Stoeger Cougar

From NRA 2010

Why am I holding a Stoeger Cougar in my hands? Well, to be perfectly honest, I was in the Stoeger booth checking out the Double Defense shotguns and the two tone Beretta Stoeger Cougar caught my eye. I figured I’d grab a throwaway picture of the Cougar and move on, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that the Cougar is actually a GREAT buy for a self defense gun. First, a little bit of history on the gun: Beretta introduced the Cougar in the mid 90s to give law enforcement agencies another option to the Beretta 92 series guns which were starting to fall out of vogue in the wake of the LAPD North Hollywood bank shootout. Despite being the gun of choice in Tom Clancy’s Rainbox Six book for the elite multi-national counter-terrorist team, the Cougar never really caught on, and eventually Beretta discontinued the Cougar in favor the Px4 Storm…which uses the exact same action as the Cougar but on a polymer frame.

After a while, Beretta which owns Stoeger decided that Stoeger needed to make some Cougars. The gun was re-introduced and manufacturing was moved to Turkey on all the original Beretta equipment, and the price point of the pistol was reduced.

That’s what makes the Stoeger Cougar a good buy in my opinion. You’re essentially getting a Beretta pistol for $350/$400ish for a brand new gun, and because there are glut of used Cougars out there you can also get parts and magazines for them relatively easily. Honestly, you could do a lot worse for a self-defense firearm than a brand spanking new .40 S&W for around $400. Sure, it’s not an HK or even a Glock, but for people on a budget that also want a new gun, it makes sense to buy. Plus, it also looks cool. But that’s just me.

Beretta/Stoeger provided no promotional consideration for this post.