I choose to believe that what the firearms looked like was not part of the selection process, although who knows, it probably was. :)

Anyway, you just reminded me of a bit of trivia about the 92F/M9 which you probably already know, but may be of interest to some of the rest of the class. Shortly after the Beretta was first adopted to replace the M1911A1 in US military service and had started getting into widespread issue, reports started coming in that they were breaking in strange and dangerous ways. The slides, it seemed, would occasionally fly apart in use, with the bit at the rear hurtling back in a deeply disconcerting way toward the shooter's face. Troops allowed as this was not a very popular feature.

Beretta and the DOD investigators were dumbfounded—did they have a batch of defective steel? Was there something wrong with the design of the slide that, somehow, no one had noticed until now?

Well... no. No, it turns out what was happening was that people were taking their new M9s and carrying out unauthorized workshop "accurization" procedures on them, tricks that were handed down through the generations as things what you oughtta do to your M1911A1 to get it to shoot straight. One of the most common was to take the slide off the pistol, put it lengthways in a bench vise, and crank down on it to squeeze the sides closer together. On the old, by-then-pretty-war-weary Colts, that would tighten them up on the frame rails, improve the fit, and—in theory—make the gun function better and the frame/barrel assembly... er... flop around less. Those old GI .45s were made of pretty mild steel, and that was a field-expedient way of compensating for what were at that point decades of wear and stretching.

The new Berettas, on the other hand, had a couple of features to their design and construction that argued against that procedure doing any good. For one thing, they were brand new pistols manufactured in the late 1980s by a company that, agree or not with the selection of a foreign vendor, knew what it was doing. For another, they were made of much harder steel. For a third, they don't have a completely enclosed slide; it's only connected together at the front and rear. It's not intended to be a structural component, so they left most of the top of it off to save weight and allow for better barrel cooling.

Which meant that if you took the slide off an M9, put it in a bench vise, and cranked down on it, all you were going to accomplish was to introduce microfractures into the fairly narrow web of material connecting the sides together at the front and rear. Put it back together, take it out to the range, put a few hundred rounds through it, and those microfractures are going to blossom into full-on fatigue cracks, and then the pistol comes apart. At which point the now-unsecured chunk of steel at the rear comes back and donks you in the face.

While the DOD was occupied printing up and distributing an urgent memo to the effect of FOR FUCK'S SAKE DON'T DO THAT, YOU ASSHOLES, Beretta went ahead and altered the configuration of the 92F's slide a little bit so that if you did break it that way, that part couldn't fly back into your eye any more. And that's where the S came from in the Model 92FS! (Sadly, the Army didn't call it the M9A1 at that point. There is an M9A1 model now, but it got the incrementation for something else. I think they stuck a Picatinny rail on it.)

Anyway, I've never handled a 92, but I quite like the Px4 Storm, which is Beretta's entry into the half-polymer pistol market. It's got a nice chunky grip on it (which you can make even chunkier by swapping around the back part) and feels good in the hand. Uses the same trigger group as the M9, but with an interesting and unusual rotary barrel lockup instead of the Walther-style block mechanism the older gun has. I think they were developing it as their entry into the frequently-renamed contest to replace the M9, and then the DOD decided to, um, not bother replacing the M9.

Although I do have the slight problem that my brain insists on parsing "Px4" as being pronounced "pee-by-four".

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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