BehindBlueI's
Grandmaster
- Oct 3, 2012
- 25,968
- 113
They were just a little too late to the party, or it could have been a different story. .357 Sig rolled out 4 years after .40 S&W. The .40 S&W was firmly entrenched, and Glock was riding that caliber hard. So hard, their gun beat the S&W gun to the retail market. It was also the FBI's darling of the day, and as you can tell with the rush back to 9mm by a lot of departments recently the FBI is something of a trend setter in this regard. A lot of departments had already swapped revolvers or 9mm to .40 because FBI and because of the Glock marketing machine that knew putting Glocks in cop's holsters sold Glocks to the masses and made departments offers they couldn't refuse. Glock had every reason to not promote Sig's new namesake cartridge, so much so that they waited about 4 years to introduce any pistol in .357 Sig after the cartridge came out and even then left the "Sig" part off... The twin power of FBI trendsetting and Glock marketing/LE push made the .40 the cartridge to unseat, and the .357 just never did.
Going back to why Glock didn't want to promote popularity of the .357 Sig, well Sig was trying to break into the domestic police market, and Glock was (and is) the king of that market. Sig's P229/P226 combo gained some limited success but never approached Glock numbers. The .357 Sig was mostly a marketing designation. "Hey, remember how cool and awesome .357 Magnum was before you went to 9mm and then went to .40? Don't you miss those days" sort of thing. They needed some angle, because realistically whatever advantage the .357 has over the .40 or vice versa is so tiny it's tough to make the argument to switch from one to the other and inertia rules the day.
Then...expense. Lower production numbers accounting for most of it I would say, perhaps some by the bottleneck brass, and then it becomes an even harder sell over 9mm or .40. I think it's doomed to stay a boutique cartridge, but at least Sig has the consolation of knowing the .45 GAP was an even bigger flop.
) Just talking around at training courses where troopers attended, they seemed to like it as flat shooting and good on glass and barriers. But now they are moving back to 9mm also. They first started with S&W's M&P 9mm in their academy a couple years ago, but the first class to use them discovered a lot of problems, and the M&P was dropped, went back to the Sig 226. Now I read they are training new troopers on Sig P320 in 9mm. Troopers who already have 226s can keep them, but they will be fading out over the next few years.
