Found this at Arfcom.
Very neat!
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I remember reading about those in a gun magazine.
ReplyDeleteLooked cool as hell, but being a kid at the time I didn't have a gun.
Let alone a Beretta.
That is interesting, is there any information on how the extra weight affects cycling the action? I'm working from the idea that long slide Glocks have a cutout in the slide to keep the weight similar to a standard slide. A best guess is that +P would run better than stock M9 and light target loads would fail to cycle, like birdshot in Mossberg 930 tactical.
ReplyDeleteThe person whose pictures I stole from Arfcom paid around $5k for it.
DeleteHe's posted there and Sniper Hide and fewer than 30 made it to the SEALS and they think that only about 100 were made total.
No information on how they shoot.
Way back in the day (ok, 1991), I remember seeing a cracked slide from an M9 at a gun store in Va Beach or Little Creek (they had it on display on top of the cash register) as to why they wouldn't sell the Beretta.
ReplyDeleteI've often wondered why the Beretta had such a short run as the service sidearm compared to the much longer life of the 1911, and this explains it neatly, and provides an actual fix to the problem. Of course, the closed slide with ejection port would cause reliability issues compared to the open slide design, so the closed slide design was both a fix and an issue simultaneously.
ReplyDeleteThe 1911 going for so long had a lot more to do with having huge numbers of, essentially, unissued guns and two gigantic reductions in force than with its exceptional quality.
DeleteWe had been trying to replace it since just after WW2. The prototype of what becomes the S&W 39 almost did replace it in the early '50's. Then another pistol competition just as Vietnam was ending that came to nothing.
By the time the M9 was selected we were desperate to stop maintaining 1911's and to finally get on NATO ammo standards. The Beretta isn't a bad gun.
Beretta fixed the slide cracking problem in house for no cost to the US Gov. Beretta maintains that it's not an issue with issue ammo, M882 is fine, but the people who broke the first test samples, The SEALs, were using +P+ ammo intended for SMG use. The SEALs deny this. I tend to err on the side of Beretta here because they'd been making the model 92 for years at that time and had seen this failure mode before.
It's short service life isn't because it sucks, it's because it's the guns have been rode hard and put away wet. Remember, they only bought three batches of the thing and most recent was a small stop-gap quantity. Most of the guns in service are pushing 40 with 20 years of continuous war footing to deal with.
Add in that 9mm handguns have seen some significant materials improvements since the M9 was adopted, it makes sense to replace them with something newer.
I think the slides cracking at high round counts is incidental to the decision to replace the M9. Fashion, because modular is the new hotness, the large size of the M9 and the complexity of a DA/SA hammer fired gun compared to the simpler handling of a,striker fired gun were the major drivers. Also the bureaucracy probably wanted to standardize and eliminate the M11 (Sig P228) and as many Glock pistols as possible.
DeleteIt is worth noting that Beretta's subsequent designs the Cougar and Px4 use a conventional closed top slide.