Читать книгу Gun Digest Book of Beretta Pistols. Function | Accuracy | Performance онлайн

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In his excellent book, Modern Beretta Firearms (Stoeger Publishing Company, 1994), gun expert Gene Gangarosa, Jr. notes that the first version had no manual safety. That original Model 950 was typically carried with the hammer at half-cock if a round was in the chamber. Many users simply carried it with the chamber empty. In 1978, when Beretta began assembling these guns in Maryland instead of Italy, a manual safety was added. Thus was born today’s Model 950 BS, which can be carried cocked and locked. Because it was understood that when worn loaded the gun was likely to be carried loose in a pocket, the factory made sure there was a strong detent to hold the thumb latch in place. This has required firm pressure to engage or disengage the safety on every sample I’ve examined. (A source at Beretta once told me that while the 950 series has no designated internal, passive firing pin safety device, the nature of the firing pin spring was such that tests convinced the factory that the pistol was “drop safe” under all reasonable circumstances with a round in the chamber.)