NOT JUST A RED-DOTTED STEPCHILD

Springfield Armory’s Red-Dot-Equipped Subcompact

- Tamara Keel

For the last couple of years, it’s felt like all the attention in the concealed-carry world has focused on increasing capacity in subcompacts. SIG’s P365, Springfield Armory’s Hellcat, and the 43X/48 duo from Glock have been getting all the headlines.

Because of this, it can be easy to overlook the fact that the original slim single-stack subcompact nines, in many ways the forebears of their double-stacked kin, are still out there and putting in yeoman work in holsters across the land.

Springfield Armory jogged our memory with the recent launch of the OSP variant of their single-stack subcompact XD-S Mod.2, with a slide milled to accept red-dot sights and available right out of the box with a factory-installed Crimson Trace CTS1500 red-dot optic.

OUT OF THE BOX

So, is the classic micro single-stack still relevant in the age of the Hellcat? Springfield Armory sure seems to think it is, so let’s open the box and find out. And when we say “open the box,” we mean that very literally, because the packaging for the XD-S Mod.2 OSP is a semigloss black cardboard box, about the right size for a personal pizza, except with the Springfield crossed-cannons logo instead of a Domino’s one.