A guy at work ordered himself a gold-accented Performance Center M&P 380 Shield EZ over the winter. He wanted something easy to shoot, posessing a good trigger, coming with high visibility sights, and taking up roughly the same footprint as his 9mm Shield. He got the call last week to pick it up and his wife immediately told him to lose the gold plated sissy pistol. Evidently, any handgun in her house has to stop a bear. So he tried flipping it to another coworker who triooed me onto the tracks as I walked by at the wrong moment. It's mine, now. New in box and unfired. Wife, kids, and I fixed the unfired problem on Sunday:
Wife prefers the curved trigger on her base model EZ as it keeps her finger high and unpinched by the trigger guard, daughter prefers the smoother and lower profile grip safety of the base model, son needs remediation in a firm grip to prevent stoppages with his noodle arms. In my clumsy mitts, the Performance center can land loose hits on a 5.5" wide by 8" tall target zone with 0.19 second splits at 4.5 yards if I don't fall prey to trigger stutter. I prefer the Performance center to the bSe model for being more endearingly ugly and having a higher profile grip safety to better fit my meathooks with the subtly longer trigger reach.
Just like my wife's gun, the roll pin retaining the loaded chamber indicator is already walking out the right side of the slide. I will recenter it and slam both ends with center punches to flare it in place. That a Performance Center gun is doing this is completely annoying. It wasn't even installed flush at the factory.
This coming weekend, I hope to see if my background check has come up and cleared for the Ruger LCP II Lite Rack .22 and Malaysian model 10. Then head to the range and spend an afternoon doing work. With the Performance Center EZ, I want to shoot a Wizard Drill cold before checking POA/POI at 25 yards and hoping it drives the dot. Then spend the rest of a box of JHP running a police qual. modified for extra headshots as an easy way to do some varied shooting on the clock without curating my own series of drills. Any leftover ammo in the range bag will be spent doing draws to single shots at a 6" steel plate at seven yards. If there is any time after that, I will cast some 105 grain semiwadcutters to load over a fair bit of Unique. Be interesting to see if they feed and, if so, how well the slowish powder gasses the barrel port.
For support gear, I intend to bake a kydex appendix rig (probably blue as to have a chintzy blue and gold nod to the Cub Scouts) when my order of belt loops arrive and possibly put the effort into blanking the spare magazine to press a pouch. If that isn't ready by the weekend, I'll just run the strongside OWB I pressed the wife. Also plan to borrow a bud's Olight Mini to see if one would fit on the dustcover rail.
If the Shield EZ works out, I'll designate it as a potential Old Man belt gun next to a .38 K-frame. Which may come sooner rather than later as my strong arm has a rotator cuff getting closer to a date with the meat carpenter with every passing year. But that's really just an excuse to keep a fun mousegun bought to bail a guy out. Should also make a dandy range piece for novice companions that is of higher build quality than my CPX-3.
Anyone been playing with the EZ series guns? Lucky Gunner's Youtube video is about the only reference I've found from someone who actually runs gear before commenting. I'd be curious to hear how they're working out in actual service. On my end, the Performance Center has been taken down to wipe off the excess factory oil, dry patch run down the bore to degrease, reassembled, and is up to a mere 50 rounds of ball. Won't turn into a 2,000 round affair and is a backburner project that'd take forever to get there anyway so I'd enjoy reading some learned perspectives.