A guy from church and I went to the range on Independence Day to get some shooting in on our day off. We took a number of rifles and pistols and spent a few hrs. playing around.

When we hit the pistol range we shot a variety of handguns and while I was showing him my little pocket pistol we decided to put some rounds through it so he could get an idea of how it shoots.

We both put a few mags through it with no problems. I decided to run a rapid fire string through it but after the 2nd or 3rd round the take down lever dropped into my left hand and the slide shot of the frame landing about 8-10' in front of me with a live round in the chamber.

I contacted S&W and the cust. serv. rep didn't hesitate or ask any questions, he simply told me to return it and they would check it out. I ask him if they had seen this before and he kind of hesitated in answering but then admitted to seeing this before.

S&W sent me a shipping label to my e-mail and I shipped it back today. The cust. serv. rep said turn around would take about 10 days.

I'm not posting this as a complaint, only to inform those of you who own a BG .380 that you need to be sure and shoot it regularly to ensure that it's going to function when you need it.

I still like the gun for those times when pocket carry is my only option but I'm going to have to put some rounds through it before I'll trust my life to it. Anyone else experience this problem?

This was a common problem on the early production models I believe. After S&W gets done with it you wont have that problem ever again.

I guess you should consider yourself lucky it happened at the range and not when you really needed to count on it-

My thoughts exactly. I don't know what would be worse, crapping my pants after I noticed my gun fell apart or the embarrasment I would feel when the BG started laughing at the situation.

Hopefully you will get it back in the 10 day span, just read on another post S&W will be shut down the whole month of August.

I had the same experience with an early BG380. S&W quickly updated the takedown lever spring to solve what you described. In fact the new takedown spring is so stout you may have trouble rotating the lever to disassemble the first few times until it loosens up. I used an old plastic toothbrush handle for leverage those first couple of times. Now it takes down easily.

I can deal with a stout lever as long as I know that the issue is resolved. Thanks for the info.