According to the news page at S&W they will soon have a locking mechanism very similar to what Taurus has had on their guns for the last couple years.
http://www.smith-wesson.com/misc/ilock.html
After all the complaining some people have done about this feature on the Taurus revolvers I expect we'll see another round about S&W now.
Personally I don't have a problem with this as long as it's been tested and introduces no extra chance of causing the revolver to fail ie breaks and locks the gun up at the worst possible time. I'm sure some people say that any added complexity introduces an additional chance of failure and in a black and white world I will conceede it does. Many semi autos have internal safties that don't compromise reliability, if S&W and Taurus have done their design correctly this shouldn't either...time will tell.
http://www.smith-wesson.com/misc/ilock.html
After all the complaining some people have done about this feature on the Taurus revolvers I expect we'll see another round about S&W now.
Personally I don't have a problem with this as long as it's been tested and introduces no extra chance of causing the revolver to fail ie breaks and locks the gun up at the worst possible time. I'm sure some people say that any added complexity introduces an additional chance of failure and in a black and white world I will conceede it does. Many semi autos have internal safties that don't compromise reliability, if S&W and Taurus have done their design correctly this shouldn't either...time will tell.