12 Hours Ago
Took the LC9s out this morning for a brief visit to the range...brief because the sky opened up about 20 minutes after I got the targets set up, and it's an outdoor range. When I got there all of the 7 yd stalls were taken, so I decided to have some faith and set up at 15 yds.
My phone's camera lens makes that look farther away than it is.
After doing some reading I opted to not try any of the 124 gr Golden Saber +P rounds that I carry in my M&P. Instead, I used up the 18 rounds of 115 gr Hornady Critical Defense that I had left over from back when I was testing different PD loads for the M&P. The results weren't even remotely Hickock45-worthy, but the rounds all fed smoothly and all of the lead landed on the paper.
With it about to rain any minute I shifted to let's-see-what-other-stuff-it'll-digest mode. I was out of my preferred Winchester White Box plinking ammo, but had a little each of some Remington UMC, Blazer Brass and...cheapest of the cheap...Tula steel cased, zinc plated projectile rounds (these things are truly crap). Save for the first Tula round, which jammed while feeding into the chamber (the case edges on them are abysmally wide and sharp) all rounds fed, cycled and ejected without problem, and also stayed on the paper...though some just barely.
Between the gun's shorter sight radius and the fact that my vision had slowly degraded to the point that it's difficult for me to focus on the sights at all I think I'm probably going to mount a grip-activated laser on it. That and a lot more practice should allow me to tighten up those sorry-assed groups considerably. But even those aren't unacceptable if you shrink the distance to typical self-defense range.
Obviously this isn't enough rounds to get used to the gun, let alone draw many conclusions about it yet. But, so far so good. The trigger was smooth with a fairly crisp break, though the take-up and reset are both a little longer than I'd prefer. The biggest problem, at least at first, was that the bottom end of the trigger is quite narrow...rather rhan flat against your finger...and almost comes to a bit of a point. As a result, the recoil from the first several shots drove that edge/point into the pad of my finger...which kinda' hurt. But I found I could prevent that by making sure my finger was up at the top of the trigger (which is relatively short anyway) and up against the bottom of the frame. That kept the end of the trigger from digging into my finger while not negatively impacting my ability to pull the trigger smoothly.
And as expected, the shorter and narrower grip made it less ergonomic than the excellent grip on my M&P. But that's the inescapable price of the size reductions required in order to make a 9mm pistol light and small enough for deep concealed hot weather carry.
So I definitely wouldn't call it a fun gun to shoot, but I didn't buy it to be a fun range toy, and it's not unpleasant enough to prevent me from practicing with it...so that's OK. So now I'm off to contemplate holstering options.