Through his unusual combined experience in a wide range of professional firearm disciplines (retail sales, gunsmithing, instruction, and real-world applied combatives), David has applied his personal touch to some of the most popular handguns we sell at AO Sword Firearms. Since the California Safe Handgun Roster limits our choices of handguns in this state, David has thoughtfully and methodically created customized packages for his favorite handguns, upgrading them into high quality precision instruments for personal defense, competition, or duty use.
Each Signature Edition handgun has been carefully designed as a complete system, for a specific purpose, without pricing the end result out of the typical shooter’s budget. David has hand-selected each upgrade part, and in some cases he has designed innovative, exclusive modifications to address a specific attribute of the handgun that he felt needed improvement. The result is a custom handgun that has been professionally designed and hand-tuned with components that have been field-proven to work together in harmony towards a specific design goal.
Signature Edition Smith & Wesson Military & Police Shield
$880 Concealed Carry Masterpiece
Our most popular Signature Edition pistol is the S&W M&P Shield 9mm. This Signature handgun is purpose-built for reliable and effective concealed carry. The substantial 7+1/8+1 ammunition capacity is a leader in the CA subcompact market, and AO Sword Firearms sells extensions that take it to 10+1 rounds. The thin profile and short grip make it exquisitely concealable, yet the grip size provides enough leverage to make shooting the Shield a comfortable experience. There are four areas of customization on this Signature Edition handgun, as follows:
- Apex Duty & Carry Action Enhancement: The OEM two-piece plastic trigger is replaced with an aircraft-grade aluminum one-piece trigger. Also upgraded are the firing pin block plunger and spring, the trigger spring, and the sear spring and sear. This fundamentally changes the trigger feel and overall shooting experience of the gun. The original, segmented trigger is sloppy and indefinite, with significant creep, lateral wiggle, overtravel, and a somewhat spongy break. The upgrade maintains a safe trigger pull while reducing trigger weight by ~2 lbs, reduces creep, shortens takeup, reach, pretravel, overtravel, and reset while greatly improving smoothness, break crispness and linear consistency. The Glock-style trigger safety efficiently replaces the safety function of the original segmented trigger.
- The Signature manual thumb safety is David’s custom design. The original is excessively flush with the gun and very stiff, making it hard to maintain a quality master grip on the handgun while manipulating the manual safety. AO Sword reshapes the interior control surfaces and tunes the spring detent for a lighter, crisper snap that definitively expresses the safety condition to the user. The external control lever is widened and dehorned while increasing gripping surface, making it more comfortable to touch yet more positive and easier to manipulate. Gone are the painful thumb abrasions from a day at the range with a Shield. The overall slender profile of the gun is still maintained, so the extended safety does not interfere with any holster, and does not catch or bind unintentionally. Manipulate your manual thumb safety with ease, comfort, and positive feedback.
- The AO Sword Firearms logo is proudly laser engraved on the slide in low-visibility grey. The logo is tastefully applied so as not to attract too much attention, but it designates your pistol as a professionally customized firearm.
- The Signature Edition Shield also includes the market-leading TFX Pro day/night sights. These combination fiber optic and tritium sights offer the highest visibility in all circumstances. Most tritium night sights share a problem in daylight, where the small dot apertures actually become less visible than standard white-dot sights. The fiber optic rods gather available light during the day, and so the brighter the ambient light, the more they glow. Even in direct desert sun, the chemically-resistant sealed TFX Pros are glowing like fireballs, leading your eye to the front sight and quality hits on target. David also selected the TFX Pro sights for their leading edge profile on the rear sight, which allows the shooter to hook the sights onto a belt, shoe, hand, or other sturdy object to perform slide manipulations. Since he designed this package for defensive carry, one-handed operation capabilities can mean the difference between life and death under adverse conditions.
