Only ran 3 magazines through one as it was a "no buy" for me. The rest of my time was tearing it apart and seeing how its designed. Shooting wise they are fine. Great ergos as is the norm on S&W. I didnt have problems manipulating its but I have strong hands from things like sports and metal work. I can see where people are struggling with these though. My main carry for this type are Makarovs and Keltec P11 style which all have 20# springs or more so stiff slide dont bother me.
I wasnt mine so I wasnt adjusting the sights. POI was a little to the left but the group itself was fine at 15 Yards or so. I downloaded the 10 round magazine to 9 because IMO they are overstating capacity on these even though I can mash in a 10th round. They are more reliable as a 9+1. Ist hangup was at the end of the ist magazine. 2nd was at the begining of magazine 3. From what I could tell it was a tight extractor.. could just need breaking in though because these pistols are oversprung by necessity.
Biggest hitch is the cleaning. Cant clean that striker (A necessity with all strikers is that they are kept CLEAN) without removal of the sight which then requires a re-zero. As they are they are the best feeling in the hand of all the small 380s and trigger is nice enough. I liked the original bodyguard as well in terms of ergos and I while the trigger was a true DAO (which people cant seem to handle these days) it also had a second strike and overall was a better pistol in terms of a true pocket gun. 2.0 is more like a Subcompact 380acp people would use in things like a bug match. I cant see being able to carry one of these in a pocket without it being obvious.
As far as a range plinker though I really like it. Not convinced they are durable longterm but as long as people keep the springs fresh it should be able to mitigate things... NO HOT LOADS. These 2.0 are not Beretta Pico, Kahr P380, Glock 42, or Ruger LC380 (NOT LCP).
Most will probably fall in love with these one they figure them out. Best thing I would say is break it in. After breakin to check for any issues.. send your magazines out to get NP3 coated so they are as slick as possible. Then keep springs fresh all around. I would do complete spring changes every 1-1.5K rounds. They are extremely light and riding close threshold in terms of durability. Keeping the striker channel clean and the pistols over all very clean is going to be mandatory. Just take a scribe and mark your rear sight so you can index it back to POI when you have to remove it. Besides spare spring to keep on hand I would also get spare magazine followers because they are pretty flimsy for the amount of strain they are under in that magazine. Its not a good magazine design and I cant tell just from the internals they were struggling to make them work.
Im back and forth on weather I will ever get one. Perhaps when they are cheap and people are dumping them IDK. I would have to be able to source a lot of spare parts and be willing to remove the rear sight after every range trip so it would involve loosening the fit of the rear and locking it down with a set screw indexed into a divot on the slide under the sight. Might be worth the work though for the ergos because as I said they feel really great.
Easiest way I could see around the striker cleaning issue would be simply to cut a dovetail further forward on the slide for the rear sight and just make a plate for the existing rear dovetail that is easily removable to get to that striker removal. Magazine, Striker, and Extractor are basically the most important areas to keep clean on any Striker pistol. Hammer fired guns are much more forgiving in the FP area.
Keep a CCW pistol clean is MUCH more important than range or hunting pistols. S&W design team dropped the ball on these pistols IMO. All modern trikers need to have easily accesable Strikers and channels for cleaning. Mossberg Mc1SC is a good example as seen here.
I know they want to keep cost low on the bodyguard but they are running 400-$500 so S&W need to do more on their end. They also need to be nickel coating their magazine tubes if they are struggling that much to keep the run speed up with the cycle time of the action. Ideally they shoukld have added some weight to the slide buit its obviopus they were going for EXTREME weightloss. Anything to add weight to that slide is going to help on the consumer end. Its a lot easier to pull off this kind of ultralight slide with a single stack magazine beacuse single stacks have very little friction and dont need to keep shifting cartridges around in the magazine. That 1.5 stack magtube design brings in a lot of problems.... always has. Russians went through it with the Makarove and had to resore to basically a two tier follower system with two independent springs and even the springs are very different and they are more like a normal recoil spring as to not have weakpoints.
Russian Double Stack Makarov Magazines shown below along with the Shield 2.0
View attachment 850833
And the Bodyguard 2.0 Magazine design.
View attachment 850834
S&W is trying to work voodoo magic with their bottleneck magazines in terms of both the followers and the springs. The more complicated a spting is the more they fail and that Spring is a hot mess. One the springs start becoming compromised so does follower stability. Its going to be extremely important to keep the magazines clean and springs fresh. Maxing out the load to 10 rounds is going to make it worse which is why I went with 9 on the 2.0 I shot (First thing I did when it was handed to me was tear it apart specifically the magazine). I didnt have my scale on me unfortunately to weigh the slide but its EXTREMELY Light which mean FAST, FAST, FAST cycle on a tilting barrel lock design.
Im not surprised so many people have had problems with them. Im not going to bash S&W because IMO they are a good company that stands behind their products and doest the right thing for the consumer but they rushed this and didnt test it properly. The design needs more work. Whomever green lit the final version 2.0 doesnt understand basic fireams fundamentals. Theres a lot of bad choices made throughout the course of this design.
Of course right now people are in love with them but thats just how the firearms market is now online because there are fanboys, industry insiders, bots, and everything else online.
If S&W was going to stick to a tiliting lockup they need to increase mass on the slide. No way around it. I would say overall the pistols are underbuilt, Oversprung (Because they are underbuilt), Non maintinance friendly (Which is silly for a CCW), and a rushed and poorly thought out product interms of producing an all time great pistol. They likely saw the massive sales on the Ruger LCP Max (also poor design IMO) and just rushed this to market through designs basically done by computer programs and not actually tested. This would explain how they have had to try to MAKE it function with crazy spring weights.
Lots of pistols are finicky beasts though. I have bug 9mm pistols I wont even shoot standard 115gr in and have to instead run 100gr loads closer to a 380acp+p level in terms of power. One of them is even a S&W. I still like it.
Bodyguard 2.0 is going to be a sensetive pistol to everything being clean and working perfectly though for performance. Theres basically no margin for error on it.
