How Might She Run?
There’s a timeless quandary orbiting around big bullets and little guns. Shrink the gun down too small and pack it full of manly rounds and you have a painful disincentive to train. Push the envelope yet farther and accuracy and reliability suffer. In the case of the Springfield XD-S Mod.2 Subcompact we find the elusive combination of reliability, power and comfort.
I’ve seen more than my share of gunshot wounds. The 9mm is usually adequate. The .380 ACP can get you there with proper social ammo. The .25 ACP is just a good luck charm unless you can ball your fist around the gun and knock somebody in the head with it. By contrast, the .45 ACP takes all the ambiguity out of a social exchange of gunfire.
Don’t misunderstand; .45 ACP run through a gun this small does inevitably fall prey to physics. The gun is tiny, and the bullets are huge. All this energy has to go someplace. However, Springfield packed this compact chassis with some serious recoil-busting tech. Running the gun is really not painful and keeping it on target, even while rushed, is not a chore.
The XD-S Subcompact comes with two beautiful stainless steel magazines. The first packs five rounds of .45 ACP chaos into a package terminating at the base of the already abbreviated grip.
This magazine comes with a modest finger rest baseplate, but there’s a flat floorplate included as well if space is at a real premium. In this configuration you have a carry gun stubby enough to hide in a decent pocket.
The 6-round Mid-Mag X-Tension magazine includes a polymer sleeve perfectly interfacing with the rest of the XD-S geometry. The X-Tension offers more real estate to grab as well as more physics-beating grip bearing space with which to best the gun’s inevitable twisting moment. Pack the gun with the stubby magazine for portability and then tuck the X-Tension spare into the other side of your belt for when life really sucks.
Muzzle flip is present but surmountable with proper technique. The smooth striker-fired trigger is a bit longer than I expected, but I like this in my deep carry guns. The frame and slide are indeed just stupid thin, but the superlative design keeps the gun well behaved. The sights are magnificent. Reliability was naturally flawless right out of the box through any load tested with no attention to maintenance. I guess you could break it intentionally with a hammer, but, short of this, this gun will run forever.
Does it shoot straight? Holy crap. Four of the five Hornady Critical Defense rounds went into the same stinkin’ hole at seven meters. It was almost too tight to measure. The worst 7-meter group of the day was still about the size of a golf ball, and this was in wet snow at 21 degrees F. I don’t know what they sprinkled on this gun in the factory to make it shoot this straight, but I want a jug full of it.
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