Gun Digest Book of Beretta Pistols. Massad Ayoob
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point, it is the national military pistol of numerous countries both inside and outside of NATO, including the United States of America, which adopted it as the M9 in the mid-1980s. It remains extremely popular among civilians, too. Even with 10-round magazines that are altogether too stingy for its ample size, the Beretta 92 continues to sell to private citizens on the strength of its accuracy, reliability, and smoothness of action. In the Chicago area, where there is no concealed carry option and, suburbanites buy handguns for sport and home protection only, a veteran gun dealer with a huge stock told me recently that the Beretta 92 is his single best-selling handgun model.
And then, there are the cops. The Beretta 92 9mm remains standard issue at this writing for both LAPD and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, two of the nation’s largest law enforcement agencies, though both give their members a short list of other optional guns they can buy on their own. These days, even more departments purchase the Beretta 96, the 92’s twin that is chambered for the .40 S&W cartridge. The state troopers of Rhode Island, Indiana, and Florida are among those who adopted the Beretta 96.
The Beretta conversion seamlessly duplicates the functions of the standard 92 and 96 series pistols.
When a gun is that popular, a market develops for conversion kits that will allow training with inexpensive .22 Long Rifle rimfire ammunition. It happened long ago with the 1911. It happened with such exotic auto pistols as the SIG P-210, and HK’s M4 and P7 .380 pistols. It’s happening right now with the GLOCK and Beretta, courtesy of Jonathan Arthur Ciener.
And Beretta is finally on board with a .22 conversion unit of their own.
While it appears on their website, Beretta does not actively advertise their neat little .22 conversion unit. This is a shame. It may be true that if you invent a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door, but first the world needs to know that you have a better mousetrap.
I first learned of this unit from a National Guard pistol team that I’ve had some small input in training. They asked me what I thought of it compared to Jonathan Arthur Ciener’s unit. I told them I was familiar with the Ciener conversion kit and thought very highly of it. My only criticism was that it was a “slick-side.” To keep manufacturing costs down and make the unit affordable. Ciener did not fit it with a safety/decock lever. This required lowering the hammer by hand, as on the very first Beretta 92 and its early Taurus clone way back when.
The unit leader replied that they also had tested the Ciener unit and liked it, but really wanted something with a decocker/safety device as on their issue weapons. They weren’t just looking at something for cheap bulls-eye target practice, he explained. They wanted a unit that would help them fulfill their training commitment to military police, security personnel, and others for whom the M9 pistol would be a primary duty and combat tool. Since the Army and National Guard mandate on-safe carry of the holstered 9mm service pistol, this had to include a system that would allow the troops to drill on releasing the safety and on decocking the pistol during a lull in the firing action.
The unit leader told me that the Beretta conversion apparently had this feature, and asked what I could find out about it. I immediately ordered one, tested it, and got it to one of his people for testing.
Gun Details
We picked up the Beretta conversion unit at the Manchester Indoor Firing Line in Manchester, New Hampshire. We were eager to, in a common figure of speech, “see what it was made of.”
The barrel is steel, and the slide is aluminum. Aluminum slide plus aluminum frame makes for a very light pistol indeed. The action is simple blowback. The ten-round magazine (one only provided with the unit) is polymer. The finish appears to be Beretta’s familiar Bruniton.
A neat little adjustable sight is provided, always a big help when you’re shooting for precision. My boss got to it first and sighted it in for himself, which puts it a little low-right for my eyes. Clicks seemed to be positive and replicable. Sight picture was excellent with a little white dot inset for iffy light conditions.
The slide locks back on the empty magazine, and can be manually locked back via the slide lock lever. Some conversion units don’t have these features.
The slide runs smoothly and effortlessly. The safety/decock lever is that of the F-series pistol, but it also works with the G-series, the designation for a spring-loaded lever, which functions as a one-stroke decocker, but not as a manual safety. However, the Beretta website does not list it as being compatible with the D-series, the double-action-only (self-decocking) variation, which makes mechanical sense.
Clearly marked “22 L.R.” on the barrel, the conversion unit features a very functional ramp and an efficient magazine that delivers the cartridges on a good feed angle.
According to Beretta, the unit is compatible with any Model 92 from the S- and SB-series on up. These are the ones with the slide-mounted safety-decock levers. The very first 92, with frame-mounted manual safety and no dedicated decocking mechanism, is not compatible with this conversion unit. Neither is the Billenium, Beretta’s limited run single-action steel-frame target auto with the frame-mounted manual safety. Nor are the short frame compacts, the 92FC and the 92M. However, the unit is compatible with the Centurion (short barrel/slide assembly on full-size frame) and the Brigadier (full-size frame with reinforced heavy slide).
What is true of the 92 is true of the 96. The conversion unit will work on all .40 caliber Beretta 96 pistols of the F- and G-series, according to Beretta, including the Brigadier and the Centurion but not the compacts. Nor, of course, will it work on the more recent designs, the 8000 series or the polymer-frame 9000 series, which are different pistols entirely.
Endurance
Beretta recently made a series of special Model 92 pistols to commemorate Operation Enduring Freedom. The epoch of the Beretta 92 itself could be called Operation Enduring Reliability. Despite rumors spread by Internet commandoes to the contrary, the military armorers I’ve talked to have been virtually unanimous in their opinion that the Model 92/M9 is an extremely reliable pistol. Its endurance, in terms of breakage, seems no worse than that of the other mainstream high-capacity 9mm service pistols. It has merely gotten a lot more negative publicity for its miniscule number of failures. This is due in at least some part to competitors who were jealous that their gun didn’t win the huge U.S. government contract.
The .22 conversion unit lives up to this reputation. Before it went to the military pistol team, I lent it to my chief of police, who is a big Beretta fan. He put it on his own commercial M92 frame, and proceeded to hammer about 1,000 rounds of Remington .22LR through it. “Love the accuracy,” he reported enthusiastically, “and it didn’t jam once.” I then ran a few hundred rounds of assorted ammo through it myself.
The .22 conversion unit is less picky about ammo than many other .22s, including some other Beretta options in the caliber.
Bear in mind that at this time, approaching 1,500 rounds, the conversion unit had not yet been cleaned. Carbon and lead buildup were visibly present, but the pistol kept chugging along. I say “chugging” advisedly. At least half of the ammo my boss put through it was standard-velocity, lead-bullet target stuff. This ammo has a very mild recoil impulse that will not operate a number of .22LR pistols and even some .22 auto-loading rifles. About half of what I put through it was less than high-velocity too, mostly the inexpensive Blazer.
As crudded up as it was, the converted pistol would very occasionally go “chug, chug.” By that I mean the slide would come back, it would start forward, seem to stall, then finish its forward movement and go into battery. This happened only with the low-velocity ammo. With plated-bullet high-velocity