Smith & Wesson M&P VTAC Pistols

On display at the NRA show floor (but nowhere to be found on S&W’s website) were the M&P VTAC pistols.  These are a partner to the M&P15 VTAC rifle, and while for the most part they’re a pretty standard M&P they do have some very interesting features. Click any picture to make it larger, as usual.  The guns right now are being offered in .40 S&W and 9mm (when they become available) with the flat dark earth or coyote tan or whatever color that is that you see on them.  Aside: why do gun manufacturers insist on doing all these variations of the same color with different names?  Don’t they know that it’s all “tan” to us dudes?

Apparently, sights like these have a name, but I cannot recall for the life of me what it is.  The sight features a “stacked” set of dots; fiber optic dots on top for daytime shooting, and tritium inserts for night sights.  I think it’s a pretty interesting design and it does make a certain amount of sense.  You want high visibility sights under all conditions, and the stacked fiber/tritium certainly offers that, I just wonder if it’s worth the trade off in how distracting that sight image would be.  It seems to me that when you’re trying to snap the gun up, take a flash sight picture and shoot that you want your eye to be drawn to a natural sight alignment as quickly as possible.  I would have to spend a lot of time shooting a gun with sights like that before I felt confident that under stress my brain would correctly align the sights.

No word on when the M&P VTAC pistol will be available or what the MSRP is, but it’s nice to see the M&P line continue to go strong for S&W.

5 Comments

  1. That seems awfully busy to me, but I would have to try it to see.

  2. I know quite a few folks who just love their M&Ps, but, I gotta admit – they just don’t do it for me.

    Not a big fan of those colors for urban pacification … How about a pistol the color of an unmowed lawn or that smells like an empty beer can… that would be more “natural” around here.

  3. The term for those sights are TFOs, for tritium fiber optic sights.

  4. If you want both fiber and tritium sights (and I can see the appeal), you can get them with a trit capsule embedded into the center of the fiber. You’ll see either a dot (a small one at nighttime, under SOME conditions I’ve been told you’ll see a large one if the ambient light causes the trit and fiber illumination to closely correspond) or a ring (full daylight, since you won’t notice tehetrit with the really bright fiber).

    But the dots will always be in the same place, and you won’t have any stacked vertically. This rig looks like you’re trying to do a night carrier landing. . .

  5. LIke the VTAC pistols, I have three standard M&Ps already in 9mm, 357 Sig and 45 acp. Wouldn’t mind one of those in 9mm but give me the standard sights.

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