Shooting Saturday – Beretta 92D

I went to Popguns Indoor Shooting range (I’ll be doing a review as well) with one of my buddies this previous weekend, and took the new Beretta 92D Centurion with me, as well as my Taurus Pt92.  We just did some general target shooting, converting money into smoke an noise; which to my estimation is an excellent way to spend a Saturday.

I brought the Taurus so I could do a side by side comparison of that with the Beretta, since they’re roughly the same gun.  A couple of things, the Beretta’s DAO trigger is a lot more crisp than the first shot with the Taurus in DA mode.  Obviously, since the Taurus is DA/SA, followup shots have a better trigger pull with the Taurus.

The grip on the Taurus feels bigger, I don’t have any empirical evidence for that, but it just feels bigger in my hand than the grip of the Beretta.  In terms of accuracy, both guns shot excellently, as you can see from the images below.  (Click either for fullsize, the first is the Beretta than the Taurus.)

You can see that there’s one flier in the Beretta group, that was pretty much entirely operator error, I was starting to get tired and impatient so I ended up spanking that round and opening up the group quite a bit.

The Beretta performed exactly as I anticipated, printing small groups and feeding everything I stuck in the magazine with an almost boring reliability.

The Beretta 92D Centurion fixes the one thing I hated about the M9 (the slide mounted safety), and the DA trigger is a crisp and easy pull.  The Taurus fixes the same problem by moving the safety to the frame (to allow for cock-and-locked carry if that’s your thing), but also retains the SA mode on the trigger.  Both guns fill important and necessary niches in my gun locker.  Now I just need to get some more magazines for the Beretta, and a 9mm carbine that shares those mags and I’ll be all set.

Good way to spend a Saturday.