S&W Sigma: the return of the wondernine

Guns Magazine, May, 2005 by Charles E. Petty

With the sunset of the assault weapons ban--you do feel less safe don't you?--we once more have the opportunity to have 16 9mm cartridges in our wide-body blaster. When the ban was thrust upon us it was almost as if the 9mm was erased from our consciousness. To be sure there was a brisk business in high-capacity magazines, but during the ban's life the furor died down and we went about our 10-round business. Of course, there were those for whom capacity was the defining issue and my question to them--then as now--is: are you planning on missing a lot?

But there will always be debate, sometimes bitter, over which is the best caliber for defense. There have been more than a few proclamations of the death of the 9mm or that it was a minor caliber. That's bogus. Where you put a bullet is what wins gunfights.

The 9mm Luger cartridge is perfectly fine for defense Just look at all the law enforcement agencies using it. The most important thing in any defensive shooting is to make holes in the dirtbag and even the self-proclaimed experts can't deny the nine is easier to shoot. Recoil is the living, breathing enemy of accuracy and the nine doesn't require anywhere near the same level of training to maintain reasonable accuracy standards.

One of the interesting things about all of this is the result of several informal internet surveys about what people carry. I take these with a substantial serving of salt but the people who sound like they might really be real, rarely mention 9mms. Instead there are lot of 1911 fans that cover a broad spectrum of everything out there and a whole bunch of folks who carry S&W J-frame revolvers.

But within moments of the ban's sunset, factories began shipping those special restricted magazines we mere mortals could once more own. It really is humorous because the bottom has fallen out from the market for pre-ban magazines.

Let's go back a little further in our history lesson to 1994 when S&W introduced the Sigma polymer frame, high-capacity pistol designed very specifically to compete with Glock's polymer frame, high-capacity pistols. I was one of a group of writers invited to sunny Florida to an event we came to call "spring break" that March. There we were introduced, with appropriate fanfare, to a pistol that had more than a passing similarity to someone else's plastic pistol. Of course the S&W folks told us how different it was and trotted out the patent-applied-for differences. The cynics among us quipped that since it quacked and waddled it was probably a duck but that really wasn't our problem. It also was quickly dubbed a "Swock."

I wrote the gun up back then and have it still and have never had a moment's trouble with it but it didn't seem to be too popular. The retail price ($593) was about the same or higher than the Glock and while the S&W name is always worth sales, consumers recognized ducks when they saw them.

Glock Sued

When the dust settled S&W agreed to make some changes primarily about the trigger. Details of the settlement are not entirely known, but they brought about another iteration of the Sigma and, for awhile, Smith "'lost the recipe" for a reliable pistol and the price was still pretty high.

One of the interesting things about polymer frames is their complicated cost structure. The moulds needed to make the parts are extremely complex and costly. They can run from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. But once you have them it is possible to turn out parts at a high rate of speed and relatively low cost. And moulds last a long time. This might provide an insight into the profits possible when injection molded frames are spit out like popcorn and few people are needed to run the show. So S&W has decided to take advantage of those economies and coupled with some small mechanical changes and tightened quality control to offer a highly-reliable pistol with a suggested retail price of $379. in real "street pricing," the cost will be closer to $300. The most obvious change is a switch from the rectangular firing pin as used on Glocks to a traditional round style.

All at once the picture is quite different. Now we have a real bargain-priced, high-capacity pistol. All we need to know now is whether or not it works. With prices like that it is entirely reasonable to wonder if quality or function has been diminished. There was only one reasonable thing to do: Road trip! Oops, I meant to say "torture test." If you've never done one of these. we'd be more than happy to have some volunteers if we ever stupidly decide to do this again. Trust me on this. The gun is the least tortured of the three parts: shooters and magazine loaders really take a beating.

And where do you draw the line on what's enough? In addition to the durability of the people, guns get way hot and it is not entirely realistic to shoot them until they glow and then throw them in a bucket of water. For that reason we chose a total of 2.500 rounds to be fired over a two-day period. The plan was to shoot a full 10 magazines (160 rounds) and then allow the gun to cool until it was no more than warm to the touch. A drop of Break Free would be applied to the muzzle and another on the barrel through the ejection port. It would be manually cycled a time or two to spread the lube and shooting would resume. Ammunition was from Black Hills and Winchester with a variety of bullet weights and types. Our intent was not to clean the gun and there was virtually no goo or powder residue from the amino that would have forced us to clean.