For many years, the only remotely CCW-type gun I had was a Smith & Wesson J-frame Model 632, a 6-shot revolver chambered for .327 Federal Magnum. I got it as a trail gun, not for CCW. However, I have occasionally carried it in-town, concealed, in an OWB pancake holster with an untucked long-enough T-shirt, or a vest, or other covering garment.

My next acquisition that could be considered a carry gun was an Italian police surplus Beretta Model 81 Cheetah in .32 ACP. Again, I did not get it specifically as a carry gun, but as an interesting surplus piece for my collection. I couldn’t resist getting Beretta quality for such a low cost. Since I did not get it specifically for CCW, its anemic .32 ACP caliber mattered not to me. In overall size and weight, it matched the S&W M632 very closely. With 12-round magazines, its capacity was double that of the M632. When I did occasionally CCW that piece, it was as I carried the M632, in an OWB pancake holster covered by some sort of an overhanging garment.

My next step in more seriously considering CCW was picking up a Sig Sauer P365XL. I finally joined the micro-9 revolution. But I was only dipping a toe. The XL is a little longer in barrel and slide, and in grip length than the original P365 micro-9. On top of that, literally, was a red dot sight. So while micro-9 slim, the XL wasn’t quite so small that I felt comfortable with it for everyday carry.

I also worried about picking up lint on the red dot lens in EDC, and I worried about running down the battery in the always-on optic. Since the RDS replaces the rear sight, the last thing you want is for it to be dead when the time comes that you need to depend upon it. And my particular RDS requires it to be removed from the gun to replace the battery. Uggh. Fortunately, the optic is rated to run for some ungodly number of hours of run time before battery change is required. It automatically adjusts brightness to the lighting conditions. If kept hooded when not in use, the LED is dimmed to practically off. Should I carry it hooded?

Next came a pair of pocket pistols – a Beretta Tomcat in .32 ACP, and a Ruger LCP Max in .380 ACP. I made leather pocket holsters for them and carried them in the right front pocket of my favorite roomy cargo shorts.

Much better than a sharp stick or fists, they definitely bring peace of mind, but they are limited to bad breath distances against only one or two assailants. Even though they have capacities of 8 and 11 shots, their small size makes accurate shot placement difficult at all but the closest ranges.

Enter the S&W Shield Plus
With this background of the current situation in the country, and my current inventory of defensive pistols, I decided that I needed something else – a micro-9 that I would feel comfortable carrying every day, inside the waistband (IWB). My choice was the Smith and Wesson M&P Shield Plus.

When I started shopping, I was looking at the original M&P Shield which was introduced back in 2012. What I wanted was short and slim, to be comfortable when carried IWB. The original Shield, a single stack with capacity of 7 or 8 rounds, met that criteria (8 with an extended mag).

Digging deeper, I learned that the Shield had been revised since then to a version 2.0. The Shield 2.0 was introduced in 2018 and featured some subtle improvements which included an improved trigger. But it remained a single stack until the Shield Plus was introduced in 2021.

Smith & Wesson M&P 9 Shield Plus OR (optics ready)

Sig’s introduction of the P365 in 2018 changed the world. The S&W M&P Shield held a very strong position in the Micro-9 market up to then, because that world was single-stack. All of a sudden, the P365 in its many variations took over the CCW market with its “stack-and-half” magazine while maintaining an ultra-slim profile. It took a full 3 years for S&W to respond with their own stack-and-a-half variant of the Shield, the Shield Plus.

Since the introduction of the P365, the market has been flooded with high-capacity micro-9s from probably more than 20 different manufacturers. S&W had to play catch-up in a big way.

The micro-9s all share one significant trait – a width right around one inch, maybe a little more, maybe a little less. While the single stack Shield M2.0 is spec’d with a width of .95 inches, the double stack Shield Plus only grows to 1.1 inches wide.

All variants of the Shield come equipped with two magazines – a flush-fit mag and an extended mag with a one-half inch taller baseplate that continues the grip contour to provide a full three-finger hold. The flush-fit mag requires my pinky finger to hang around below the magazine. While the single-stack Shields have a 9mm capacity of 7 and 8 rounds, the Shield Plus has a capacity of 10 and 13 rounds, a significant increase.

I knew none of this Shield history or about the various versions before I started shopping them. When I saw that the Shield Plus was actually the least costly version on the Sportsman’s website, and much less costly than a SIG P365, the choice became obvious. I actually opted for the slightly upgraded OR (optics ready) version for $50 more. Not only was the slide milled to accept a red dot sight, but the iron sights were upgraded to tritium night sights. I liked having the option to add an RDS in the future if I should later decide, even though I was primarily seeking an iron-sighted carry solution. I placed my order.

Then a day or two later, I discovered that the very same pistol was also available in 30 Super Carry caliber. 30SC was introduced two years ago by Federal and is actually of .32 caliber, .312”, the same diameter as .32 ACP, .32 S&W Long, .32 H&R Mag, and .327 Federal Magnum. Hmm.

Smith & Wesson Shield Plus in 30 Super Carry - optics ready by default

I have to admit, I am a sucker for oddball calibers, especially 8mms it seems. After a day or two of thinking about it, I went down to Sportsman’s to see if I could change my order. They told me that I could place a new order for the 30SC, and that they would cancel my order for the 9mm once it arrived. OK, let’s do that. But ...

So I placed my order for the 30SC Shield Plus. Another day or two passed, which was enough time to regret passing up the 9mm. The decision devolved to getting both of them! I went back to Sportsman’s to cancel my cancelation of the 9mm. Less than a week later I now owned two identical, except for caliber, S&W Shield Plusses!

The 30 Super Carry was created to be close to 9mm in power but allow higher capacity in carry size guns. In the 30SC Shield Plus, magazine capacities are 3 rounds more than in the 9mm version — 13 rounds in the flush mag, and 16 rounds in the extended mag. That’s a lot of rounds for such a small package.

With two new guns in hand, ammo and holsters, it seemed like the thing to do was to head out to the desert to break them in. But beyond that, I figured that this would be a good opportunity to do a more comprehensive test of my carry options. I gathered up the six guns in the preceding photo, ammo for all of them, plus a bunch of other equipment that would allow a more thorough evaluation.

The first order of business was velocity testing. I set up the LabRadar and fired four rounds of each ammo type to get an average velocity figure for each. The table is arranged in order of increasing energy per the measured velocity.

Right off the bat, there was trouble. The first gun I loaded up was the Beretta Tomcat. Click. Huh? Check the round. No firing pin indent. Try again. Click. Hmm. Remove slide, try manually pushing the firing pin forward. No protrusion. The firing pin tip was busted off. I’m already learning things about my carry options. That gun quickly went from viable carry option to novelty range toy — once I replace the firing pin of course. Right now it is nothing but a paperweight.

The rest of the velocity testing went fine. It was quite interesting to see where the guns and the ammo combinations fell along the energy spectrum. It was surprising to see the Fiocchi .32 ACP load actually overpowering some .380 Auto loads.

The big show of course, was to see how the 30 Super Carry loads compared to the 9mm loads. Is Super Carry really a viable alternative to 9mm? There could be no more of a direct comparison than to fire them out of identical guns.

The 115 grain CCI Blazer 30 Super Carry load and the 9mm 115 grain Winchester Target & Practice FMJ loads turned in almost identical performance in the S&W Shields. Overall, we can see that the 30 Super Carry is just a shade less powerful than 9mm.

Why the little 30SC gets so close is because of its pressure spec. The SAAMI max pressure for the 30SC is a whopping 52k psi. 9mm is spec’d only at 35k psi.

From L to R: .32 ACP, 30 Super Carry, .380 Auto, 9mm Luger, .32 S&W Long, .32 H&R Magnum, .327 Federal Magnum

Concerning the measured velocities, a note of caution is in order. Once I got home and took a deeper look at the LabRadar data, I realized that there may not have been enough “runway” for the LabRadar to most accurately calculate the muzzle velocities. I was shooting at only about 12 yards before the bullets disappeared behind a target or into bushes. The LabRadar calculates MV based on a linear back-calculation of a number of velocity samples. What I saw in rifle testing was that the bullets were entering the radar signal cone at around eleven yards. With a clear view of the bullets out past 50 yards or more, there was plenty of data for the radar to be able to back-calculate MV. For this pistol testing where the radar may have stopped seeing the bullet much sooner, these MVs need to be taken with a pinch of salt. They seem reasonable, but next time I’ll know to leave a longer trajectory path for the radar to measure.

While velocity testing, I also shot at water-filled 12 ounce pop bottles, my favorite expansion test medium, to gauge bullet expansion. Expanding rifle bullets will practically turn these things inside-out. .22s will pencil in and out and cause only a slow leak. While having no scientific validity whatsoever, I’ve shot enough of these bottles to have a pretty good idea about how a bullet is transferring its energy just by looking at a shot bottle.

I was having trouble hitting a bottle with the 30SC at 12 yards. I decided that I needed to print on paper to see what was happening. The bullets were hitting some 6 inches or so left of point of aim and low. While there was nothing I could do about elevation, I had the tools with me to drift-adjust the rear sight. It took a few tries and more pounding than I liked to do on a new gun, but eventually I centered up the bullet strikes, at least horizontally.

When I got to the 9mm, it was also printing slightly left, but much less than the 30SC was. I was able to get that one centered up quickly.

Also on today’s menu were some timed drills. My first drill was as described below: 8 inch plates at 12 yards - 8 shots from concealment - 3 runs - 2L, 2R, 2L, 2R. This left my 6-shot revolver out of the game. I intended to count hits and misses when I started, but I found that I could not do the counting in the heat of battle. I had many misses.

I had some special learnings with the Beretta Model 81 because I started hammer-down, first shot in double-action mode. The difference between the trigger positions between DA and SA modes was very different, and each time the trigger transitioned, it took me a split second of re-orientation to adjust mentally and take the next shot.

Overall, I became faster and faster with each gun tried, simply due to practice running the course. So it’s hard to draw any conclusions, especially since I could not count hits and misses while concentrating on taking my shots.

Still, it was a very worthwhile exercise since I had never run guns on time before, drawing from concealment. You can’t do that on a public range, and I’m pretty sure that we don’t want to do that during our club matches. There is just too much opportunity for something to go wrong with other people around.

You can bet that I was being hyper aware of what I was doing during draw, because when you are alone, there is no one around to render assistance or get you to the hospital before you bleed out, should something go wrong. That was painful, just thinking about, and writing that.

The Lucky Gunner 5x5 drill

I still had one more timed drill that I wanted to do. I’m a big fan of Lucky Gunner on YouTube. They have something called the “5x5 Drill”. It’s pretty simple and seemed like a fun thing to try. Given a 5 inch circle, five yards away, put five shots into the circle in less than 5 seconds.

When I refreshed myself by reading the instructions printed on the target, I was relieved to see that I did not need to again risk exsanguinating myself by drawing from concealment! Well at least when doing the beginner variation, I could start from low-ready.

It seemed like the first target fired from each gun was the worst, with the exception being the LCP Max. The first target was the learning target. The most shameful first target was with the Shield 30SC where all five shots were misses!

I would give myself a miss if the bullet hole was more than 50% outside the grey circle border. The 30SC was still printing low for me. On subsequent targets, I learned that I could keep them inside the circle if I held the front sight a little tall of the rear sight. By the third and fourth targets, I was keeping them all in the circle with the 30 Super Carry.

But this drill did humble me. I was barely able to keep under 5 seconds to make those 5 shots, even though I started from low ready. Of the 16 targets I fired, I ran over five seconds on four of them – 25%. The drill highlighted how I need to work on my shot-to-shot recovery time. And too many misses. Obviously much more practice is needed.

Conclusions so far: I can take the two Beretta .32 ACPs off of my CCW list, the Tomcat and the Model 81. The M81 was never intended to be a CCW gun for me in the first place, and the Tomcat has proven itself too fragile. Besides the broken firing pin, Beretta recommends that you don’t shoot ammo exceeding 130 ft-lbs through it, or you could crack the aluminum frame. Anyways, HP .32 ACP ammo usually does not expand because velocity is too low.

For pocket CCW, the Ruger LCP Max remains a good option. The only defensive load I tested was decently strong. The Norma MHP solid copper hollow point churned up 174 foot-pounds. Still, I should test a few more defensive loads to find the best for that gun. The Max’s only negative that I’ve seen is that it hits a shade low for me.

Now that I have the two Shield Plusses, I can take the S&W .327 Federal Magnum revolver off city CCW duty, and let it live its life on the trail, as originally intended.

During my testing, I used only the flush fit magazine on both Shields, because that is how I would be carrying them. I expect that I would be able to shoot better if I used the extended mags because I could get a full hand hold, but I worry about the grip printing when carrying concealed.

I tried various holster positions IWB such as one o’clock (appendix), two o’clock, and three o’clock (strong side hip). I keep coming back to strong side hip as the most comfortable position for me. But that position is where the grip is most likely to print.

From my initial experience with the two Shield Plusses, I’m ready to declare the 9mm fit for city CCW duty. If I could get the 30SC to hit reliably where I point, I would have a strong preference for the increased capacity. With the flush fit magazine, it’s 13+1 versus 10+1 for the 9. If carrying the extended magazine for a reload, it’s a total of 30 rounds on-hand versus 24. That’s a big difference! A difference that could keep you alive if accosted by a gang.

After some more practice sessions to try to learn the 30SC Shield better, if I am still unhappy with where the rounds print versus my aim, I may yet resort to a red dot sight. But a further reservation I have with RDSs is speed of target acquisition. They certainly can put you right on target, but unless you train diligently, finding that dot in the window can take precious time.

Next time out, I will take the Shields and the P365XL so that I can compare the RDS equipped SIG micro-9 to my new iron sight carry guns. That will help me decide whether or not I should mount an RDS on the 30 Super Carry.