harleyman5:
The M&P9's and 40's are available with and without the Hilary Lock (which is the little round hole), with and without a magazine safety (guns without one are marked on the slide), and with and without thumb safeties.
The Hilary Lock and thumb safety may be exclusive, but it appears that the mag safety is available either way.
S&W, for sound economic reasons, uses the same manual for all of them.
(There's also the option of the "Massachusetts Compliant" sear block.)
And you're correct - some areas require the mag safety and/or Hilary Lock, and the MA Compliant sear block is pretty obvious
....
I'm too lazy to figure out the total number of possibles....
It doesn't appear that you can add a thumb safety easily (S&W will say you can't) to a gun that didn't come with one, but the rest of these options are a mix & match sort of thing, except that the MA Compliant sear block, once done (or if you bought it that way) can't be switched back. (But you can swap springs or use an Apex kit to improve that.)
So if you bring one home with a mag safety and Hilary Lock, you can remove those fairly easily. (There's a special spring that goes on the shaft that holds the mag safety and disassembly sear block, in this case, that you'll need to fudge, but tossing the disassembly block also works
. Conversely, you can install a mag safety in a gun that doesn't have one, but you'll need a different spring. The spring actually is a sort of active spacer, to keep things from flopping around, so there's nothing critical there. I haven't tried it, but you probably could cut up a ballpoint pen spring....)
All that said, and it's just a touch of Mas Ayoob paranoia, you probably should never remove a manufacturer-supplied safety device. YMMV....
About mixing guns in manuals.... I swear that the folks at Para got completely carried away with that. My first Para came with a manual that made it abundantly clear that I had the wrong manual until I really dug into things. Full length guide rod? No problem - that's a footnote on page XXX. Double-stacker? Covered back there someplace. Etc.... After about an hour of holding the gun and manual and twisting things around, it finally became clear that other than the guide rod, disassembly was the same as any old 1911, and that I
didn't have the model that required you to take the guide rod apart before trying to take the gun apart....
The Walther P22 may be the best, though, if they didn't change it. The first one I saw (at the club), the owner had to take it apart to show us.... We couldn't get it back together.... Five or six really serious gun guys.... Finally, somebody noticed that little piece of plastic in the pile - it's a very temporary extension to the guide rod. You put the spring on both parts during re-assembly.... The portions of the manual that cover it might as well had been written in Urdu....
(Another story.... WAY back, when the Intel 286 processor was something new, I bought a new machine, and arranged to take it to a buddy's house in Columbus. An impromptu cookout ensued, and we tried to set the machine up - format the HD, etc. He was a serious PC Consultant, a couple of the guys worked for the Microcentre, and one guy was at the top end of Battelle's PC operation. I wasn't the guru that I briefly became yet
. We couldn't get the fool thing to partition properly.... After about four hours, and a lot of beer, and possibly because I don't drink, I figured out that there were two nearly identical screens to deal with, one of which was a sort of "press F1 to change any of this" screen, and just pressing "Enter" didn't do what we thought it would.... Manuals? We don't need no steenkin manuals....
)
NOW, immediately, run out and buy several more M&P's. Gotta keep the numbers up at S&W
....
(Enjoy!)
Regards,
