The S&W forum has two good threads on this. It seems the early guns had problems, S&W thought they had a handle on the problems but they didn�t. A little later S&W seems to have solved the problems. A second thread indicates the later guns are trouble free. My wife has a Ruger LCP and it functions well, I don�t care for this type of firearm but that is a personal preference. My wife has handled the S&W and believes she would like it better than the Ruger, she has not voted with her pocket book, yet.
It appears this post sort of sums things up. Below the quoted post is a link to the first thread highlighting the problem guns. If it helps, any we bought a 317 Airlight when they first appeared. This little revolver had the extractor star cut wrong and it bulged cartridge cases and had sticky extraction. My wife called S&W and the first person she spoke with informed her everything was normal and this is exactly how the gun was supposed to operate. We mailed S&W 8 empties and our telephone number. S&W called us within 3 days asking that we return the revolver for repair.
�It appears from another post on this forum that S&W has determined that two problems exist.
#1 - the spring needs to be stiffer as the flex in the current one is not remaining seated in the groove of the takedown lever allowing it to crawl out.
#2 - the groove in the takedown lever is not cut deep enough and allows the flexible spring to let go under fire.
Initial repairs before they discovered this problem, was to merely replace the spring and takedown lever with the same thing, not fixing the problem.
From other posts, it looks like they are replacing the frames with new serial numbers to fix the two issues. I hope so since mine was send back to them last week. �
http://smith-wessonforum.com/smith-wesson-semi-auto-pistols/148484-bodyguard-380-first-problem.html
