help in that regard. With good ammunition the P226 is on the average one of the most accurate service pistols on the market. Its double-action trigger is quite smooth and reasonably light, making the transition from a long double-action first shot to the subsequent single-action shots easy to accomplish…The P226 is expensive compared to some of its competition but it is a superbly made, very accurate, and very reliable fighting handgun.” (7)

Since the thumb does not have to manipulate a safety catch on the frame or the slide, shooter with SIG P226 can take this extremely powerful “master grip” with thumb curled down and actually touching middle finger. It’s the strongest start for handgun retention if there’s a struggle for the gun, and no grasp is stronger when a pistol is fired one hand only. When thumb is curled down, it cannot ride the slide lock lever and prevent the slide from staying open on the last round, a common problem with some other right-handed grasp techniques.

Wiley Clapp brings both police and military experience to the table when he evaluates handguns, which is something he has done successfully full-time for a number of years now. In the Gun Digest Book of 9mm Handguns, he wrote, “Apparently the (P226’s) magazine was designed with considerable care, as the gun fired without a single glitch in the course of hundreds of rounds. When the magazine design is increased to nearly double capacity, the butt becomes thicker. In the 226, the thickening of the butt section 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, and in transition training the deputies were taught to treat the slide-mounted levers on the latter brands as decockers, not safeties.

The time came when a deputy with a new Beretta was the first to respond to a psycho firing a shotgun in a public place. When the shotgunner came at him, the officer fired one round and missed. Still new to the semiautomatic, he failed to return the trigger far enough forward to re-set it for the second shot, and when he pulled the trigger, the gun of course did not fire. Thinking it had jammed, he racked the slide with his non-dominant hand as he had been taught, clearing a live round from the chamber and cycling another one in. However, his hand had inadvertently pushed the lever down into the “safe” position as he performed the stoppage clearance drill. Now, as he attempted to fire on the gunman who was rapidly closing on him, the trigger moved uselessly under his finger. His life was saved when another policeman, off duty at the scene and armed with a slick-slide 9mm, shot and killed the gunman just in time.

This P226 9mm is in its second generation of protecting the public. Originally issued to a trooper by the Michigan State Police, it was traded in when MSP upgraded to the more powerful .40 caliber version of the P226. This officer purchased it second hand, and wears it to work daily today. It still delivers excellent accuracy and, as he demonstrates, excellent control.

Author found extremely uniform accuracy with awide variety of 9mm ammo when shooting this P226 from the “auto hood position” at 25 yards.

It should be noted that in writing the above, I am not condemning the concept of a safety/ decock lever. I am simply saying that if the decision is made to carry the gun off safe, the gun probably should not have an “on safe” option at all. Moreover, that if the design chosen is “decocker-only,” the frame-mounted decocker as on the SIG makes more sense for more people than does a decocker mounted on the slide. I’ve carried the Beretta, the Ruger, and the S&W TDA autos on duty, but always carried them on-safe and always practiced the off-safing movement as part of the draw, and taught it to my officers who also carried that type of gun.

The SIG, of course, had other attributes. No competitive gun had a better trigger in terms of smoothness of the first double-action shot and controllability of single-action follow-up shots. The trigger re-set of the SIG-Sauer was just right for police work: Not so long as to be ungainly, but not so short as to allow a shaky hand to fire an additional shot unintentionally after the need to shoot had ended.

Accuracy is the P226’s calling card. Behold a one-inch five-shot group, fired at 25 yards from a bench rest with the most popular .357 SIG duty load, the Speer Gold Dot 125-grain jacketed hollow point (JHP).

There was the reliability factor, too. The SIG was simply extraordinary in this regard. The good “feel” and “pointability” repeatedly cited by the authorities quoted above made for good, fast shooting in the hands of the average cop. Competence and confidence were both enhanced by this.

The SIG’s inherent accuracy put it in the forefront, too. The experts cited above told you the straight stuff about that. In my job teaching nationwide, I got to not only intensively test every 9mm out there, but got to observe a great number of them in the hands of officers and instructors. As a rule, the SIG P226 would group tighter than the Glock, the Ruger, and the Smith & Wesson service pistols. Only the Beretta and two of HK’s entries, which eventually numbered four, could keep up. The VP70Z, a machine pistol designed for cheap mass-manufacture turned into a cheap semiautomatic pistol, was never in the same ballpark with the SIG for accuracy, reliability, or ergonomics, and was soon mercifully discontinued. The current HK USP is a good gun, and spectacularly accurate in .45 ACP, but not so accurate in the 9mm specimens I’ve seen. The P9S, discontinued in the 1980s, would stay with or even exceed the SIG-Sauer for accuracy in 9mm, but design quirks such as requiring a pull of the trigger to decock made it unworkable for American law enforcement. The HK P7, then and now, could be expected to keep pace with the SIG in the accuracy department, but its unique squeeze-cocking mechanism turned off as many police departments as its very high price.

The Texas Department of Public Safety and the Rhode Island State Police both issue this .357 SIG P226 to their uniformed troopers. These guns combine great power with extraordinary accuracy, very good controllability, and the highest order of reliability. Full cartridge capacity is 13 rounds in the magazine, and one more in the firing chamber.

Thus, if you’re talking about maximum accuracy in a 9mm service pistol, and you want traditional design plus high reliability plus affordability, you’re down to a two-horse race: SIG and Beretta. The two are almost indistinguishable in this regard, each occasionally beating the other, but if it came down to the wire I would have to admit that in my experience the average SIG P226 9mm will, just by a hair, shoot a little tighter than the average Beretta.

The P226 has a distinguished history in American law enforcement. It has been the service gun of the state police in Massachusetts, Michigan, and other states. Arizona troopers used to have a choice between two SIGs, the P226 in 9mm and the P220 in .45.

When departments have gone from the P226 to something else, it usually wasn’t a brand change, but a power upgrade. Michigan and Massachusetts state troopers still carry SIG P226 pistols, but in .40 caliber, not 9mm. On the other hand, at this writing the Orlando, Florida Police Department, nationally famous for its professionalism and high-grade handgun training and performance, is still using the P226 9mm after many, many years. Their duty load is the Winchester Ranger 127-grain +P+ at 1250 feet per second. In a long list of shootings, this 9mm round has stopped the bad guys with alacrity, curing the one thing that is really wrong with a 9mm, its limited stopping power in most available loadings.

The P226 Rail model set up for home defense or police tactical work. InSight M3 tactical flashlight is mounted to the rail at the front of the dust cover, and a 20-round extended magazine is locked in place.

Choice Of Experts

Supervisory Special Agent Gordon McNeill was team leader of the FBI stakeout group that engaged the armed robbery and murder suspects Edward Matix and Michael Platt on April 11, 1986, in a suburb of Miami, Florida. Armed with a short-barreled six-shot .357 revolver, he fired the opening police shots of the encounter. He wounded Matix, but emptied the gun. Between his fourth and fifth shot a .223 rifle bullet fired by Platt smashed McNeill’s gun hand. Unable to reload his revolver due to his injuries, he was about to turn back to his vehicle to grab his shotgun when Platt loomed up and shot him in the neck. The bullet left him partially paralyzed for life.

Largely as a result of this incident, the FBI soon authorized field agents to carry their own 9mm or .45 caliber pistols. Initially, only two brands were approved, SIG and Smith & Wesson. McNeill, still working for the Bureau in a teaching assignment despite his physical disabilities and still able to qualify to work armed, immediately purchased a 16-shot SIG-Sauer P226. After the horror of being helpless with an empty gun after six shots, Gordon McNeill wanted increased and highly reliable firepower on his side. No one in the world can blame him. His choice of pistol was an excellent one.

Evan Marshall has been a friend of mine for going on 30 years. A survivor of multiple armed encounters during his distinguished career with the Detroit Police Department, he has for many years kept a running tally of gunfight reports from around the country and the world, and attempted to assess how well different calibers and loads worked in actual shootouts. His work has been controversial, but based on all my input, his conclusions about the relative stopping power of 9mm and larger caliber hollow-points are pretty much on the mark. He has no problem at all carrying a 9mm so long as it is loaded with an efficiently opening bullet in the 115- to 127-grain weight range at +P or +P+ velocity. And I’ve often seen him carrying a 9mm SIG P226 as his primary weapon.

The P226 Rail’s trademark is this extended dust cover portion of the frame.

The late Robert Shimek was famous as an authority on classic handguns. What few of his readers knew was that he was also a career law enforcement officer. The gun that he carried on duty, right up through his retirement shortly before his untimely death, was a SIG-Sauer P226 9mm.

In police departments where there is a broad choice of options as to what gun to carry, it’s always wise to look to see what the instructors are carrying. They see all the guns in action, and they know what works.

Consider NYPD. Requiring double-action-only 9mm pistols, the nation’s largest police department (some 40,000 sworn officers) authorizes three specific make/models, one of which is the SIG P226 DAO. The SIG has become the “prestige gun” on that department. Its reliability is unbeaten, and it is more accurate than either of the other two approved pistols.

Good sights are a feature on all the SIG-Sauer duty guns. This P226 benefits from night sights. Note proper grasp: web of hand high into the grip tang, and barrel in line with the long bones of the forearm.

“Stippled” front strap and back strap aid in secure grasp under the most adverse conditions of climate, circumstances, and stress.

Chicago PD is our next largest police department, some 13,000 strong. There, too, double-action-only is a requirement for any autoloader carried to work. Approved calibers are .45 ACP and 9mm Parabellum; approved DAO pistol brands are Beretta, Ruger, SIG, and Smith & Wesson. A majority of the Chicago PD firearms instructors I’ve run across carry the SIG.

The Sacramento County, California Sheriff’s Department boasts some of the finest firearms training in the country. As proof, their individual officers and teams have brought back national champion titles in police combat shooting. The issue pistol is the SIG P229 in .40, but the deputies are authorized to carry any SIG from 9mm to .45 caliber. A disproportionate number of the firearms instructors – most of whom I’ve worked with as a guest trainer, and can attest that they’re among the best in the country – choose the 9mm P226 as their uniform duty pistol. They appreciate its top-level accuracy combined with uncompromising reliability. Convinced by investigation of their department’s many shootings that shot placement means more than caliber in ending a gunfight quickly, they’ve found the P226, with its light recoil and great ergonomics, allows them to put more bullets in the center, faster, than anything else.

Inserting the index finger to the first joint will give maximum leverage on the trigger for double-action shots, and does not deleteriously effect control of subsequent shots in single-action mode. Pistol is aP226 Rail.

P226 Choices

Since the mid-1990s, the P226 has been available chambered for the .357 SIG and the .40 S&W. Each will hold two fewer of the large-diameter cartridges than the predecessor gun. Going from 16 of the 9mm rounds to 14 of the .40s or .357s is an upgrade as far as most people are concerned.

The .40 S&W cartridge in general is simply not the most accurate semiautomatic round available. That’s as true in the SIG as anything else. I’ve found that it will certainly be accurate enough for police work or IDPA competition, but it does not deliver the same high order of accuracy in the P226 as does the 9mm Parabellum round.

The .357 SIG cartridge is something else, though. With its high energy and high terminal striking power comes also a high order of accuracy. Simply put, the .357 SIG is an inherently accurate cartridge.

At this writing, the current president of SIGARMS is licensed to carry a concealed weapon. A big man, he carries a P226 in .357 SIG. He has no problem concealing it. And he uses the same gun to hunt deer!

George Harris, Bank Miller’s right hand man at the SIGARMS Academy, brings a lot of real-world experience to the ranges and classrooms where he teaches. The .357 SIG is his hands-down choice of cartridge, not only for carry but for hunting. While he normally carries the compact P239 in that caliber, he also likes the P226 in .357, and last year, killed his annual buck with a single shot; quick and clean.

A few years ago, the Texas Department of Public Safety, which encompasses the state highway patrol, swapped the trusty P220 .45s they had carried for many years for P226 pistols chambered for .357 SIG. They have been delighted with the stopping power it has afforded their personnel in several gunfights since. Anecdotal reports indicate that the bad guys go down a little faster to the .357 SIG than to even a .45 auto.

As with other SIGs in these calibers, the same magazine is interchangeable between .357 SIG and .40 S&W P226s. In fact, all that needs to be swapped to change caliber is the barrel.

In one famous shooting, during the transition period between guns, two Texas highway patrolmen shot it out with a gunman ensconced in the cab of an 18-wheeler. The senior officer’s P220 shot where he aimed it, but the wide, slow .45 slugs did not punch through the massive bodywork of the giant truck with enough authority to stop the offender. His rookie partner, however, was fresh from the academy with a newly issued P226 in .357 SIG. His 125-grain CCI Gold Dot bullets at 1350 feet per second drilled through the heavy cab and punched through their would-be killer’s brain, ending the deadly battle instantly.

Steel-framed P226s are now available. I haven’t really worked with them, except for the target model, which is just deliciously accurate and sweet to shoot.

The P226 is an eminently “shootable” pistol when the pressure is on. Firing in front of a large class of students to “set the pace,” author shot this perfect 300 out of 300 score with sixty rounds of 9mm on the combat course. Thanks to the P226’s consistency of performance, such a target is pretty much replicable on demand.

Personal Perspective

If I sound high on the P226, it’s not because it’s one of my favorite guns and my second favorite SIG. Rather, those things are true because the gun has proven itself in the manner described above. I use the P226 in its original caliber, 9mm, for several reasons that may or may not be relevant to your own needs.

First, I’m on the road a lot teaching, and usually flying. The airlines at this writing limit you to 11 pounds of ammunition in checked baggage. Eleven pounds of ammo means a lot more 9mm rounds than .40 or .45 rounds. When the Twin Towers were hit on September 11, 2001, my wife and daughter were in Nevada. Air travel shut down nationwide instantly, a situation that lasted for several days. Fortunately, I was able to fax my lovely bride a copy of her FFL, and she went to the nearest gun shop and bought the last suitable hardware that hadn’t been cleaned off the shelf by panicky buyers. Ammo disappeared from dealers’ shelves, too. They were stranded out there for a while. A lot of people had to make their way home on the ground, often hitch-hiking because the rental agencies had run out of automobiles, and the trains and buses were overloaded. If I have to make a long journey on foot or by thumb in a time of national emergency, I would find it much more comforting to have a lot of ammo in my backpack rather than a little. Unlike most police officers with issue ammo, when I’m on my own time I can carry whatever I want. Those 127-grain +P+ Winchesters, or Evan Marshall’s favorite 115-grain JHPs at 1300 or more feet per second, will get the job done quite nicely in 9mm.

Other more routine job-related requirements exist. If I have to buy training ammo on the road, 9mm is cheaper than anything else. If I have to ship thousands of rounds ahead to a training site, the lighter 9mm ammo costs less. I put a couple of thousand rounds of 9mm through my P226 at my last busman’s holiday at Chapman Academy.

I also compete whenever I can. The SIG pistol is very well suited to IDPA, where it is shot in the Stock Service Pistol (SSP) category. There, 9mm pistols compete with those chambered for .40 S&W, .357 SIG, and .45 ACP. I see no reason at all to have a .45 that only holds eight or nine rounds when IDPA rules let me have 11 in an SSP gun, and my 9mm SIG will take that many. I see no reason, either, to contend with .45 caliber recoil when I can shoot just a little bit faster against the omnipresent clock with a 9mm.

Each of us has our own job to do, and we pick our tools accordingly. However, in its broad caliber range of 9mm Parabellum, .357 SIG, and .40 S&W, the SIG P226 can literally offer something for everyone.

Of the many variations of the P226, and among the four P226 9mms that now rest in my gun safe, the one I prefer to use is the newest, the “rail gun.” The dust cover, or forward portion of the frame, is grooved to accept accessories such as an attached white light unit. (“White light” is the current way cool, high-speed, low-drag “tactical” terminology for “flashlight.”) I travel with an InSight M3 light in my carry-on luggage. At night, when I go to bed, I slide the flashlight onto the P226. I also do a tactical reload and swap out the pre-ban 15-round “carry magazine” of 9mm hot loads for a pre-ban 20-round magazine of the same ammo.

Do you wear a tactical load-bearing vest or magazine pouches to bed? Good. Neither do I. Police work has taught me that home invasions happen fast, and hotel room invasions happen faster because there’s less space to act as a buffer zone. I like the idea of one practiced movement putting everything in my hand that I need. A pistol with powerful ammunition; an ample supply of that ammunition already on board; light attached, with which to find, identify and blind my opponent; and, as icing on the cake, SIG-Lite night sights.

Another special-purpose P226 has already been mentioned: The double-action-only model as required by Chicago PD. For the armed citizen as well, the DAO concept bears looking at, if only from its civil liability defensibility standpoint, which, to be frank, is why so many police chiefs have specified it.

References

1. (1)Wilson, R.L., The World of Beretta: An International Legend, New York City: Random House, 2000, PP. 238-240.

2. (2)Karwan, Chuck, The SIG-Sauer P226, sidebar in Standard Catalog of Firearms, 13th Edition, by Ned Schwing. Iola, WI: Krause Publications, 2002, P. 958.

3. (3)Mullin, Timothy J., The 100 Greatest Combat Pistols, Boulder, CO: Paladin Press, 1994, P.381.

4. (4)Taylor, Chuck, The Gun Digest Book of Combat Handgunnery, 4th Edition, Iola, WI: Krause Publications, 1997, P. 226.

5. (5)Taylor, Ibid.

6. (6)Mullin, op.cit., P. 382.

7. (7)Karwan, op.cit.

8. (8)Clapp, Wiley, The Gun Digest Book of 9mm Pistols, Northbrook, IL: DBI Books, 1986, P. 209.