The Sig P226--Old School DA/SA Pistol

The original P226 (Photo by Hardenacke (Source))

Instapundit recently linked to an article on the Sig P226 entitled "SIG P226: The OG DA/SA Gun You Really Want" by Kat Ainsworth Stevens at Shooting News Weekly. She begins:

Sometimes, you have to go back to the classics—or at least the OG. The SIG SAUER P226 is one of the original guns that started it all, and it’s still a great pistol in its own right. Sure, it’s been reimagined and enhanced quite a few times over the years, but the original standard model P226 is still worth having. It’s not identical to the newer models, either. The design varies, features are different, and the various models will feel different in your hands. Here’s why we think you should go ahead and add the basic P226 to your collection.

The rest of the article is her impressions of the weapon and a brief review of its performance. The funny part to me was that, although she called her model the "OG" (short for "original gangsta") in the title and referred to her pistol as the "original" P226, she doesn't picture or review the original P226. She has a newer version with a Picatinny rail, different grips, and, I assume, the milled slide. The photo above shows what a Sig P226 would have looked like in the 1980s and early '90s, and you can see that it differs from the one pictured in her article, below.

P226 pictured in  Kat Ainsworth Stevens' article

    I owned one of the older versions for awhile when I was younger. I picked it up as a second-hand police trade-in from CDNN Sports for relatively cheap--it was still in the years when police were switching over to .40 S&W from the 9mm. It came with night sights, but they were pretty dim given the age of the weapon. As you might expect with a police weapon, it had a lot of carry wear (and an alarming amount of surface rust on the slide) but virtually no sign of having been shot much. When I first got it, it was wearing a pair of Pachmayr grips which I replaced with a set of original grips for a short time before switching back to the Pachmayr. It also had the original folded and wielded slide (I believe Sig changed over to milled slides in the mid-90s). Unfortunately, a few years after I bought it, I was forced to sell it along with some other firearms in order to pay some bills. Such is life.

    I have to say that it was a good shooter. But my principle complaint about it was similar to other double-stack "wonder 9s" of the 1980s and '90s: the grips were simply too bulky for my hands, particularly when trying to shoot double-action or using only one hand. I certainly wasn't the only one with that problem, which is why the military ultimately wound up adopting the smaller Sig P228 (M11) for certain of its troops and officers. But I also didn't like the anemic palm-swell: one of the reasons I switched back to the Pachmayr grips from the factory grips.

    For a long time I wanted to replace that old P226, but the prices have remained high on the original 9mm models or even for the newer 9mm models. And, of course, there are no more cheap police trade-ins available in 9mm. Rather, the tide has shifted and the police trade-ins over the past several years have been in calibers like .40 S&W and the occasional .357 Sig. I wound up getting a P220 that was a police trade-in and in excellent condition with the only wear being marks from whatever weapon light had been mounted on it. The P220 is essentially the same weapon as the P226, but in .45 ACP and employing a single-stack 8-round magazine. It scratched my itch for an old-school Sig DA/SA pistol while also satisfying my desire for a dependable pistol in .45.