Gun Digest Book of Beretta Pistols. Massad Ayoob
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here demonstrated by gun dealer and small arms expert Jim McLoud.
The Fight To Succeed The 1911
The story of the military testing is long and complicated. The most detailed and informative accounts appear in Wilson’s book, and in the United States Marine Corps Diary 1990 in a segment by Matthew T. Robinson, the associate editor of the Marine Corps Gazette. That account was called “The Long Road to Change: Procurement of the Beretta 9mm M9 Service Pistol,” and Larry Wilson dubbed it “the most succinct and straightforward piece” explaining the complex testing procedure and its various “back-stories.” The following is a necessarily brief synopsis.
The testing began in the late 1970s, under the Joint Services Small Arms Program (JSSAP), an entity mandated by Congress. It was determined that the United States Air Force would be the service branch that would lead the testing, which kicked off at the USAF’s Eglin Air Base in Valparaiso, Florida.
There were many entries. Colt fielded their double-action SSP, which did not do terribly well and which never made it into full-scale production. Smith & Wesson entered their Model 459 high-capacity, lightweight 9mm with a double-stack magazine. Ironically, this was a second-generation version of the S&W Model 39, a 26.5-ounce update of the Model 39 of 1954, which had been developed by S&W in the late 1940s the first time the government had indicated that it might be interested in adopting a new 9mm duty pistol. Heckler and Koch fielded two models, their P9 – preceding the Glock as the first polymer-framed pistol– and their VP70, a semi-auto pistol version of their machine pistol. Fabrique Nationale sent three different 9mm pistols to the contest, and Star of Spain sent one. Beretta, fresh from winning the Brazilian Army competition, sent in the Model 92.
The evolution of the Model 92 took place quickly, and of necessity as it faced the most modern high-tech handguns the free world had to offer. Gene Gangarosa, Jr. is a handgun authority who has written an eminently readable book on Beretta pistols, and several great articles. He encapsulated the 92’s development as follows.
“In 1976 Beretta introduced their 9mm Model 92 pistol. It made a big hit worldwide with its 15-round magazine and double-action trigger. In its first version the Model 92 featured a sear-blocking manual safety lever located on the frame’s left side in the manner of a Colt Government Model. Later that year, to appeal to military and police forces, Beretta introduced its Model 92S, a Model 92 with a hammer-decocking manual safety lever on the left side of the slide. An upgraded variant of the Model 92S, the Model 92S-1, appeared in 1978 in response to U.S. armed forces interest in issuing a 9mm service pistol. This added an ambidextrous safety lever, enlarged sights and grooved grip straps to the Model 92S, and placed the magazine release behind the trigger guard. Beretta placed the Model 92S-1 changes into full production in late 1980 when the company introduced the Model 92SB. In addition to all the improvements of the prototypical S-1 variant, the SB version also incorporated fully checkered grips, safety levers reshaped to the current configuration, an overtravel shelf on the trigger and a firing-pin lock. Further changes made to the Model 92SB, in response to continued U.S. armed forces testing, led to the Model 92SB-F, evaluated by the U.S. Army in 1984 and adopted in January 1985 as the M9. Beretta also released this variant for commercial sale and police issue as the Model 92F. Changes included a black enamel ‘Bruniton’ finish, squared combat-style trigger guard, chrome-lined bore, slight flaring of the frame’s bottom front portion, fourth-finger rest on the magazine bottom, relieving the grips’ upper rear corners to allow easier access to the safety lever, and enlarging the grips screws’ screwdriver slots. In 1990, following several slide separation incidents in the U.S. armed forces’ training and experimentation, Beretta incorporated a ‘slide retention device.’ This quick fix consists of an enlarged hammer axis pin, which, if the slide’s rear end separates during recoil, engages in a groove machined inside the slide’s lower left rear portion to keep the slide on the frame. With the slide retention device fitted, Beretta designated the pistol Model 92FS, advancing the gun to its current configuration.” (7)
Slide markings help track the Model 92’s evolution in America. Beretta’s U.S. corporate base was in New York when this 92F was imported from Italy …
… while Beretta U.S.A, had been established in Maryland by the time the sun shone on this 92F …
… and this contemporary 92FS was proudly “made in U.S.A.”
The 92FS with slide catch device was designated the M10 pistol by the military. However, in all these years, not a single military person who works with these guns has called one an M10 within my hearing. Without exception, with slide catch or without it, FS or F style, the soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen who carry them call these guns “M9s”. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear, did it really make a sound? If a name is changed and no one uses the new name, was the thing in question really re-named?
The entire, every-viewpoint-represented story of the giant cluster-coitus that was the test for the new 9mm U.S. military pistol has yet to be written. Very thorough accounts exist thus far, however, in the writings of Matthews and Wilson, cited earlier, and in Gangarosa’s work. Suffice to say that after a long string of tests, lawsuits, and exchanged allegations, the Beretta Model 92 won virtually all of the tests. In the very last, it finished neck and neck with SIG-Sauer, and very slightly underbid the manufacturers of the SIG P226. Because it had been understood that the military would adopt the winner of the test, and because there were then so many tests over several years, various historical accounts differ as to the year that the Beretta Model 92 was actually adopted as U.S. Service Pistol, M9.
However, the weight of the evidence indicates that the pivotal approval and official adoption came in 1985. There would be many subsequent tests, all of which verified the selection of the Beretta as having been “the right thing to do.” Suffice to say that Beretta considers 1985 to have been the official year of the U.S. adoption.
Lawsuits and trash-talking newspaper stories came into play. There were those who vilified the Beretta. In 1997, one of my editors at Publishers Development Corporation, now Firearms Marketing Group, asked me to research an article on the matter. The research was already pretty much done. I had followed the Beretta testing from the beginning. A good friend of mine, Jack Robbins, was one of the key men involved in the JSSAP project at Eglin. He had told me that the reason the Beretta had won was that it had simply outperformed everything else, and that Beretta had shown a different attitude than most of its competitors. The majority had figured they made the best gun and it would stand on its own. Beretta, more than any other player in the race, had sent its top people back and forth between the U.S.A. and Italy to ask the testers and the military in detail what they wanted and demanded, and had custom-tailored what became the 92F – and ultimately, the M9 – to those wants and needs.
When the slide separations started happening, I was on it like white on rice. I had for many years done the “Industry Insider” column for American Handgunner, and was proud that I had earned a reputation of telling it like it was. I had exposed a number of bad firearms, and a lot of manufacturers didn’t like me for it. I had been banned at various times from Charter Arms, Glock, Smith & Wesson, and Sterling Arms for writing things about their products that the executives didn’t appreciate. One company had pulled over a million dollars worth of advertising out of the PDC magazines, with a senior exec telling the publisher that they would buy again as soon as I was fired. To his enormous credit, founding publisher George Von Rosen told them to stuff it. Later, when that particular executive was fired, his gun company determined that I was no longer the problem. By then, the company had addressed every one of the shortcomings that I had mentioned in the long article series on their guns that had so enraged their former decision-maker.