The 90-series Beretta has an external trigger bar unlike most handguns. While I was at Beretta, one of the guys who worked for me — one of our armorer school instructors — had a student claim that a dime had lodged itself in between the trigger bar and the frame of one of their guns, incapacitating it.
True story? I don’t care.
There are more than half a million Beretta 90-series pistols in service with the U.S. military. There have been a hundred thousand (or more) in the holsters of law enforcement officers. In all that time, do you know how many of those guns were incapacitated that way? Somewhere very close to zero. Do you know how many times I’ve seen an internet commando wannabe warn people that Berettas can be shut down by a piece of <whatever> at the trigger guard, or that the open top slide makes the guns less reliable, or that a ninja can strip the slide off the gun faster than you can pull the trigger? More than I can count…
It’s one thing to be aware of potential actual problems brought about by a gun’s design.
It’s another to be paranoid about once in a lifetime wild improbabilities… especially when you’re talking about a firearm that has seen service all over the world in every imaginable environment.
Don’t believe the hype…
Train hard & stay safe! ToddG
Not totally unlike the SERPA conversation, perhaps?
I think the SERPA issue has merit, with the serpa there has been NUMEROUS proven accounts of the holster screwing uo or putting the novice shooter in bad position finger wise….
the rest is all crap..
BKS — I agree with Wesley. The SERPA issue is well documented. There’s a big difference between a one-in-a-million maybe and a repeatedly demonstrated deficiency.
About that strip the slide off BS.
I was at a constables class years ago. 1 of the instructors tried to demo that with a Beretta 92 that everybody verified unloaded. He started to move I pulled the trigger 3 times. My assumption is that if I have a pistol on a guy , I am willing to shoot him.
If he gets his hands on your gun he can strip it out of your hands, he does not need to take it apart.
Yeah, but that guy wasn’t Jet Li 🙂
As far as holsters go, no retention holster is perfect. They can all hang up the pistol if the draw isn’t executed perfectly.
Gotta love those keyboard commandos that know all there is to know about firearms. Great post!
As pointed out some time ago by Ayoob, the danger in a gun grab is that they get your gun and shoot you with it, not that they take it apart.
MY advice has always been that if a ninja pulls the slide off of your 92 variant that you punch him in the face really, really hard with the dust cover of the lower you have in your hand, then transition to your BUG.
“Back in the day,” they said something similar about the 1911. Supposedly by pressing on the front of pistol, you could push it out of battery, thereby disabling it. There wasn’t any internet then, but still everybody knew it was true.
So, a young Army lieutenant serving as his battalion’s staff duty officer in the mid-1970’s, decided to show his duty NCO how easy it was to disable a 1911. The result was a .45 caliber hole in his palm and the end to his Army career.
100 years from now a spacemall ninja will be showing how you can disable a plasma weapon in the 40 watt range by simply sticking your tongue into the plasma ejection port. Darwin doesn’t work as fast as they reproduce.
Real question for Todd, what about the grip safety on an XD? I don’t like it cause I think it’s redundant, but is it a real point of failure for a concealed carry gun?
I used to shoot the crap out of a Beretta. I shot 1k in a day without cleaning it once. I thought that was pretty impressive back then. I was surprised a few years later when somebody told me how crappy they were. I don’t know what their experience with the pistol actually was. Kinda like how the BHP isn’t up to snuff either; but it’s been the most used pistol in the world. Huh?
Bruce — The problem with the XD grip safety is repeatable and observable. Because it grip safety needs to be engaged for the slide to cycle, one-handed manipulations (especially malfunction clearances) become a challenge. I’ve witnessed people struggle with it myself and more than one law enforcement agency has rejected the gun after seeing the same problem during testing.
Matt — No way you shot that much through a Beretta. The slide would have flown off and killed you. Please stop using your personal experience to counter what the Internet tells us is true!
You’re right on. I never really cared for the Beretta 92s, but that was based on me shooting better with other pistols and not any reliability issues. I have a lot of time with the little bitty Beretta 21A, however, and carried it in all manner of unusual and otherwise careless positions before I knew better without ever getting a dime lodged in the exposed trigger bar, or even enough lint to bind it up. A gun, even a reliable one, is a mechanical device and may fail at some point. Carry a BUG.
I have a Beretta 92s and have always found it to be very accurate and reliable, but for my taste its too bulky, heavy and too long to carry concealed. However if I’m somewhere that I can open carry (camping, hiking, etc.) You better believe its on my hip.
I’ve certainly been pleased with my 92D-flawless reliability and an exceptionally nice DAO triggerpull-much like that of a tuned revolver.
The discussion Todd initiated about the Beretta is akin to that on “another forum” where one somewhat credentialed instructor/gunshop guy insists that the slide cut-out on the Glock G34/G35 is an open invitation to the Armegeddon of all failures, despite compelling counters from numerous credible forum participants’ empirical experience to the contrary. While some things are theoretically possible, real world experience and common sense should (hopefully) trump unwarranted suppositions of the extreme…
Best, Jon
Jon — That’s another good example. I do not doubt that it happened to someone once. But in the history of the G34/G35, how many trigger springs have broken? How many slide lock springs? How many slide stop levers? How many mag catch springs? How many firing pin blocks have got stuck? Those are all things that happen with far greater frequency yet no one says “STOP SHOOTING GLOCK!” because of them.
Worrying about the one-in-a-million problem while ignoring the one-in-a-thousand problem is just silly to me.
And with the realization that a judicious and consistant maintenance/parts replacement protocol will generally/usually/most of the time more than adequately take care of the potential “one-in-a-thousand” problems…
Best, Jon
Ironically, the only time my Beretta ever broke, ToddG fixed it in a Phoenix hotel room. Trigger return spring went TU. More than a decade later, I’m still shooting and carrying that gun.
I switched to the Wolff INS-instigated captive coil trigger return spring unit they call their Trigger Conversion Unit (TCU) after my OEM lever-type trigger return spring broke.
Best, Jon