Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Massad Ayoob
Read between
December 22, 2023 - February 21, 2024
Each group was measured to the nearest 0.05 of an inch, center-to-center of the farthest bullet holes, and again for the best three shots. Experience has taught me that the latter measurement goes far toward factoring out human error and giving us a shorthand preview of the pistol’s inherent accuracy, coming close to a five-shot group from a Ransom rest.
Repeating yourself yet again, Mas!!
Now, let’s analyze this. At least one ammo company, Winchester, has warned that the light subsonic 147-grain loads the police community once demanded might not operate all auto pistols under less than ideal conditions. That said, I can’t blame the ammo.
The Beretta 9mm is taking over from the 1911 .45 as the dominant gun in NRA Distinguished pistol shooting.
Wow! Strange you don’t hear more about this!!
him, “The standard Beretta rifling is just under one turn in 10 inches. The Bar-Sto is one in 16. The slower twists like heavier bullets, and the faster twists like lighter ones.”
NRA Hunter Pistol. It’s all done from standing (off-hand, two-hand) position, from 40 to 100 meters. It duplicates the steel critters of the International Metallic Handgun Silhouette Association, but with scaled-down targets. At 40 paces, the “chicken” is the size of a robin; at 50, the “pig” is no bigger than a house cat; at 75 meters, the “turkey” resembles a healthy chicken, and at 100, the “ram” is best described as a dachshund wearing a little helmet.
I ordered a target pistol, and that’s what I got: a precision machine that you have to break in before it works as reliably as its original heavy-duty version. It was the same with the 1911 pistol, wasn’t it?
Remember, the outof-the-box Beretta will always do way better than 4 inches at 25 yards, and the center zone of an IDPA target is an 8-inch circle.
The pistol I chose, with virtually all in the world to pick from and no thought that many years later I would be assigned to write a book about the brand, was the Beretta 92FS.
Hopefully a good omen for Yours Truly <knock on wood, inshallah, fingers crossed…✌️🙏📿🤞>
These days, I use Winchester’s Ranger-T 127-grain +P+ JHP. That stuff is rated for 1,250 foot seconds out of a standard service barrel and is probably over 1,300 foot seconds out of the longer Jarvis unit, which means that each shot is delivering impact in the .357 SIG’s territory.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this book the excellent custom work done on my 92FC by Jim Horan. Sadly, he is no longer in the gunsmithing business. Having figured out just what a thankless task that is, now that he’s retired from law enforcement he is working as a police equipment distributor. It’s a loss to the Beretta shooting community, because he did a fine pistol.
Gunsmithing is “thankless?!?!”
In the delicate hand of Dr. Judy Tant, national women’s champion bull’s-eye shooter, this David Sams Custom Beretta is the most manageable of Distinguished guns.
The conventional wisdom held that the .45 ACP cartridge was historically more accurate than the 9mm NATO round.
This new Beretta thingamajig had an aluminum frame. How could a pistolsmith accurize that? The answer was found in the good old-fashioned American ingenuity of our military armorers. First came steel inserts, hardened to 32 Rockwell, then cut to shape and press fit into the frame rails, and screwed in place for good measure. Now they could work steel to steel to tighten the slide to the frame.
Fans of the great 1911 pistol may grind their teeth, but the fact is that the category of service pistol bull’s-eye shooting, designed for the .45 and dominated by that gun for so many decades, is now virtually ruled by the Beretta 9mm.
Slaughter that sacred cow!!
Engraving initials on the floorplate of the magazine or something like that shouldn’t hurt anything either. It won’t be as if a master engraver did it, but you’ll be able to tell your Beretta mags from someone else’s when they’re lying in the dirt among many others on the range.
Sooooooo tempting…
Winchester high-velocity plated round nose, a good choice in smaller Beretta .22 LRs and virtually guaranteed to cycle in them.
So far so good <knock on wood> out of my Beretta M9A1-22.
Since almost any .22 rimfire ammo can ricochet, I would tend in this one caliber range to go with round nose instead of HP to assure deep enough penetration.
For some reason, the high-velocity Remington .22 Long Rifle with plated round nose bullets seems to produce particularly nasty wounds, tumbling through tissue with a buzzsaw effect, yet it feeds flawlessly and shoots accurately. It would be my first choice if I had to load any .22 caliber handgun to defend myself.
.25s work better. The great John Browning expressly designed this 6.35mm round in 1908 to work in tiny semiautomatic pistols.
The author’s grandfather shot an armed robber with this Colt .32 auto, and won the fight, but Ayoob still doesn’t care to rely on a caliber that small. For a .32 Beretta he recommends Silvertip or Gold Dot if it will feed reliably.
I asked my students this question: “If this is the effect of three .25 caliber, muzzle-contact gunshot wounds on a frail, elderly man who wanted to die, what do you suppose their effect would have been on a big, strong, young criminal filled with adrenaline and drugs who wanted you to die?” This is why I coined the phrase, “Friends don’t let friends carry mouseguns.”
Or why Major Boothroyd told James Bond and “M” that the .25 had no stopping power in “Dr. No!”
As recently as World War II, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) issued the Colt .32 Pocket Model automatic to spies, and the United States Army issued them to general officers well into the 1950s. For decades after that, numerous European police forces felt .32 autos were adequate for law enforcement service. The South African Police Force issued .32s to detectives until almost the fourth quarter of the 20th century.
In late 2004, Phil’s son – who had risked death as a New York City firefighter among the first responders to the Twin Towers horror – was killed in Iraq.
Phil believed that a .32 auto loaded with the hard-jacketed German Geco ball round would penetrate deeper than a .380 and be easier to shoot fast and straight, due to its light recoil. He was among the very few credentialed experts who preferred the .32 to the .380,
So was J.B. Wood.
Certainly, with proper placement it will do the job. Rex Applegate recorded a case of an OSS agent who was captured by a couple of Nazis behind their lines.
the end of the drive the American drew the Colt and shot each of his Nazi captors once in the back of the head. Each was killed instantly, and the American escaped to tell his tale.
The trouble is, the bright line seems to go right through the center of it, with half of the people whose research qualifies them to an opinion accepting the .380 as the bare minimum, and the other half drawing the line just above that cartridge because they consider it marginal or sub-marginal. This writer falls into the latter category.
The United States Judge Advocate General’s Office has long since determined that no convention or treaty to which the United States is bound requires ball ammo except in official, declared international warfare. What is going on at this writing is counter-terrorism, and American use of hollow-point ammunition is absolutely justified by all prevailing standards and law.
There are no surprises here. If we’ve known for more than a century that 9mm ball didn’t have what it takes to stop armed men in a fight-or-flight state, we’ve known for more than a third of a century that good JHP 9mm does.
author often uses 127-grain Winchester Ranger SXT +P+ in his 9mm Berettas. They’re warranted for it and stand up to its power. It’s a police-only load; private citizens who can’t get it can buy CCI Gold Dot 124-grain +P, the NYPD load, which virtually duplicates its ballistics.
PMC 115-grain jacketed hollow-point, which at that time was jacketed up and over the edge of the hollow cavity and did not expand.
PMC later upgraded their 9mm ammunition to much more efficient bullets, including Tom Burczynski’s excellent StarFire design.
a +P+ 9mm JHP that weighed 115 grains and traveled 1,300 feet per second, generating a whopping 431 foot-pounds of energy. In numerous shootings, this round proved itself to be a very decisive manstopper. Separate testing led to adoption of the 115-grain +P+ by the U.S. Secret Service, the Air Marshals, and in a pilot program for semiautomatic pistols, the U.S. Border Patrol. They among other agencies demonstrated it to be a decisive fight-stopper.
Meanwhile, another 9mm load concept was developed and had borne fruit. This concept was exemplified by the Winchester 127-grain +P+ Ranger at 1,250 feet per second, and the CCI Speer Gold Dot 124-grain +P at the same velocity.
spectacular success with these rounds on the street. Indeed, they were so successful that street cops virtually stopped lobbying for more powerful guns. Word spread like wildfire among these agencies after each shooting: the ammo they had now made the 9mm work as a fight-stopper.
civilians can purchase this excellent 115-grain ammo as CCI Gold Dot +P, Black Hills +P, Pro-Load Tactical +P, and Remington +P.
However, for those who are particularly sensitive to recoil, I have to agree again with Evan Marshall and recommend Federal’s 115-grain Classic JHP, which is product coded “9BP.”
Accuracy is also superlative, on a par with the famously accurate Olin Super Match.
The M9/Model 92 in particular was engineered for the NATO 9mm round, which is actually higher in pressure than a +P+ police load.
The 135-grain bullets give the .40 S&W cartridge a shorter overall length, and while that does not affect most guns, I’ve received a number of complaints about stoppages with 135-grain .40 rounds in the Beretta 96.
Worked fine in my CBP-issued HK P2000 FWIW.
As with the .357 SIG, Beretta makes but a single pistol line in this caliber, the Model 8045 Cougar series.
And today there’s the Beretta PX4 Storm in the caliber.
At this writing, the LAPD load is the Winchester 230-grain SXT.
Personally, I don’t use steel case ammo in any of my American or European handguns. That stuff, as currently produced, was designed by the Russians for Russian weapons, which in turn were designed with massive extractors expressly to deal with the way steel case ammo affects feeding.
The virtually universal consensus of the U.S. military armorers who were over there and the American combat personnel who did the fighting was that the Beretta pistols were fine and any problems involved Checkmate magazines bought on bid and pointy-nose full-metal-jacket ball ammunition that has been known for about a century to be a most unlikely manstopper.
Berettas jamming in sand? Wait a minute. The Israelis are the masters of desert warfare, and they use Beretta pistols extensively.
The South Africans were no slouches in desert combat, either, since Namibia was for many years under their control as Southwest Africa, and they used the Z88, a copy of the 92 made under Beretta license in the Republic of South Africa.
Army and Marine Corps armorers who work for their services’ marksmanship training units are on top of the battlefield feedback from both fronts, Afghanistan and Iraq. They confirm that the pistols are fine. “Trust only two magazines: American Beretta mags, and Italian Beretta mags,” they told me. That basically gives you a choice of three, the third being MecGar magazines, since Italy’s MecGar has made many of the “factory” magazines for Beretta.
Let’s look at two recently returned American combat soldiers. One has requested to remain nameless. He found the Beretta worked fine in Afghanistan, so long as it had good magazines and was kept reasonably clean. When he’s not serving the National Guard, his job stateside is as a full-time police officer in a major metropolitan city. When his department allowed him to carry the gun of his choice, he wore a personally owned Beretta 92F. When he got into a gunfight with it, he unerringly drew from his SS-III security holster, smoothly popped off the safety, and killed his armed antagonist, who
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The other man is Ray Millican, an Army Command Sergeant Major with a special forces assignment. Recently returned, he had the same observations on the American sidearms. Issued the M9, he trusts the gun but has little faith in full-metal-jacket 9mm ammo. He thinks so much of the Beretta that he bought one as a personal carry and home-defense pistol,
Berettas come in three variations. Those with the “F” suffix are traditional double-action (TDA) designs, which are double-action only on the first shot. They then cock themselves to easy single-action pulls for subsequent shots,
Okay, Mas, you’re repeating yourself yet again….
