Choosing M&P Shield M2.0 or Shield EZ 9mm - Smith and Wesson

hello everybody this is hammer striker here got a couple of em and Pete's on the table we've got an M&P shield em 2.0 chambered 9-millimeter and we've got the new mmp-9 shield or shield 9 ez both of these are made by Smith & Wesson the 2.0 version of the shield came out maybe a year or so ago maybe a little bit longer and it's a vast improvement over the original shield and then just very recently the 9 ez came out following the popularity of the 380 easy so we're going to do a quick comparison between the two of them because one of the things that might come to mind is did the 9 ez make this gun irrelevant should I kick it to the curb just get the EZ or if I'm shopping why would I get one or the other there are a few reasons why you would pick one or the other so that's we're gonna go through so first thing I'm going to do is make sure that none of these are going to be any bitey that one's unloaded and that one is unloaded so I have to worry about them doing anything unpleasant to us so let's start with the shield M 2.0 this is the second generation of the shield and the biggest changes they made there's some minor cosmetic changes but the major change is a vast improvement north on the trigger the trigger went to a roughly a five pound trigger with a reasonable amount of take-up and a nice short crisp break and a decent reset it's not a short reset like the ppq but it's also not all the way out it's pretty much taken it back to where the take-up cleared so it's not a super short reset but it's a nice trigger very easy to get back on target and it's even getting an over travel stop built into the frame so overall it's a nice trigger and this is one of the things that actually kind of caused us to even look at these because we had both tried the shield's before various rental ranges and friends the triggers were hideous and we had some reliability issues with the old ones this one the trigger is nice and it has worked flawlessly so let's look at the easy one thing I'll know to is that the hinge trigger so you see it's got the hinge trigger the easy lacks the hinge trigger so you might think that it doesn't have that safety feature but it adds grip safety now these are contentious these are one of those love it or hate of things this one has caused no problems when you grab the gun even close to a good grip it automatically deactivates that so the grip safety helps perform one of the functions that the hinge trigger would which is preventing inertial poles and this is similar to what you see in a 1911 or the XDM series by Springfield so let's give this trigger a try it has a shorter take-up then the regular shield that same short crisp break and you'll see it also has the over travel stock and a nice reset and I let it go a little too far out so I'm gonna do it again there's the reset it's not all the way out close though but it's an overall a decent reset so you've got nice triggers on both of these from a capacity standpoint the EZ comes in one capacity and that is eight and it uses these magazines that kind of look like 22 magazines they've got these little follower tags on them and these little follower tangs allow you to hold the follower down to make it easier to load the magazine they're relatively thin and they've got these little wings on them that are part of the catch for the magazine catch and they fit flush with the grip the shield the M 2.0 it comes in two different choices of capacity eight and seven with the seven the flush magazine you've actually got a shorter grip the grip height on the regular one is 4.5 inches with seven rounds and it's close to five inches when you put the extender in and you get your 8 rounds the easy is four point nine eight inches with the only option available which is the eight round magazine so you don't lose any capacity going to the easy but you do lose the ability to get a shorter grip and of course for concealment the grip is the hard part to hide the length of them is a little different as well you'll see that the EZ is longer and I'm going to I'm going to hold these up side by side and show you all the different dimensions after I talk about them but the regular M&P is six point one inches long the EZ is six point eight inches long and the EZ does have a longer barrel three point 675 yeah they went all the way out to that to that level of resolution versus a three point one inch barrel so the EZ is a slightly bigger gun and a lot of that has to do with what they had to do to make the slide easy that's really the big calling feature of this gun the last dimension before we actually start talking about the slides is with you'll see that the regular MMP is much thinner it's 0.99 inches thick whereas the easy edit short at its narrowest is 1.15 and then when you factor in these little wings at the back here it becomes 1.43 so if true concealed carry deep concealed pocket conceals what you're looking for the original shield is going to draw your attention but let's actually put them side-by-side so you can see the differences and I'll do it with the flush mags it's only fair that I actually put the flush mag in it so you'll see that the grip is much shorter on the regular MMP and of course yes if you put the extended mag in they're the same size but for a concealed carry you would be you would be actually using the regular mag at your primary mag and then you'd be putting in the extended as your backup or your recharged mag now if I put them this way and I kind of already showed you a little bit you can see that this there's definitely a thickness difference and of course the length difference is fairly obvious as well you can notice that one thing you will notice is the easy that's Picatinny rail whereas the regular one doesn't both of these are available in versions with a Crimson Trace laser the one has a laser guard and the other has a you know rail mounted laser so both of these have the options for lasers and lights and all the different combos Crimson Trace has kind of perfected that laser guard concept when they started dealing with Glock from a weight perspective the original one wins that battle as well at eighteen point three ounces versus twenty three ounces for the easy so the easy is definitely heavier gun a couple things that the easy does have is of course it has the grip safety whether that's something you like or not may actually be a deciding factor for a lot of people both of them are available with a thumb safety option both of them have internal drop safeties and both of them either using the combination of the grip safety or the hinge trigger are safe from inertial pull so overall they're designed to be drop safe weapons and both of them have a mechanism for loaded chamber it's a view port on the regular MP plus the striker wool or the extractor will protrude a little bit and on the easy this lever will lift up you don't have a view port but this will lift up a little bit so that you have a quick easy indication of a loaded chamber on both of them these sights on both of them are quite nice there's three dot very bright white easy to see three dot both of them are dovetailed front and rear so you can easily replace the sights but one thing the easy has is a wind adjustable sight there's a little adjustment you actually have to get to it from underneath you loosen it up from the underneath and adjust it without having to actually drift the sight of course because they're dovetailed you can adjust the sights on any of these but this has actually got a designed to be easily adjusted for windage sight MSRP is similar on both of these it's 479 and the street price is close the original shield is down around the 350 strike street price the easy is right now it's kind of round the 379 but it'll probably come down and by the way when I mention original shield I'm talking about this M 2.0 version not the true original which would be the 1.0 it's this this one here that I've got so now you start looking at it to say well there's really nothing about the EZ that makes it better it's heavier it's longer it's longer in both directions it's fatter so why would I want it well there's one really good reason for that it's very very easy hence the name to operate the slide whether you're doing it with you a couple fingers catching those wings or even if you had to do it with just a couple of your edged fingers it's just super easy so if you have a difficulty with operating a slide that has liked you out of the nine-millimeter territory the easy fixes that now this doesn't have a difficult to operate slide but you'll see just by the way I'm pulling on it and we pull the mag out so it's even even I'm heaven too I'm having to noticeably grip it and do some pulling on it and it's very difficult to catch it would you know my weak fingers trying to use my left hand just the two fingers on the end I can do it but I'm having to work at rows with the EZ and do it all day so what the EZ brings to the table is the ability for somebody that has compromised hands weaker hands or even if you've got really brutally strong hands but you injured in a fight you now can easily rack the slide on the gun that's the attractive feature what you're giving up is a little bit of size and a little bit of weight to get that feature but up until now people that have had hand problems have been either relegated to hammer guns external hammer guns where they can thumb the hammer back first and then pull back the slide or they've been relegated to the lesser calibers like the 380 and most of the 380 SR in this size territory that have easy to rack slides so one interesting note by the way the field M 2.0 is a striker gun this is a hammer gun but it's an internal hammer and that's part of how they accomplished that lighter slide so when I take it apart I'll show you how that works and you wouldn't know that by looking at it because the hammer is completely internal it actually kind of looks like a striker gun so that is really the big attraction the adjustable sights kind of cool but once you get the sight set where you need it it's kind of done but the ability to rack the slide really attracts a lot of people to this that have pretty much been locked out of anything else up until now maintenance on these is both actually really easy there's a couple minor differences I'll show you so I'm gonna go ahead and take them apart one at a time so we'll start with the shield 2.0 they both work about the same in the process you lock them back flip the lever down down on the 2.0 it's going to be hard to see it but there's a yellow arm in there it's underneath the extractor so I'm putting my thumb on the extractor and you'll see below there's a yellow arm you can reach in there with a pick and push that arm down to disengage the sear and that's an optional process so that will that way you don't have to pull the trigger but you have to lock the gun back anyway so you just make sure it's clear bring it forward take the trigger and it comes apart I'm not going to go through a bunch of details on the mechanisms you've going to put a link to the full review for both these guns but you'll see this is you're pretty much a classic striker slide drop safety and then you've got a striker mechanism that looks very similar to Glock and many of the others you see the sears back here and then you've got pretty robust rails and then there's a little better view of that arm now if I push the arm down I'd either have to lift the arm back up when I'm done or insert a magazine which will push it up for me now the easy starts the same lock it back flip down the lever no trigger I didn't touch the trigger if you look at the slide it's a little bit different there's a cutout here and where some of the other mechanisms would be is gone because this isn't a striker gun it's a hammer gun and here's the hammer right there now it's kind of important to make sure that you don't pull the trigger while you have it disassembled because the hammer will over travel forward could damage the gun beyond that the rails are fairly similar things are a little bit different layout but overall it's it's to maintain either one of these and while you're cleaning out one way you can prevent accidentally pulling the triggers be careful not to engage the grip safety so as you handle it you know kind of stay away from the triggers stay away from the grip safety so that way you don't accidentally damage the gun now reassembling them both is relatively easy but this one does have a quirk so does the other one make sure you don't hold the grip safety when you reassemble it you see those arms that come up when you go to reassemble it if you're holding the grip safety those arms will interfere with the slide so you want to grab it from the side or from here or from down low but don't grab it with the grip safety engage where you won't be able to get the slide back so all I did is put two pull it back and kind of grab it from the side slid it back and then flip the lever down and you're back in business we now have an operational easy now putting together the M 2.0 is equally easy of course you don't have to worry about how you hold up it could help if I put the thing back on the right way so this one isn't going together because I inadvertently didn't make sure the recoil spring was centered which that's true of any gun with no Multan no matter what one it is if the recoil springs not centered it'll catch when you go to put it back together and that caused it to hang up flip the lever now if I'd push the singer down I'd either have to with a lock back reach in there and flip it up or insert a magazine to reengage it because I chose to pull the trigger a tree re-engaged automatically neither one of these is difficult to maintain whether you've got strong hands or not they were about the same that it takes to work with them of course it is easier to lock the easy back because the slides lighter but overall that really is probably the big determining factor which one of these you would choose is do you need that ability the last factor that might come into play of course is reliability and shooting both of these have been reliable though we did have a couple issues with this one where it wanted to lock back and I don't know if that's just a break-in thing or if it was being held improperly but it tended to lock back mid magazine and early did that once or twice so I just gonna keep an eye on this to see if that's a problem there may be a spring that's not set correctly but it did function reliably ignoring that and it didn't Jam it's all I had to do is just you know release it and put it back into service and again throughout all the shooting we did with it it only did that once or twice this one has been flawless the M 2.0 has been flawless we haven't had a single issue with it which was that differs from what our experience with the original 1.0 which we have reliability issues on everyone we tried yours you know you might have one point on it's been flawless and that's that's cool this one has been good and both of these are considered am 2.0 by the way they're they're part of the second generation from Smith & Wesson both were easy to shoot well both were easy to get on target the triggers feel almost identical and if you had the extended magazines and the grips almost feel identical of course this when you get a two finger grip with the short magazine and then a three finger grip if you put the extender in it and this one is you know kind of natively a three finger grip but beyond that I wouldn't say that the shooting impressions were different between the two of them in summary of the to both hammer and I have one of these in our get home bag to the original M 2.0 not too easy and we're not going to change that easy is a nice gun but this has that compact nature neither of us needs the lighter slide so we're just gonna stick with this and our get home bags but this will stay around will stay in the safe it is fun to shoot so we're not going to kick it to the curb and I think if you choose this to get that lighter slide you're not going to be making a mistake if you choose this for the more compact nature and lighter you're also not making a mistake and beyond that if you like our videos please give us a thumbs up share subscribe click that bell to be notified if you do check us out on patreon Facebook Twitter Instagram and have a great day thank you [Applause] you

Channel: Hammer Striker

Views: 231,130

Rating: 4.933104 out of 5

Keywords: Shield, 9mm, 9 mm, Shield EZ, buying guide, buyer, guide, versus, compared, choosing, Smith, Wesson, S&W, new, easy

Id: 7Lta2Vtbmjg

Length: 18min 24sec (1104 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 10 2020