this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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Never should have went away from the Retta.
Or at least normalized condition 3 carry.
Desk jockeys rocking condition 0 will always result in ND, it's just a matter of when.
Everyone has this obsession with cowboy movie quick draw. If you need to shoot within half a second of drawing your gun, it most likely doesn't matter if you even have a gun.
You get to a secure location while drawing, evaluate the situation, then engage. Absolutely plenty of time to disengage a safety, or barring a safety to chamber a round.
Quick edit:
Everyone kept saying p320 I forgot the M18 has a safety. I haven't seen anything that mentions if the safety was on or not, still leaving the original because the vast majority in public use don't have a safety, because everyone is convinced flipping a safety while you bring it up is too much of a hassle.
Anyway, this has been my rant about how safeties and hammers need to come back.
The Beretta was a decent gun new, but wears into a malfunction queen. There is a reason the special forces went away from them decades ago, better sidearms exist.
There are tons of examples of someone having to draw and fire in a split second without time to retreat and chamber. This is a settled issue.
Cop shoots guy who pretended to surrender and drew a gun. https://youtu.be/V7qcZ127y10?t=1m
Attempted mugger with a gun gets shot by armed civilian. https://youtu.be/9xjyaBaVfew?t=47s
Many such cases.
Complacency is primarily why NDs happen, P320 type malfunctions are an exception and should not be an example of why you should carry with an empty chamber.
I've never heard that about the M9. I had one of the original M9s (think it was late 80s/early 90s) for years with probably 10k+ rounds through it and never had an issue. Anecdotal, I know, but given I've never heard of widespread issues with the gun I'm finding this claim hard to believe.
Do you have a link to a study/article about this? Curious if there's something I should be on the lookout for, as I am quite partial to that particular design.
GAO report on failures/defects
CNA study on soldier experiences with small arms, including M9 55% reported failure to feed, 26% stoppages(62% serious), and 46% lacked confidence in the reliability.
Our top tier soldiers don't want the M9.
Special forces switch to Glock 19/22 and SIG MK25(P226)
SEALs use Glock as SI
Then there are the anecdotal accounts of soldiers that didn't like the M9 that you can find all over the Internet.
Thanks for sharing. That GAO report is pretty old, and seems to indicate potential issues with the first gen M9s. Not sure how much of that is still relevant today, I'm pretty sure my M9 was made after that report came out.
The CNA study is more interesting and relevant but kinda hard to interpret. There's a lot of externalities in there, apparently only 64% of soldiers were issued cleaning kits with their weapons, and 23% used nonstandard lubricant. The second one is interesting because later on the study found that those using nonstandard lube were 21x more likely to experience malfunctions. I honestly wonder if "nonstandard" lube was KY jelly for a lot of those guys; Army grunts are pretty famously stupid when it comes to gun maintenance.
Don't know that there's enough here to change my mind on reliability. Clearly the M9 was the least satisfactory part of their kit, but I'm not sure that it was due to a problem with the gun itself. Double-action is a legit downside, so I can't fault them for being unhappy with it; if they want to be able to draw and fire with a quick trigger pull, the M9 ain't it.