I'm gonna make my own Stack-A-Toe, but better...with blackjack. And hookers.

[HCM]

Erick Gelhaus has been running an M&P with an acro and apex parts on duty for most of the last decade. Congrats on the new gun and optic.

Hasn't the ACRO only been out like 3 or 4 years max?

Forget it, he’s rolling …

[TCinVA]

If my Wife sees this post, I'll be putting one together. But she'll be skeptical of the trigger being 1911 like.

Maybe I should show her the post, & she can decide on the trigger herself.

The "duty" trigger isn't 1911 like in that it has a long takeup. The actual trigger pull, though, is short, smooth, has minimal over-travel and a quick reset.

The forward set triggers feel different as they don't have the takeup but tend to break about the same and exhibit minimal overtravel...which is kind of important given how far out there they sit.

[guymontag]

You’re gonna need to attach some ex-LE, ex SF names onto this - you gotta pump those numbers up, those are rookie numbers.

But really, well thought out setup - now all that extra cash can flow somewhere else!

[Erick Gelhaus]

I think Tim is on to something here. The 4” & 4.25” thumb safety versions of the 9mm M&P 2.0 are excellent choices.

After 20+ years of carrying, using, training, competing, and teaching with, etc., 1911s, I switched to 9mm M&Ps at the start of 2012 with an RMR and Apex parts. I ended my Beta test relationship with Trijicon at the end of 2012.

I kept carrying the 9mm M&P until mid-2014 – when I switched to a Gen 4 -17 because of work stuff – and returned to it in 2018 with a new RMR. Fwiw, not every 1.0 9mm was inaccurate. An Acro went on a 2.0 as soon as Atei could finish cutting the slide in mid-2019.

Apex Tactical DCAEK is The Answer for making the trigger press cleaner! I don’t care about light as much as I want clean. However, a mistake I see across the shooting community is trying to make non-1911 pistols into 1911/2011 pistols by making the triggers into something they aren’t and cannot be. Doing that with duty guns may well be a problem.

Randy @ Apex was kind enough to fit Apex barrels to my first few 4” & 4.25” pistols. I wasn’t sure I’d want to go that route until I had one of the deputies from LASD-SEB come through the first Gunsite pistol-mounted optics class with one of those barrels (and Apex internals).

S&W and the factory cut slide – I talked with S&W at SHOT this year about the slide. Their guy wasn’t sure they would ever have any interest in the outside of the first agency they were made for. I tried telling him he was quite mistaken, but I don’t think he believed that. Glock has an SKU for Acro cut slides as well. I wish that option was more widely available from S&W; while I’m more than happy with the people at & work from Atei, I’d prefer not to ship the slide out for work.

For duty guns, I really prefer enclosed emitter optics. Hence, why I put up with the battery life issues with my early 2019 Acro P1. I wish that Holosun & Steiner (as well as whomever else is developing them) could have adopted the same footprint. Fortunately, my Steiner MPS fits on the Acro cut.

The availability of thumb safety models was a big driver behind me going to the M&P from 1911a1s. I prefer it for cop work and concealed carry, but I seemed to be one of the few voices in that wilderness. I’m glad to read Tim likes it as well.

I was a little late to the B8 game, even though the USBP had agents shooting silhouette targets with them early in the last century. I shot them at the FBI instructor course in ’96 and again with Vickers in ’08. I’m aware their popularity has increased since then.

I would not argue against this combo as an issued L/E duty pistol. How could I? I carry another proto-type version of it and have for years. However, what I would recommend and spec out for an agency is a bit different. It would likely cost more, but it would not be a 5lb S/A or striker-fired pistol, it would have a clean 7.5-8lb trigger and an Acro cut slide.

Again, I think Tim is going down the right path with this.

[Darth_Uno]

I can't tell you how nice it is to just do up one fastener and have all the concerns about mounting an optic completely evaporate. / This is the way optic mounting should be

Don’t have an M&P, but I got an Acro cut Glock slide (Centurion) and I 110% agree.

Years ago I asked “if red dots are so great, why don’t we have them on carry guns?” There were a number of reasons at the time, but it turns out I was right. I just had to wait until a viable solution came along (direct milling).

Then I said, it’d be nice if you could just mount it on a rail like a regular optic. That sure seems better. I knew you needed not only an optic that mounted that way, but the rest of the market to accept it and make slides to accommodate. Again, I just had to wait.

I quite like my RMR’s, but I won’t be buying more now that it seems the cross-bolt method is here to stay. I expect other optic brands to follow suit.

[TCinVA]

The M&P itself bears some consideration.

I started to seriously look at the M&P as a result of Todd's endurance tests on the guns years ago. (I'd prefer not to think of how many years ago...) They seemed to be very reliable pistols. I handled a couple and I found that unlike the other striker fired gun in the game (The Glock) that it wouldn't cut the dickens out of my hands. Ammo was cheaper and I could fit more bullets in the magazines. What I didn't appreciate as much then but have learned to appreciate in the intervening years is just how important the fit of the grip is to performance with the pistol.

The revolver masters of old understood the importance of making the grip fit your hand. That's one of the reasons why factory stocks for old S&W and Colt revolvers are valuable, because anyone who knew what was up immediately junked them and put new stocks on their revolvers. Often these were custom made specifically for the customer's hand via a tracing.

One of the reasons why the 1911 was as popular a defensive tool as it was relates to the size and shape of the frame and the stocks. If you look at it closely, you'll notice it's sort of an irregular oval. You can play with the thickness of the stocks of the 1911 to adjust for hand size and trigger reach. Hell, if you actually look at Jeff Cooper gripping a 1911 there are some clues there about how he was building his grip that explain his preference for the 1911. It wasn't just the trigger or caliber.

The M&P has one of the best engineered grips of any handgun on the market today. The shape of the grip is more like an oval than the more square grip of a Glock, and that makes a huge difference in how well you can perform with it. I can shoot a Glock very well, but it's never fit me well. It's sort of like running in shoes that don't quite fit. You can do it, but it sort of sucks.

The M&P lets me get the grip I want to get on the gun instead of having to fit my hands around what some Austrian bent on world domination insists is "ergonomic" based on his extensive research of a few soldiers at a barracks.

How we get on the gun has significant implications for how we can perform with it.

There's a certain margin of error built into the mechanical accuracy of the pistol itself. Then there's a certain margin for error in the ammunition. Then there's a margin of error in the pink squishy bit behind the gun. These are all additive. If we have an 8" shooter at 25 yards and we hand him a gun/ammo combination that shoots 4" at 25, there's now a 12" zone of uncertainty down there. Keeping it on paper is about the best we can hope for him to do. A gun that actually fits the shooter's hand can knock some of the shooter's margin of error down. If just having a better fitting gun could knock the shooter's margin of error down from 8" to 6 or 7, the overall chances of them scoring a hit at that 25 yard distance increase significantly.

The same sort of error reduction is true of the trigger. It's much harder to manage a trigger you can't reach properly. Cooper took a lot of stick for maligning "crunchentickers", but if you've taught significant numbers of students trying to use them, you've encountered people who simply cannot reach that DA trigger set forward of a big blocky grip that's necessary to accommodate a double stack magazine. If you've got Bill Jordan sized hands it's not a problem...but for more normally sized mortals the reach on a P226 or Beretta 92 of the time really made shooting it accurately a challenge.

The trigger component tends to be where people focus because it's the most easily changed on modern semi-auto handguns. (Even the Beretta can be had with a vastly improved trigger now) The trigger tends to be thought of as the modification for improving shootability, and that has indeed resulted in people trying to make Glock triggers into 1911 triggers...which is almost always a fucking terrible idea. And it's almost always focused on the wrong bit of the trigger pull to boot. I remember when the first Haley endorsed Glock trigger (the "skimmer", IIRC) came out and people started putting it into their Glocks only to notice it was essentially deactivating the striker block and causing the striker to sit almost fully cocked.

I can't tell you how many aftermarket Glock fire control bits I've seen cause serious issues over the years. The Glock has now reached the same point as the 1911 reached years ago. Everybody is building parts for it, and everybody has their own opinion on how those parts should be made. The difference is that damn few of the people making parts for the Glock have any of Glock's internal knowledge about their manufacturing processes and the implications that has for the clearances and tolerances of parts. The number of guns I've seen exhibit failures to reset or doing an intermittent impression of the Glock 18 because their fire control bits had been tampered with is legion.

The place where most shooters really struggle with Glocks is in the overtravel, not so much the pre-travel, IMO. It's that period after the trigger breaks while the trigger is still moving and the bullet is still inside the gun combined with the square shape of the grip that tends to produce the ubiquitous steerage and squirming of the gun to the support side...not the pre-travel.

The goal of the Apex kit in this gun isn't to make the trigger into a 1911 trigger, because it's not. I deliberately chose the duty trigger setup because I wanted takeup in the trigger so that my brain has a better chance of recognizing that I'm moving the trigger if I'm trigger checking under stress. (I'm human enough to do that. I'd wager most people are.)

The trigger itself isn't as light as a good 1911 trigger, but it does break smoothly without hitting any sort of wall...and it's the "hitting the wall" that tends to induce the tendency to steer the gun off target. People press the trigger, hit resistance, and then start applying more force with the entire hand, steering the gun off target.

What I'm seeing with this pistol so far is that my margin for error is lower and the gun's margin for error is lower. I still make the same mistakes, but the consequences are that the bullet holes are closer to where I intended them to be than with my current carry gun, the Gen5 G17. That can be a significant advantage under stress.

[WobblyPossum]

Great shooting. I had thought of almost exactly this setup ever since the Wilson EDC X9 was released and someone posted that an M&P could be made into a poor man’s version. Nothing changes with the current hotness Stack-A-Toe. The direct milled ACRO slides just make things better. I only wish they were more available from the factory and that more optic manufacturers would standardize on a cut like that. There’s no reason even open emitter optics can’t be designed with an ACRO footprint.

[HCM]

Great shooting. I had thought of almost exactly this setup ever since the Wilson EDC X9 was released and someone posted that an M&P could be made into a poor man’s version. Nothing changes with the current hotness Stack-A-Toe. The direct milled ACRO slides just make things better. I only wish they were more available from the factory and that more optic manufacturers would standardize on a cut like that. There’s no reason even open emitter optics can’t be designed with an ACRO footprint.

I’ve tried to like the M&P a few times over the years. While it was great on paper it never quite worked for me. However, one could achieve a similar result with a thumb safety variant P320 FCU and a Gray Guns trigger. It also provides multiple grip options though it gets there by different means. SIG doesn't yet offer an ACRO factory cut but standard slides can be cut for the ACRO.

[JRB]

Thank you TC for taking the time to write this all up! I've personally noticed the same educational benefits from shooting with a dot, even solo without instruction. Looks like I really need to try an M&P with a dot soon.

The S&W SKU I found for the base ACRO-cut M&P 2.0 is 13353

That SKU is a 4.25" 17+1 with the ACRO cut, optic height sights, and w/o a safety. Does anyone know if S&W has an SKU for the same configuration, but with a manual safety?
I haven't found an open source for the 13353 gun yet, but one LE/Mil dealer offers them to qualified personnel for around $550.

[WobblyPossum]

I’ve tried to like the M&P a few times over the years. While it was great on paper it never quite worked for me. However, one could achieve a similar result with a thumb safety variant P320 FCU and a Gray Guns trigger. It also provides multiple grip options though it gets there by different means. SIG doesn't yet offer an ACRO factory cut but standard slides can be cut for the ACRO.

My first LE issued handgun was a .40 M&P 1.0. I liked it alright and it shot fairly well. I briefly messed around with a 2.0 Compact 9mm that I bought as a gift for a friend and wanted to shoot enough to verify reliability. I liked that one a lot. It had addressed most of the issues I had with the first generation such as the mushy trigger and the bar-of-soap smoothness of the frame. I wish the striker parts weren’t secured by the rear sight. Glock really has spoiled me with how simple the guns are and how easy they are to perform armorer level maintenance work on.

For anyone wanting to dip a toe into the pool of guns like the EDC X9 or 2011s who isn’t entirely sure they want to drop the money, setting up an M&P like Tim’s is a hell of a way to get a gun 90% of the way there for a fraction of the cost. If the group posted on the OP is indicative of the quality of the average Apex semi-drop in barrel, these guns will be great shooters.

I just want the industry to standardize on some optic mounting system for handgun slides the way they standardized on the pic rail for rifles. Then everyone coming out with a MRDS will have to go with the standard footprints, otherwise no one will buy an optic they can’t mount to their gun.