My first gun ever was a GLOCK 17, I loved that gun. The reliability simply cannot be matched but after buying my first 1911 I quickly realized the grip size and angle was lacking. Enter Smith & Wesson’s M&P pistol line. I bought one of the original M&P’s when they first came out and immediately fell in love with the grip. The size and angle were a huge leap forward over GLOCKS’s. The downside was the trigger, I just never cared for it and after a couple of years I sold the firearm to a co-worker who wanted one.
In my time away from the M&P Smith & Wesson continued to improve upon the design. It was never enough to make me go buy one but I enjoyed watching them make a good pistol better. Everything changed when they came out with their metal version of the M&P. I read and watched every review I could find on it and with them being almost entirely positive I finally gave in and decided it was time to buy one for myself. Luckily for me I delayed long enough for them to release the M&P M2.0 Competitor. It included a longer barrel, new slide cutouts, an extended magazine release, a magwell, an optics ready slide, and a competition ready trigger. There was no way I could pass this up, after comparing prices I bought one for a good deal.
As soon as it came in I knew I made the right decision. It felt great in the hand, the grips were extremely tacky and grippy, there’s no way you cannot maintain a strong grip on it. I loved the look and feel of the silver metal frame and slide and the trigger was an enormous improvement over the standard M&P trigger.
The one area Smith & Wesson dropped the ball is the magazines. Don’t get me wrong, they’re well built and reliable. Not to mention they send four with the firearm. Where they fail is their baseplates, while they are well built and made to stick out far enough to be used with the magwell they don’t add any capacity to the magazine. I can’t imagine if they had made them hollow from the inside instead of the outside that it would have cost anymore to give us an extra two to three rounds. I have an XDm Elite Precision which comes with a large magwell as well, but their baseplates add capacity. As such the XDm magazines are 22 rounders compared to the Competitor’s 17 rounders. Five rounds extra in each magazine during a competition will make or break you and sadly, Smith and Wesson failed here and I just don’t know why.
But don’t let that one single fault fool you. It’s an amazing pistol and I don’t regret buying it for one second.
Stay safe, be kind, and help those in need.