![]() ![]() Our students shoot hundreds of rounds on paper and steel silhouettes each week. In my own little corner of the world, we put shooters through much more than the standard pistol qualification course. They consume magazine after magazine of hot M882 military ball ammo and keep coming back for more. While I hate to give the bottom line up front, the fact is that these guns are tough and reliable. It’s not the gun, it’s you.Īs a small arms instructor I have put literally thousands of rounds of ammunition through the M9 service pistol during the last year. After putting a full magazine into the center of the target he handed the pistol back to the shooter and advised, “There’s nothing wrong with this gun.” The implication was obvious. The instructor took the pistol and with a single hand held it upside down. A young officer complained that she couldn’t hit the target because there was something wrong with her pistol. I remember one admonition from our senior firearms instructor when I was a police academy cadet. “Operator error” is by and large the number one reason for failure. Experience had taught me that, only on the rarest occasion is the equipment at fault. The first thing shooters will do after they perform poorly on the range is to blame their equipment. To date I have worked with hundreds of servicemen and women, and have run across the same arguments, issues and excuses that I heard 20 years ago. For the first time in more than a decade I had to closely examine not only the characteristics of the pistol, but how to best operate the gun in close quarter combat. As a member of a Small Arms and Tactics training team, one of my jobs is to train US troops with the M9. Last year I had cause to reconsider the M9 service pistol. Only a few months out of the Marines, I entered the police academy and during my career as a cop I carried a number of sidearms, but not the M9 or its civilian counterpart the Beretta 92. I carried the M9 for a few years during my tour of duty and I will be the first to admit that after I left the Corps I did not carry one again for many years. All the editorials, reviews, or carefully crafted letters in the world aren’t going to change the fact that as these words are put to paper, the predominant sidearm of the US Military is the M9 Beretta pistol. So what is the point why revisit the Beretta M9? Because, like it or not, at the moment there are literally tens of thousands of M9 pistols in the hands of our troops around the globe. Before we move one sentence further into this review let me make it clear, I’m not going to re-fight that war. 45ACP versus 9mm, and the M1911A1 versus the M9. Gallons of ink and reams of paper were sacrificed during the debate over. I was a young US Marine when this changeover took place and I still remember the noise that went on in the ranks and in the firearms world in general. Not only did we change caliber (a subject that is still open for debate), we adopted a completely different operating system with a double-action/single-action (DA/SA) design. A little more than two decades ago the United States military, and by that I mean the actual men and women serving in it, underwent a big change in their lives with the adoption of a new service pistol. ![]()
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