Beretta 92FS (9mm Para)
Kim du Toit
May 15, 2003
11:00 PM CDT
When The Mrs. and I qualified for our Texas Concealed Handgun License (CHL), we both encountered an unexpected problem when it came time to take the “proficiency” part of the course: my Springfield 1911 was away getting a bobbed hammer and beavertail safety installed, but that was an easy problem to solve: I just borrowed a Springfield 1911 rental gun, and that was that.
The Mrs. had a more profound problem: her Browning had suffered a catastrophic failure earlier that afternoon (the slide locking bar had broken—an unusual but not unknown problem with Brownings). So she too had to borrow a rental gun—but the problem was that there were no single-action 9mm semi-autos on the rack. She would have to learn how to shoot a double-action pistol, pretty much during the qualifying shoot (explanation below).
Anyway, being the resourceful and talented woman that she is, she sailed through the proficiency shoot, although not without an attack of nerves.
The pistol she chose to use was the Beretta 92FS, and to a large degree, it played no small part in her being able to pop all the necessary rounds into the right part of the target, using a completely strange handgun, with timed strings, at varying distances.
Here’s the 92FS:
The 92F is a derivation of the tried-and-trusted Walther P-38 “open-slide” design.The Beretta 92F replaced the Colt 1911 as the official sidearm of the U.S. Armed Forces (and was promptly renamed the “M9"), after an exhaustive “competition” against other handguns from Smith & Wesson, Colt, Heckler & Koch and SIG. I am not, of course, in agreement with the decision to replace a .45-caliber handgun with a Europellet 9mm one, but that’s a discussion for another time. The 9mm is also more “controllable” for women to shoot than the .45 ACP, which no doubt made it more acceptable to the feminized girly-men who think that having women in combat is A Good Thing.
Here’s the skinny on the 92FS, which is a slightly-improved version of the original 92F design: it’s disgustingly reliable, and reasonably accurate. Its incredibly-fast “lock” time means it can deliver a follow-up shot faster than most 9mm pistols. And, just to show I do give credit where it’s due: the 92F design is easier to field-strip and reassemble than the 1911 which it replaced.
I’m not a fan of double-action pistols, as a rule (I like all my trigger pulls to feel the same, whether the first or the last, and generally speaking, the only way to achieve this is with a single-action trigger set). That said, I would have no hesitation in relying on the 92FS in any kind of emergency (especially if I had a few of those excellent 15-round pre-ban magazines handy). Loaded with decent hollowpoint designs like the Federal Hydra-Shok, Speer Gold Dot or Winchester SXT, the 9mm Para cartridge becomes an acceptable self-defense round, and especially so if the mag is emptied into the torso of the goblin.
The Mrs., by the way, was so taken with the Beretta 92FS that she is considering getting this one, the commemorative “Operation Enduring Freedom” edition, a.) because it’s patriotic, and b.) because it’s flat-out gorgeous.
Can’t argue with her there. The damn guns may be Italian, but at least they’re made in the United States.
Okay, now that the “experiment” is done, can our soldiers go back to using a decent .45-caliber pistol again? I don’t even care if it’s a Beretta.
The Texas CHL proficiency course requires that the first shot of every “string” be fired as though the gun had just been taken from the holster—ie. with a DA pistol, the first round has to have a double-action pull. When the timed strings were called, The Mrs. would have to remember to decock the pistol after every string—which, considering she’d never trained for it (her High Power is single-action), added a level of complexity to her already-high level of stress. But she still got 90% of the maximum number (225) of “points” available.
Don’t ask what I got.
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