Smith & Wesson M&P22 Compact

Last month I put several guns on consignment with a local gun store. Yesterday I went to the shop to get the payment for the final gun I sold but I decided to take it in store credit.

I'm a fan of compact .22 autoloading pistols. They often can be easily used by all sizes of shooters, if reliable enough can be secondary defensive arms, and are simply fun to shoot.

So I came home with a Smith & Wesson M&P22 Compact. It is a 10 shot semiautomatic .22 pistol, intended to serve as an understudy to the S&W M&P centerfire pistols. It came with an adjustable rear sight and a thread adaptor to accept a silencer.

The gun weighs about 1 lb. loaded with 10 rounds.

Additionally, it has an ambidextrous manual safety which as a lefty I appreciate, a magazine disconnect, and a Picatinny rail on the dust cover under the barrel. There is a built-in lock with 2 keys supplied, and it also came with a cable lock.

The rear sight is adjustable for windage and elevation, while the front sight is dovetailed into the slide so if you wanted you could replace it with something else like a fiber optic (it has a white dot).

The aluminum slide is not cut for an optic. This may matter to some folks but not to me.

Unlike the centerfire M&P pistols the M&P22 is not striker-fired. It has an internal hammer.

Something I always do when I get a new-to-me gun is field strip it, clean off whatever preservative was put on in the factory, and then lubricate it. On the M&P22 Compact you need to first remove the barrel nut so you can remove the slide.

However, some idiot at Smith & Wesson thought it would be a good idea to put copious amounts of strong threadlocker on the barrel threads, so even with the supplied wrench I couldn't get it to budge at first. I applied Kroil and let it sit for about an hour, then locked back the slide, clamped it in a vise, and used a mallet to smack the wrench to get it turning. WTH, Smith & Wesson? Why would you do this?

The vise jaws are lined with copper sheet. The slide was not marred.

The recoil spring is captive on a plastic guide, which makes removal and reinstallation easy. Racking the slide is very easy.

After getting it apart I cleaned off the threads as much as possible, cleaned and lubed the gun, and when I reassembled it I covered the barrel threads in Shooter's Choice grease as an anti-seize.

Today I took it to an indoor range and put 91 CCI 40 grain Mini Mag solids and 100 Remington Golden Bullet 36 grain HPs. The gun functioned perfectly and none of the ammo misfired. The gun feels smooth when cycling.

The trigger is meh but I’ll put at least 1000 rounds through it before thinking about a trigger job. Unfortunately, couldn’t get any good groups because the windage adjustment screw on the rear sight -- which should've had blue threadlocker -- kept loosening and thus it would lose zero. I put blue Loctite on it after I got home and plan to zero the gun at 10 yards.

I've ordered 5 more magazines for it, and a barrel thread protector to replace the thread adaptor, since I will be mostly shooting it unsuppressed. I'd rather not have to remove the adaptor every time I want to strip the gun for cleaning.

It fits in the El Paso Saddlery M-1942 tanker holster I bought for my S&W M&P9 2.0 Compact, with a little room to spare.

Once I get the M&P22 Compact zeroed it'll make a nice kit gun.