Well, I had to pay a $30 transfer fee, but the Smith and Wesson M&P .45was free. I won a gift certificate for it in a shooting match in August and it finally arrived at the dealer this week.
I haven’t had a chance to shoot it yet; but I do have a few initial impressions.
The interchangeable backstraps are a great way to have a grip whose shape you can alter on a polymer framed gun. Walther uses a similar system.
The trigger pull is surprisingly good.
The fixed sights are very good.
This piece is clearly another attempt by Smith to compete directly with Glock. Pending tests for accuracy and reliability, I’d say this gun is better in many respects than the Glock. If they can compete price-wise, maybe we’ll start seeing more of these in police holsters.
Good luck with your new, and free, pistol. Does it have the “won’t fire with the magazine out” feature? I shoot IDPA, and am a Safety Officer, and sme of the shooters have M&Ps with that feature. It’s a PITA because they have to carry an empty magazine so they can “drop the hammer” after showing clear. I don’t care for the feature myself, but have been told that either it’s an option, or can be bypassed.
A year ago last Spring, I won a Para Ordinance LTC in .45 ACP. Shoots so nice I bought a Para Ordinance CCO with the LDA trigger last week.
Mine is the “no magazine safety” variant and has a big warning to that effect printed on the slide, so it is a factory option.
I have to agree that to my aging eyes this gun is not beautiful. Ugly is as ugly does, though. We’ll find out when I get a chance to take it to the range.
If I were to buy one, that’s the version I’d get. I had a S&W 469 I believe it was many years ago and it had that “feature”. I was not shooting in competition back then and it didn’t bother me. But now I’d never buy a pistol with that feature.
We had a manufacturer’s range day a few weeks back and many folks tried the M&Ps that were available. They seemed to like them, so as GusnSpot mentioned, you got a good price. It’s hard to dislike a free pistol.
I had it to the range today for a little test firing. I used up nearly 100 rounds of ammo from various partially full boxes that were taking up space in my ammo locker. It fed and fired a real mixed bag of hardball and hollowpoint loads from different makers with nary a bobble.
Accuracy was quite good. I didn’t fire it from the bench or at a bullseye target, but everything went neatly into tight little groups at point of aim on the silhouette targets I was using.
Ergonomics on this piece are really great. I went with the smallest of the three interchangeable backstraps and the gun is now a proper “instinctive pointer.” The trigger is miles ahead of any of the Glock triggers I’ve experienced.
My only criticism is quite mild. The piece doesn’t field strip and reassemble as easily as some of my other service pistols, like the USP 40 or the CZ-75. It isn’t really difficult, as much as it is quirky. There’s a little sear lever inside the magwell that needs to be depressed to field strip and during reassembly the trigger needs to be depressed at the proper moment. Again, neither of these things are difficult, but I have other pistols that don’t have these little quirks.
