With this Performance Center pistol, you don’t just get the pistol, you get two magazines, a cable lock, and a 14-piece gun cleaning kit in its own case.įirst, the EZ’s magazines are only centerfire handgun magazines that I can think of which feature a thumb stud on the side of the follower to make it easier to load. Smith & Wesson changed a lot of things on this pistol to make it much easier to load the magazines, easier to chamber a round, easier to shoot, and easier to disassemble for cleaning than a standard Shield. Smith & Wesson’s Shield wasn’t the first compact 9mm semi-auto, but it led a fresh wave of them, and compact and even subcompact 9mm pistols now seem to be the preferred carry pieces for private citizens. Everybody else there fired as many rounds (we burned through cases and cases of ammo), and nobody had problems with their guns. When S&W debuted the gun, they invited a bunch of gunwriters to their facility and in two days I put 700 rounds through a Shield without a single problem. That meant it had steel sights, a stainless-steel barrel and slide, and the durability testing of the Shield was off the charts. It was built to the same tough standards as the full-size M&P pistols, as S&W wanted cops to buy them as backups to their M&P duty guns in addition to private citizens buying them for personal protection. It sported a 3.1-inch barrel and weighed 19 ounces. It was a compact, single stack (kinda) version of the M&P, chambered in 9mm and fed by flush seven-round or extended eight-round magazines. Introduced in 2012, the original S&W M&P Shield was an immediate and huge success. 380 Shield EZ, then circle halfway back around to this new 9mm Performance Center Shield EZ model. Let’s start at the beginning with the original 9mm Shield and do a little history lesson and study the family tree, working forward from there to the. The original is more concealable, but the new gun has a higher capacity and more features. × An original 9mm Shield on the left, compared to the Performance Center M&P9 Shield EZ on the right. All three-color variations of this pistol are available with or without a bilateral thumb safety, and I obtained a sample with a thumb safety. Chambered in 9mm, this pistol is fed by eight-round magazines and has a 3.83-inch barrel. Overall this pistol is 7.0 inches long and 5.0 inches tall and weighs 23.2 ounces with a magazine in place. The gold (as is the silver and black) is anodizing, not 24K. I will leave it to you to decide if you like the aesthetic. Everyone knows what black and silver look like, but as for a gun with gold highlights, it could look classy, or trashy, or somewhere in-between, which is why I chose this gun, so you could see for yourself. This pistol is available in three color variations - all black, black with silver highlights, and black with gold highlights as you see here. For those of you thinking, “What the pimp-in-a-purple-fedora hell is going on here?,” let me explain. You’ve all already seen the photos accompanying this article of the pistol in question. This Performance Center model features upgrades inside and out. So, S&W offered a 9mm version of the Shield EZ. 380 Shield EZ was a huge hit, but many people had the same complaint - the caliber. To fix that, S&W recently introduced a 9mm version of the Shield EZ (the M&P9 Shield EZ, a slightly better name) and now they’ve introduced a semi-custom version of that same pistol, the Performance Center M&P9 Shield EZ. The only downside to the Smith & Wesson M&P380 Shield EZ in many people’s minds was the caliber. 380 ACP.īut…then I laid hands on it, and I experienced everything S&W did to make this gun easier to load, clean, shoot, etc. 40 S&W, and this new pistol was “only” a.

The original Shield was offered in 9mm and. Then, I hated the very idea of it: S&W took one of their most popular and smart guns ever, sized it up to make it less concealable, and then chambered it in a smaller, weaker cartridge. Seriously, say it out loud, it’s thirteen syllables, that’s more than antidisestablishmentarianism. When it was announced, the Smith & Wesson M&P380 Shield EZ was one of those guns that I couldn’t wait to hate.

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