Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Massad Ayoob
Read between
December 22, 2023 - February 21, 2024
The Cougar was touted as having passed 30,000-round torture tests, and winning NATO approval. In the 1990s, it passed the rugged battery of tests mandated by the NYPD, and was approved as an optional off-duty pistol for New York’s Finest.
“Since 1986-87 the Department of Public Safety has utilized the Heckler & Koch (H&K) P7 (M8-M13) 9mm auto loading pistol as the issued duty handgun. Even though the H&K is an excellent weapon, it became apparent by 1996 that the P7 was no longer a viable weapon of choice for DPS. The price of a new H&K with night sights and two magazines, increased from $425 in 1986 to over $1,100 in 1996. After a decade of use, many of the weapons needed routine maintenance; however, replacement parts were expensive and difficult to obtain.
To a lot of shooters, the Beretta 92 is to handguns what a Lamborghini or an Alfa Romeo is to sports cars. The Beretta Cougar is seen as, well, kind of a Fiat. Good, functional, but nothing to make your blood sing,
The Cougar was about to become the first “big blaster” in the history of Beretta pistols.
Not many people realize that Beretta, whose name is a byword for semiautomatic pistols, has also produced revolvers. In the late 20th Century, the firm developed a double-action .357 Magnum with integral recoil control ports in the barrel. It resembled a cross between a German Korth, a French Manhurin, and an American Ruger. Those who handled it said it was superb. I wouldn’t know; I never got my hands on one. These guns were never commercially imported into the United States.
Well i’ll be damned! Learn something new everyday!
Beretta does, after a fashion, manufacture a .357 Magnum revolver today. A few years ago, the company took over Uberti,
If the Stampedes I’ve tested are any indication, Beretta has done a lot to improve Uberti’s quality control.
In 1983, concurrent with the Connecticut State Police, NCHP had become one of the first major departments in the nation to adopt a high-capacity 9mm auto, the Beretta 92F.
They had good luck with their 115-grain JHP 9mm ammo, and found it to be an adequate manstopper.
The .357 SIG is a success story. Early problems with the cartridge involving case neck separation seem to have been pretty well worked out. If you want a double-action police-type service pistol in this caliber, there are several choices. However, if you want one with the added “handgun retention insurance” of a manual safety, there is only one: the Beretta Cougar 8357.
Which brings us to the long-awaited Beretta .45 automatic, the Cougar 8045. The one I have now is an excellent pistol. It has jammed but once, a feed stoppage with a low-powered target round.
I like Beretta pistols. I like .45s. A lot of people who liked .45s didn’t like Berettas because they only came in smaller calibers. That’s over now.
It’s worth the weight and it’s worth the wait.
The slide release is easy to reach. Perhaps too easy. As with earlier Beretta service guns, it extends well back to the point where if you shoot with a high thumb position like Jeff Cooper or a straight thumb grasp like most IPSC shooters, your dominant thumb will ride the slide stop and prevent it from locking the slide open when the pistol runs dry.
I’m personally partial to the “F” style Berettas carried on safe, because I’ve seen so many cases where a criminal got an on-safe auto from a good guy, tried to shoot him, and couldn’t do so before the good guy, or his back-up, rectified the situation.
Okay, Mas, starting to get repetitious there.
Experience has taught me that the best three shots will generally equal a five-shot group from a Ransom machine rest if there are no called flyers.
Okay, Mas, starting to get repetitious there.
I find that with a top-quality double-action revolver, I do the same or better double-action as I do single-action. With a double-action auto, however, the linkage is rarely as smooth as on the best sixguns and I’ll generally shoot a bit tighter in single-action mode.
Bottom line: the Beretta Model 8045 shoots, even in its “toughest to shoot well” incarnation as the double-action-only Model 8045 D.
In terms of reliability, the new .45 Beretta has big shoes to fill, those of its famous older brother, the 9mm Beretta 92. The performance of that gun in military torture tests has been extraordinary, exceeding that of the legendary 1911 pistol in terms of reliability. We hear the same from police departments using that gun.
Beretta service pistols come with big, blocky sights. My aging eyeballs and I love them.
Not until 1998 did I shoot a clean 300 on the tough IPSC target that way. The pistol was a Beretta 92D, and I owe the score in large part to those humongous Beretta sights.
If my Beretta .45 automatic is any indication, yours will be utterly reliable, easy to shoot fast and reload fast, and will shoot pretty much where it looks. It will be accurate with loads it likes, and you’ll have fun finding out which those are. The .45 Beretta really was worth the wait.
Ditto for the Beretta PX4 Storm .45 ACP (not yet in production when Mas wrote this book)!
Some 70 percent of new police purchases of handguns were said to be Glocks.
the oldest of the world’s gun makers at last departed from its tried and true formula of blue steel and walnut and introduced its first polymer-frame handgun in 2001. It was dubbed the Model 9000.
The conventional double-action first shot style, self-cocking thereafter, with a combination safety/decocking lever is the “F” style. This is what the Army uses in their Beretta M9 9mm. The same system but with a spring-loaded slide lever that decocks only and is always in the “fire” position is the “G” style. The double-action-only — called the “slick-slide” by Beretta insiders because it needs no levers of any kind on the slide — is known as the “D” style.
Again…Okay, Mas, starting to get repetitious there.
The “F” is the oldest and most proven of Beretta’s systems. On-safe carry gives you a weapon retention fallback. If the bad guy gets your gun, he has to find the safety catch before he can shoot you. Being lightly spring-loaded, it’s among the quickest to release. If you have long enough a thumb, a downward swipe like wiping off a 1911’s safety will activate it.
Again…Okay, Mas, starting to get repetitious there.
Beretta has gone to great and laudable lengths to cultivate pride of ownership among its customers. The newest .40 simply doesn’t make the cut on subtleties of workmanship. I’ve never had to say
By that standard, the old Beretta .40 “shot more than twice as good” as the new one. Finally, and most unforgivably, my test 9000 jammed. Every stoppage was a 12 o’clock misfeed.
was getting about one jam to every 60 or so shots, and they did not clear easily. I had to rip the magazine out of the gun, allowing the choked round to fall, then reload and continue.
What went wrong with the newest Beretta? Gabriele de Plano thinks I got a lemon, and assures me I got a lemon. I hope he’s right, but if he’s wrong, the problem could be that our oldest firearms manufacturer went into the 21st century too fast and via the wrong avenue.
Every family has its black sheep. I sympathize. (In my family, I probably am the black sheep). HK had the VP70Z, SIG had the Mauser M2, Colt had the egregious Model 2000, Smith & Wesson had its disposable Sigma .380, and so on.
the Smith 5906 was always considered a heavy service pistol.
AKA “the Boat Anchor” as one of my fellow L.E. veterans called it.
BANG! The pistol discharged, and delivered justice. Without going into details, it would be correct to say that there was indeed a “de-cocking” involved, but it just didn’t involve the Beretta’s hammer or the lever on its slide.
Haha, ZING!!
When I was young, my mother, who thought it unladylike to use bad language or take God’s name in vain, would use the abbreviation “GD” when my dad would have said, “God damn!” I am sure that the wanna-be cop-killer who emasculated himself must at some point have blamed that “GD Beretta.” As I was putting this book together, each chapter needed a filecode in the computer, and I used “GDBeretta” for Gun Digest Book of Modern Beretta Pistols. I confess that as deadline loomed closer and things came up that made the book’s completion more hectic, I uttered the phrase “that GD Beretta book is due”
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photography by the incomparable Ichiro Nagata.
When the new guns were acquired, the old ones were traded in, and were sold off by a distributor in Kentucky. I bought one. I wanted it for my collection as a monument to the sort of bureaucratic idiocy that can sometimes bedevil large organizations.
Only “sometimes?!?!”
there’s no point in having a shootin’ iron that you don’t shoot, so I took it to the range.
Beretta revolvers? No, it’s not a misprint.
In the 19th century, from the pinfire era on, Beretta had a bunch of revolvers in their catalogue.
In the 20th century, Beretta sold a line of wheelguns under its own name that they called Tenex revolvers, which bore a remarkable resemblance to the Taurus.
Present was Cathy Williams, Beretta’s public relations liaison, and one of the very best in the industry. She is not someone to be trifled with,
The Uberti guns coming through now under the Beretta Stampede moniker are absolutely gorgeous. Not just in looks, but in performance.
If Bat Masterson came back to life and thumbed a Stampede’s hammer back, he would be horrified to see that it had no firing pin. It would take him a moment to realize that the firing pin now floats, spring-loaded, in the frame,
the four clicks of the original Colt single-action hammer is absent. This, to the true traditionalist, is an unforgivable deviation from authenticity. That said, though, the hammer comes back easily enough and smoothly enough that the ergonomics are essentially the same. Alas, however, the shooter will feel only three clicks by the time the hammer reaches full cock. The old-timers said that those four clicks spelled CO-L-T. Well, on this revolver, I guess the three clicks will have to spell N-E-W.
A friend of mine has written that fine bluing should look like a pool of black oil that appears wet even when the surface is bone dry. That, my friends, is the look the Uberti/Beretta Stampede has achieved with its standard-grade finish. The polish is excellent, and the color is a deep blue-black.
Very fast bullets tend to hit lower than standard velocity,
Fobus synthetic holster and magazine pouches are popular in IDPA matches and for concealed carry.
You wouldn’t buy an Alfa Romeo and put cheap two-ply retread tires on it. Don’t accessorize your Beretta on the cheap, either.
The Bruniton finish on the chrome-molybdenum gun will age nicely, rubbing off a bit on the frame if you give it a lot of wear, which imbues a pleasant “salty” look to the gun, sort of like a scarred and dented police baton. It’s a patina that says, “Been there, done that.”
As noted elsewhere, the sights will be excellent as they come out of the box.
