Sunday Smith #71: Bodyguard 380, 2013

The .380ACP cartridge was developed by John Moses Browning and debuted on these shores in Colt's Model 1908 Pocket Hammerless. It would, however, be another eighty-seven years before Smith & Wesson offered a pistol in the chambering.

That was the SW380, a little striker-fired pistol in the Sigma series. It had a 3" barrel, weighed a claimed 14 ounces empty, and had a six shot magazine that was released by squeezing two large tabs, one on either side, like it was the battery pack in a power tool. It was a straight-blowback pistol with a zinc alloy slide and, as a result, had a beastly heavy recoil spring that made cycling the slide a difficult proposition for those without a lot of grip strength.

The slide was finished with black paint that chipped easily. The gun was built to a price and looked it. Reliability was poor and the guns had a notoriously short lifespan, being cynically designed with an eye toward the fact that the typical purchaser probably wouldn't shoot them much. Production ran for only a year or two and then Smith & Wesson dropped the .380 cartridge from its catalog for over another dozen years before releasing the Bodyguard 380 (sometimes referred to as the BG380) in 2010.

Unlike the SW380, the BG380 is a locked-breech pistol using a modified Browning tilting barrel short recoil setup, with the barrel locking to the slide via a shoulder atop the chamber that mates with the leading edge of the ejection port.

Also unlike the earlier Sigma, the Bodyguard is a hammer-fired pistol. Since the slide has to overcome not only the dual concentric recoil springs under the barrel, but also force the hammer back against the hammer spring, the slide can be much slimmer and lighter than the one on the earlier striker-fired blowback gun. Like the larger pistols in the M&P series, the slide is Melonite-finished stainless steel. The BG380 weighs 14.7 ounces with 6+1 Hornady Critical Defense .380 FTX rounds aboard.

Most of the little .380s in this class, like the Kel-Tec P3AT and the original Ruger LCP, are only quasi-double-action. The hammer spring is cocked by the action of the slide and pulling the trigger just causes the the hammer to move, sort of like the old Para-Ordnance LDA or HK's LEM. The Bodyguard 380, on the other hand, is a true double-action only, with re-strike capability and all.

Originally all BG380s had an integral laser in the frame, activated by the gray button in front of the trigger guard. The likelihood of activating this thing when reacting under pressure is about nil, practically speaking and, in 2014, Smith started offering a version without the integral laser.

I bought the pictured pistol new back in 2013 and used it for wintertime coat pocket carry for several years. The slide is not the original one, being fitted with XS Standard Dot night sights. It was a gift from a friend, having originally been on his BG380.

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Sunday Smith #65: M&P9, 2010

By the early 1990s, Smith & Wesson's dominance of the law enforcement market was starting to erode. While the Third Generation autos were rugged, reliable, and accurate, so was the polymer upstart from Austria, and there was no way to compete with Glock on price, no matter how many cost-saving measures were applied to the 59xx and 40xx pistols.

In a classic example of "if you can't beat them, join them", Smith & Wesson launched the polymer-framed, striker-fired Sigma line of autos in 1994. Despite applying for a number of patents on the design and slathering it with marketing gobbledygook, there was no hiding the embarrassing fact that the Sigma was, for all intents and purposes, a reverse-engineered Glock 17.

Not only did Glock sue, but the launch timing couldn't have been worse, as the new 17-shot 9mm autoloaders started shipping only months before Congress's new so-called "Assault Weapons Ban" went into effect, neutering the magazine capacity of the gun for private citizens and making "pre-ban" standard capacity Sigma magazines among the scarcest and most valuable from '94 to '04.

Smith settled with Glock out of court and the Sigma morphed into the SW (and later SD) line of pistols, going from an attempt to unseat Glock in duty holsters to a budget-oriented offering for cash strapped pistol customers.

Smith withdrew for a while to lick its wounds before making another serious run at the polymer duty gun market in late 2005 with the M&P series, which borrowed its moniker from the classic fixed-sight service revolvers...er, much to the chagrin of some purists at the time.

The scoffers, including yours truly, were wrong. While it never supplanted the Glock as the dominant pistol choice in the holsters of law enforcement and private citizens in the U.S., it was definitely the leading "not a Glock" from its introduction until fairly recently, when that role was taken over by Sig Sauer's P320. From 2006 until about 2017, you could be sure that any holster or accessory that came out on the market, if it were made for anything other than a Glock, would also be made for an M&P.

The pictured M&P9 features two of those accessories: A LaserGrip and a LightGuard from Crimson Trace. Thanks to its replaceable backstraps, the integration of the LaserGrip on the M&P is among the most seamless of any polymer auto.

The pictured pistol, which was my carry gun from the middle of 2011 until nearly the last day of 2015, is kind of unusual. Product Code 150580 is a factory two-tone: the usual black polymer frame with the stainless slide left in its natural color, rather than Melonited black. It's uncommon enough not to be listed in the SCSW4E. I bought it used at an Indy 1500 gun show back in the summer of '11, still in the factory box with three magazines, for $399 and I'd say that I more than got my money's worth out of it.
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