How to merge Laravel objects in controller

What you can do here is merge the arrays of the two query result and then use the Response with json output like shown below.

$array = array_merge($mc->toArray(), $sm->toArray());
return Response::json($array);

Nowadays you can use

$new_collection = $collection->merge($other_collection).

This works in Laravel 4 and seems to handle both arrays and collections.