Easiest shooting 9mm for small hands? Dedicated home defense application.
I've got a daughter about to graduate high school. She has a reasonable amount of training/experience with shotguns, bolt guns, AR's, and service-style pistols, but she hasn't been terribly enthusiastic about shooting for a couple years now, being more inclined to hang out with friends than her boring, old dad. Can you even imagine that?
My hopeful plan is to try to maximize our time at the range this summer before she turns 18 later in the year (she started school earlier than most kids do). I'd like to focus on handguns, and I thought about trying to find a new 9mm pistol that has very minimal recoil for caliber, while still being as optimal for very small hands as possible. To this end, I thought about mounting a giant WML to increase weight and perhaps reduce recoil. Probably want to be red dot friendly. My hope is a setup like this might eventually become a dedicated home defense/bedside safe pistol for her someday if everything works out well.
For reference, Glock 19s are hard for her to get good trigger reach. M&Ps with small backstrap work OK for her, but it seems like there may be more good options these days. PDP-F and Sig 320s look interesting, but there are no places around to rent these, and I've heard some weird things about the 320 series. P365 Macro family looks interesting because of the modularity, but not sure how much you can tame the recoil on these by adding grip weights, lights and such. I do have a standard p365 myself, and think highly of the p365's in general, but it's pretty snappy in the smallest/lightest form factor.
1) What is the short list of pistols to look at for this application in 2024?
2) How much can the weight of a large weapon mounted light and/or grip weights reduce perceived recoil? If this isn't a dumb idea, what to look at?
3) What holsters would you be looking at? I'd need to find a quality holster for the whole setup because we always work out of holsters at outdoor shooting ranges for practice, and guns without good holsters are just stupid.