![]() Beretta's design team developed a wedge-shaped safety, which aids the shooter in racking the slide to chamber a round. With the safety lever down the pistol is on “safe.” To make it ready to fire, all you have to do is thumb the safety into the up position. Px4 samples shot at the Beretta seminar wore the ambidextrous thumb safeties/decockers. Unlike the M9 pistol the slide is closed at its top and has a conventional ejection port. The slide of the Px4 Storm is a massive steel part machined from a solid forging. Both have slick side slides without a manual safety, decocker, or hammer spur. In addition, there are two double-action-only configurations for the Px4. Guns can also be configured to DA/SA with a decocker and no manual safety. The guns that were provided for us during the writer's seminar possessed conventional double-action/single-action (DA/SA) lockwork with an ambidextrous safety/decocker. A gunsmith can easily change the action to meet the agency's or shooter's preference. Beretta engineers designed the Px4 so that armorers could change the pistol's fire-control system. The big deal is that the Px4 lets the shooter or the agency that issues the weapon make a lot more choices than just the size of the grip. A lot of pistols now allow you to tailor the grips and other elements of their frames to suit your needs. This is what Beretta calls “Optimized Individual Performance.” All of these options permit you to tailor each gun for each individual officer. The Px4 Storm even has two different slide release widths. There are also three different sizes of completely ambidextrous magazine releases that the owner can use to customize the gun. Three different backstraps are available for the Px4, and this allows the user to customize the weapon for different hand sizes. And unlike the M9 pistol the Px4 Storm has an internal trigger bar. To allow easy mounting of lights and lasers, the frame includes an integral Picatinny rail on the bottom of the dust cover. For corrosion resistance, economy, and weight savings Beretta molds the pistol from a “technopolymer” reinforced fiberglass. There are a few things that you'll notice immediately when you see the Px4. Both calibers use steel magazines that drop freely when the magazine release is hit. 40 S&W model's capacity is 14 rounds, 17 rounds with the extended floorplate. The 9mm Px4 will have a magazine capacity of 17 rounds, 20 rounds with an optional extended floorplate. Hence the name Px4, or pistol times four. 40 S&W and 9mm, Beretta intends to quickly add. So, while the initial Px4 Storms will be offered only in. For example, one of the standards was that the pistol must have a long service life-a minimum of 30,000 rounds-and that it be able to fire 5,000 rounds between failures.Īnother specification that Beretta's management set for the Px4 is that the new pistol had to offer users and police agencies a lot of choice. So we spent a lot of time at the nearby Prince George's County Police range, putting the new pistol through its paces.Īccording to Blackwell, the Px4 is a direct result of Beretta not only listening to shooters' criticisms of the company's ubiquitous M9/M92 duty weapons but also studying the needs of its customers and devising solutions to meet those needs.īeretta then developed demanding criteria for what it hopes will be a hugely successful law enforcement handgun. The seminar marked the introduction of the Px4 Storm and Beretta officials wanted to solicit feedback from the assembled writers. “The new Beretta Px4 Storm provides departments with the ability to tailor their handguns to fit a petite 90-pound officer or a strapping 300-pound SWAT operator.”Ĭan one pistol really meet the needs of every officer in a police agency? In search of the answer to that question, I attended a writers' seminar hosted by Beretta at its Maryland manufacturing facility. “We're in the solutions business,” says Scott Blackwell, Beretta's vice president of law enforcement. Beretta believes it has such a weapon in its soon to be released Px4 Storm duty pistol. One of the biggest equipment challenges faced by police agencies is finding a handgun that will accommodate all of their officers and conform to agency firearms policies.
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