Imagine getting a phone call telling you that you are to go to the famous Gunsite Training Center in northern Arizona and spend a week shooting someone else's guns and ammunition. Imagine, also, that a whole bunch of your friends and colleagues will also be there, with all sorts of time set aside for visiting and storytelling. While my qualifications for such an assignment may come into question, my enthusiasm was surely up to the task. Ya think there just might really be a Santa Claus after all?

Smith & Wesson used the opportunity to bring out its M&P 9mm pistol and M&P15 carbine. Black Hills furnished the ammunition, and Blade-Tech provided the Kydex holsters and magazine carriers. Aimpoint provided red-dot sights for the carbines, SureFire brought the lights, and Brownells had the carbine magazines and cleaning equipment.

Wayne Novak was also present; his good combat sights are featured on the M&P pistols and he is a veteran shooter. The rest of us were there with instructions to shoot and use the equipment and to offer criticisms and suggestions for new products.

In order to test these various items under actual conditions, the Gunsite staff put us through various shooting drills. We worked on the speed reload and the tactical reload. We shot far; we shot close. In a night shoot we worked with a mounted light on the carbine and both mounted and handheld lights with the pistol. We also shot with the Novak tritium night sights used on the M&P pistol.

Towards the end of the week those nefarious folks that Gunsite calls range officers even set us up with a man-against-man shoot-off using steel plates. This would have been fine except that Tim Wegner, the Blade-Tech honcho, brought in Bobby McGee, his professional shooter. Mr. McGee promptly cleaned our clocks. Actually, it was a real pleasure to see a young man of Bobby's stature so involved in the shooting sports. His manners, attitude, and skills are the kind of stuff that American shooting sports should always emulate.

However, I got the most fun out of shooting against the Gunsite robot. They've got this little robot with a silhouette target mounted on it and a knife dangling where its right hand ought to be. They can move it in any direction on the range, and it really picks up speed when it's coming right at you swinging the knife. One of the range officers pointed out to me that I really should have yelled "halt" first and then started shooting. Other than that slight oversight, I think the robot learned not to bring a knife to a gunfight.

S&W's M&P is an interesting pistol to shoot. It is a 24-ounce striker-fired 9mm with a 4.25-inch barrel. The magazine capacity is 17 rounds, and as I mentioned, the pistol is issued with the Novak fixed combat sights. It is fitted with a magazine-disconnect safety for civilian use, while the feature is not installed on police and military versions.

The most interesting, and useful, feature of the M&P pistol is that it has an interchangeable backstrap and comes with small, medium, and large backstraps to better fit the individual shooter's hand. I chose the small backstrap and found that it gave me a very positive, wraparound grip that aided quick shooting.