FN Pistols Can Fire When Bumped?

Arizona DPS discovered a significant safety issue with certain FN pistols.

According to their testing of the pistols, if the trigger is pulled on an FN FNS pistol while the pistol is out of battery (slide slightly pushed rear-ward), the pistol won’t fire (this is a good thing and what all pistols shouldn’t do) but it will enter a dangerous condition in which a bump, from any direction, can cause the pistol to fire.

This is a significant issue. AZ DPS is taking the FN pistol out of service and they created this excellent video detailing the problem with FN pistols in August of 2018. That’s right…. almost a year ago!

A tap, rack, any side-to-side or up-and-down movement, a sharp jarring blow and even holstering and unholstering will cause the weapon to fire with no further contact with the trigger

Also, a department in Baltimore, after learning of the problem from AZ DPS, is also taking the pistols out of service. At least one officer has been injured with one of these FN FNS pistols.

Not only is this a major safety concern, it invites a few questions:

• Why haven’t we heard about this until now?
• Why hasn’t FN recalled these pistols?
• Why did AZ DPS tell their officers and Baltimore but not the public?

FN has released a safety bulletin about the issue with the offer for a free fix of the problem, however, it is unclear when the safety bulletin was added. Using WayBackMachine archiving, we did find that the safety bulletin was first crawled last week.