New reason to dislike mag disconnect

[Jaymo]

I'm torn on the mag disconnect issue.
On some pistols, like the P35, M52(IIRC), some Star pistols(IIRC), and others, the mags don't drop free.
On others, like the Ruger SR9 and the 3rd gen Smiths, they do.

As I understand it, a good number of officers have been shot with their own weapons.
Hitting the mag release during a struggle in which the LEO is losing possession of his/her sidearm can keep the criminal from using said sidearm to shoot said officer.
However, if the officer retains possession of said sidearm, he/she now has to insert a spare mag, in order to be able to shoot said criminal.

My 2012-2013 SR9 does not have a different trigger feel with or without the mag disconnect.
Don't know about my 5946, but it has a smooth pull. I see no reason to mess with it, beyond the strip/clean/lube and repair of a sideplate that was sprung pretty far starboard and had actually caused the L/S of the grip to bend (and take a "set") out from the frame.

Part of me doesn't like the MD, part of me does, and part of me is just too apathetic to give a rat's real.
So, I leave them in.

I did take it out of my Star BM, but I reinstalled it when I sold it.
I also took it out of my FEG P35 copy and put it back in when I sold it.

Put it back in the SR9 and just have to remember to only dry-fire it with the mag installed.
Left it in my 5946 and will probably leave it in my 5906 and 6906.

 

[Fastbolt]

And now the crow eating session begins....

Not something to sweat.

If we haven't had some small portion of Crow on our plates at one time or another, we either haven't trained enough, or done enough, to experience the opportunity to learn from mistakes and grow.

I've sometimes thought the folks who claimed to have never had to eat Crow have either led very sheltered lives, or haven't recognized the taste when it was served to them.

 

[Ofc.JL]

Gentlemen; I carry a 2009 M&P 40FS and it has a Mag disconnect. I am an LEO and work by myself almost all the time. I know how to remove the mag disconnect and after serious thought, have decided against that. I may never have to use it in conflict, but if I do, I know I can disable my pistol if need be. YMMV, it's up to what ever the individual wants, likes and/or needs.
And I agree w/ Fastbolt wholeheartedly. Well said, Brother.

 

[Ofc.JL]

BtW, Rastoff, look for a small burr on the disconnect lever. A very light(Don't cut the levers "pad") polish would probably stop that problem. Mine has never hung, and is actually so smooth in operation that I never feel it. Use an air compressor nozzle to blow the dirt and junk out of the disconnect cam area. A drop of CLP on the cam and pivot area will help, as well.

 

[Maximumbob54]

All I will add is that resale of a gun with a mag disconnect is an odd duck. I've sold a couple of my M&P's and that was almost always the first question asked. Both times my ad said they were models that came with out them but people still wanted to make sure. Not a single person asked to be sure they had them; they all wanted to be sure they didn't have them. Not saying I'm for or against them, just wanted to share that if you ever want to sell one it seems more people dislike them than like them.

Oh, and gutting that thing from my Hi Power made that into a whole new gun.

 

[M29since14]

...or haven't recognized the taste when it was served to them.

Very good. In my experience, much of that there is!

 

[Buford57]

There have been dozens (if not hundreds) of documented saves due to a mag disconnect.

Or engaging a manual safety, yet some of the more popular designs don't have one. I'd be interested in seeing the reports on those incidents. The fact that a tactic was used in an incident that ended well doesn't necessarily mean the tactic was causal. I worked with an officer who, having regained control of his weapon (a revolver) threw it across the room to keep the perp from getting it again. Not a tactic I'd recommend, but since it didn't end with the officer being shot, I guess it qualifies as a "save". Let's all practice our throwing technique?



And the whole "you might need that one round in a defensive situation" is mall ninja nonsense.

Tell that to the officers in Miami and Newhall who were killed while reloading.


The odds of any of us using a gun in a real defensive situation are incredibly low.


So why bother carrying at all? If the odds of needing a gun at all are so low, aren't the chances of needing to disable your own gun during a struggle even lower? Aren't other aspects of weapon retention more worthy of our attention?


Show me one time a mag disconnect caused an injury. I'll show you 100 where it prevented one. All my guns except one have one

And of course you never carry that one, because it's dangerous, right?


For all of that, the OPs problem, as he reported, was incomplete cleaning, not the disconnect. Whether we love them or hate them seems to be the issue here (like the IL) rather than whether they are either an indispensable lifesaver or a hazard.

 

[Rastoff]

BtW, Rastoff, look for a small burr on the disconnect lever.

Thanks for the suggestion, but I did check for that.

For all of that, the OPs problem, as he reported, was incomplete cleaning, not the disconnect.

No, this is not correct. It's almost correct, but you must take the whole situation into account. The main issue is a magwell that is almost too small. If that were proper sized, this issue never would have come up. It just so happens that a combination of magwell being too small, dirt and mag disconnect worked together to prevent the mag from falling free.

So, it wasn't any one thing that caused this new issue. It was three working together.

If I were a policeman or had some job where I had to rely on this gun, I would use a different one. Mag changes are important and need to be able to be done quickly. This issue of the magwell being almost too small would be a deal breaker for me. My 45 and 40c don't have this problem.

 

[Fastbolt]

In early days when the 3rd gen's were new, we were shown how to use a file or hammer to "adjust" an occasional magazine body that might be "sticky" in a particular gun, "correcting" any high spots on the mag body.

Kind of like how nobody really wants to watch a smith or armorer "adjust" the front fixed sight of an older revolver.

Like I said earlier, though, at least the M&P's aren't using plastic-clad mag bodies. Imagine raised scratched or burred spots in the plastic on the outside of mag bodies, combined with the usual expected +/- tolerances in mag body production. (The grass on the other side of the fence comes with its own weeds and maintenance issues, at times. )

 

[Lost Lake]

My thoughts haven't changed on this subject.

The way I like my guns to operate is with a trigger that controls the firing pin. When I want to fire the gun, I want to be able to pull that trigger and the guns fires. Simple.

I don't want an extra lever that may or may not work. I don't want to maybe pull my gun from the holster and the mag falls free and it is incapable of firing. One shot is better than no shots any day.

Please don't bother to tell me how wrong I am, I don't care.

.

 

[Arik]

My thoughts haven't changed on this subject.

The way I like my guns to operate is with a trigger that controls the firing pin. When I want to fire the gun, I want to be able to pull that trigger and the guns fires. Simple.

I don't want an extra lever that may or may not work. I don't want to maybe pull my gun from the holster and the mag falls free and it is incapable of firing. One shot is better than no shots any day.

Please don't bother to tell me how wrong I am, I don't care.

.

You are wrong wrong very very wrong and to prove it to you I present my edc....a glock 19!

; )

 

[kbm6893]

And of course you never carry that one, because it's dangerous, right?


For all of that, the OPs problem, as he reported, was incomplete cleaning, not the disconnect. Whether we love them or hate them seems to be the issue here (like the IL) rather than whether they are either an indispensable lifesaver or a hazard.

No I don't. Not cause it any more dangerous, though. I just like the extra layer of safety. I don't fantasize about doing tactical reloads in the middle of a gun fight and needing that one shot.

 

[WR Moore]

This subject was beaten beyond death on the old Amback Forum with many notables from the firearms world contributing. The entire read was informative.

Like Fastbolt, I've carried mag disconnect service pistols for decades and simply don't see it as a major issue. You're going to look long, hard and without result* to find a case where the presence caused death or injury. On the other hand, there are a great many cases where they saved lives in struggles over the weapon or the officer was overpowered and the bad dude couldn't figure out how to make the gun fire (manual safety on and by the time/if the BD figured the safety out, the mag was on the ground). This last point also came up several times in a similar thread on a LE trainers limited access website.

I've seen litterally millions of rounds go down range without seeing a S&W mag disconnect malfunction. I have seen (and been guilty a couple of times myself of) operator error where the mag wasn't fully seated on a reload and the weapon wouldn't fire. In a great many cases, the first shot did fire, the second round didn't load, but the magazine was still in the weapon. The IAD for no shot is the same with/with out the mag disconnect. The correction is making sure the magazine is properly seated.

For those in an experimental mood, the mag in an M&P has to be about to drop out of the mag well for the piece not to fire. This wasn't the case in the third generation guns. So there may well be that opportunity for that first round to fire.

* Nothing shows up in Westlaw or the other legal search engine. However, allegedly, there was a case about 1950 involving a small town police force and the brand new model 39. The holster company (allegedly) paid damages, S&W (allegedly) made slight revisions to the mag release. However, the hypothetical root cause almost undoubtably would have been a total lack of transition training to make the officers aware of the presence of the magazine disconnect. Given the time and circumstances the officers were probably issued gun, holster and ammo and told something like: " You boys was in the Army, this works like that pistol (P38) the _______(Germans) had."

 

[PastureOfMuppets]

You're not that far away. I'd be happy to come down and help you do it one day.

Thank you for the offer. I may well take you up on that.

 

[rscalzo]

We transitioned to the then new 659 in 84 which came standards with magazine disconnects. Up until the mid 2000 we finally speced a Glock (23) was S&W no longer produced their line of third gen. SA. All had the feature and none malfunctioned. But there were more than a few times that the seat belt (for left handed officers) popped the mag release enough to activate it. For the entire time I carried them, I was in the habit of checking the magazine seating.

But never did we have one malfunction. There we pros and cons to them.

One unanticipated result was some getting lazy when handling prisoners and simply removing the magazine and putting it their pockets. The magazine was still way too close and two were on the belt. It took an official procedure to remove the firearm when moving prisoners to the cell block to prevent an incident.

 

[kbm6893]

I was in the FBI gun cleaning room at the FBI Academy in Quantico. VA. At there time, there was a large bullet hole in the cinderblock wall where a student discharged a chambered round after removing the magazine. Fortunately, no one was injured. The gun was a Glock.

Many of us here are older and we've been 'round the world a few times. We're no longer LEOs and we don't go looking for trouble. 99.9999% of us will eventually expire from natural causes, but what about that gun in your nightstand that a family member may have to render safe? I've taught the most gun savvy of my three sons how to properly clear an autoloader but what if he forgets the sequence upon the reality of just having lost his father?

My personal preference is to not have a magazine disconnect. I've used a Brother label maker to make a label saying "fires w/o mag." which I've affixed to the magazines of my two main carry, and HD guns. It's my way of not leaving a booby trap for my family.

After 30 years in law enforcement, firearms instruction, etc, I see the mag. disconnect as a safety feature in administrative gun handling rather than as a tactical safety feature. I first viewed the mag. disconnect with disfavor because of how it significantly and adversely affected the trigger pull on my Browning HP.

I've owned 2 Glocks an sold them both. When they came out there were basically the only polymer game in town so they cornered the market. Springfield took some Croatian gun and renamed it the XD and then other polymer guns came into play. Now pretty much everybody has a polymer striker fired gun in the game.

And with that, I don't get why Glocks are still popular. They have one major flaw that opponents of mag disconnects ignore and just keep repeating the whole "follow the gun safety rules and nothing will happen" mantra. You have to pull the trigger on a Glock to field strip it, and I bet that FBI agent was doing just that in that cleaning room. He either screwed up the order and racked the slide first before dropping the mag, or he just forgot altogether. But either way, the bullet hole in the wall (thankfully not a person) was the result.

And this was somebody who was being professionally trained under controlled settings. What about the person who walks into a gunshop and buys a gun with minimal (if any at all) training? I once watched a guy buy a pistol gripped Mossberg 12 gauge after the big North East blackout in 2003. As he is leaving, he asks the clerk "where does the clip go for the bullets?". The guy showed him the magazine tube and how to load it. Think that guy went home and even bothered to read the manual?

 

[hardluk1]

Why so much chatter about a mag safety. Want it great you may have it . Don't want it take it out. Only pistol I own with a mag discontect is the m&p. Only took 5 minutes to strip down and remove it. So all mine work the same . If you think its great feature then you can have it and get on with a better subject.

 

[Bkreutz]

Why so much chatter about a mag safety.

Because the rule is on this forum that every recurring topic is like having a new horse that gets trotted out and then everyone gets their stick and starts beating it.

 

[NEURON]

Easy just pick a gun without it, I only own Colt 1911's for my autos and S&W for my wheelers. For LEO's a great feature I guess, for me more unnecessary ****. I am old though and shot my first 1911 57 years ago. I tend toward the less complicated in my life.