This weekend, my wife and I went to our local firearms range, and my wife got some practice with her Sig P238. At one point, after she racked the slide, the pistol failed to go back into battery. I took the pistol to diagnose the problem, and then noticed that the slide stop had fallen out of the pistol (!). I'm not sure whether it fell out before or after I took the gun. It was simple enough to put back in, but I have no idea why it happened in the first place, and my quick attempt to induce this malfunction did not cause it to recur. So, my questions are: 1) Has this happened to anyone else? 2) Any idea what might have caused this particular malfunction? 3) How can we prevent this from occurring again? I know this is a high quality pistol, but it's a little disconcerting when parts start falling off the gun! Thanks in advance for any help!
So I know nothing about the P238 specifically, but am around handguns day in and day out. Either there was some weird thing going on with your wife's grip and she pushed the slide stop out at just the right time or there is something broken which allowed the slide stop to move out of its captured position. If you can't repeat the malfunction and nothing internally appears broken, I'd shoot a couple hundred rounds through it and drive on. You should also consider calling Sig and ask if this is something familiar to them.
I can't help you out but this is a special case. I have a P938 for a couple years now with close to 1K rounds through it and it has never malfunctioned.
I spoke with a CS rep at Sig the other day, who was very helpful. She reported that they had heard of this before, and that one possible cause was racking the slide back slowly with the pistol tilted over onto its left side. By doing this, the slide stop could start to work loose, and then continue to "walk out" as you continue shooting. This is probably what happened. (Another possible cause was putting the slide stop in incorrectly, but since we had not disassembled the pistol, I ruled this out as the cause in our case). Going forward, we'll have to just be intentional about racking the slide back and releasing it quickly. In any event, I disassembled and cleaned the pistol yesterday. Our plan now is just to keep shooting it, and see if this recurs. Thanks again guys.
Don't tempt me! That's what I assumed my wife would want, but she likes the idea of a manual safety. On the consideration that it's her gun and I want her to get whatever she wants, we went with the Sig. But I'd take the Glock
