S&W M&P magazine failure today

ProShooter · Sep 14, 2013

Here's an example of why we train, and why we advocate carrying a spare magazine.

A student in today's Defensive Handgun I class was using a Smith & Wesson M&P 9mm. This is a factory mag that has been used, but not abused.

One of the 3 rounds in the magazine tipped upward somehow during one of the shooting drills. That caused the rounds to get jammed halfway down in the magazine. The magazine's floor plate and spring had to be removed to clear the jammed rounds.

S1owJam · Sep 14, 2013

That's a new one. Any crazy conditions that led to it happening? Or was it just a freak occurrence?

mtnwisdom · Sep 15, 2013

A clear example of "one is none and two is one"...

smokey · Sep 15, 2013

Was the follower dirty? I learned that exact same lesson at thurmont a few years back with my p99. I shot it too many times without taking the mag apart to clean the crap off the follower. In the middle of shooting, the follower got stuck and I ended up with a similar mag failure as that one. It was great practice identifying a malfunction I hadn't seen before and clearing it while under stress. It felt like 3 minutes of looking down through the ejection port, locking the slide...dropping the mag and slamming a new one home(to release the slide when seating it)...but was actually only a couple seconds.

When I finished up, I went over to the bench and took the mag apart....and realized it had built up a pretty thick layer of gunk all around the follower. A quick rub down and it functioned well for the rest of the day. When I got home I stripped off all the fouling of all my mags and made it part of my cleaning routine.

I have had one failure like that the very first time I loaded the 17 rnd m&p mag. I'm right handed and put some right-to-left pressure on the cartridges when pushing them in to the mag. For whatever reason, the mag staggered left, right,left, right, left, left right, left, right....when downloading it, a similar failure happened with cartridges locking up where the mag starts to taper to a single stack just above the mag release cutout. I now take extra care to say out loud, "left, right, left, right....", when loading my m&p mags to ensure they properly stagger.

87Theworld · Sep 15, 2013

I had that problem with all four of my m&p mags. It was the follower getting caught on the mag body. It would only happen if the follower went past the two open notches in the mag. My rounds would sound like a box of mike and ikes sometimes in the mag. I sent the first two mags to s&w who fixed it. Bought two more mags they just sent me new followers. They haven't had any problems since, but it makes putting faith in your gun mags harder.

Bikebreath · Sep 15, 2013

Yep, gotta clean those mags.

l730dc · Sep 15, 2013

ProShooter said:
Here's an example of why we train, and why we advocate carrying a spare magazine.

A student in today's Defensive Handgun I class was using a Smith & Wesson M&P 9mm. This is a factory mag that has been used, but not abused.

One of the 3 rounds in the magazine tipped upward somehow during one of the shooting drills. That caused the rounds to get jammed halfway down in the magazine. The magazine's floor plate and spring had to be removed to clear the jammed rounds.

"Here's an example of why we train, and why we advocate carrying a spare magazine"
:thumbsup:

I couldnt imagine how panicked I would be if that happened in a life or death scenario. .. spare mag and practice might save your life one day

Kbroc2 · Sep 15, 2013

The worst part of m&p mags is availability

ProShooter · Sep 16, 2013

The student was shooting from a standing position, firing multiple rounds at a target. Gun ejected the last fired casing and the slide went back into battery, but wouldn't fire. The student did a tap/rack and it was dead. He dropped the mag and switched to a new mag and finished the course of fire. We inspected the mag afterwards and found the failure. The follower was not unusually dirty at all. It definitely appeared to have gotten stuck in the magazine body. In putting it back together, it seemed that there was very little tolerance in how it went in....like it was made oddly shaped and had to inserted exactly correct. Not sure that I can explain it another way.

Seems that there's more than one story on the net about M&P mag failures.

dfens42 · Sep 17, 2013

Hmmm, I have never had that issue with mine, I also snagged a couple aftermarket mags for spares since 17 rounders are non-existent at the moment, I'll disassemble 1 of each and see if they are different.

smokey · Sep 19, 2013

I went shooting with the m&p45 today and didn't have a mag malfunction, but I did have a ammo failure. It's my first failure in about 1,700 rounds or so in that gun. It was about 4 shots deep into the 10 rnd mag when the slide failed to go all the way forward in to battery. I did a quick tap-rack...the following round dropped the slide into battery just like normal. I unloaded and checked out the round that was now on the floor. Racking it out was kind've a pain and it offered more resistance than normal like it was seizing in the chamber a little. Comparing it to other rounds, the casing is a little longer and has a burr on the end from where it ran out of room and moved some brass.

This kind've validates in my mind that the standard tap-rack failure drill is the way to go. In some gun circles, it's being taught that when you identify a failure to go in battery, you should give the rear of the slide a pop on striker fired guns to try to force it in to battery...so you don't lose a round. I'm fairly confident if I beat on the back of my slide, it still wouldn't go all the way in to battery, but I would risk seizing the slide a little and make it harder to strip the round from the chamber.

The bad cartridge in question was the only bad cartridge in a winchester 100 rnd white box pack

StanW · Sep 19, 2013

smokey0118 said:
Comparing it to other rounds, the casing is a little longer and has a burr on the end from where it ran out of room and moved some brass.

I bought a box of Federal Premium Personal Defense .40 yesterday and half the rounds had all kinds of crap stuck to them. Kinda of like they had been splattered with something. Most came off by scraping with my finger nail, one larger piece I had to use a pocket knife. If I hadn't noticed I'm thinking I would have had a couple of FTFs.

S&W M&P magazine failure today

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