The Malevolent Rocket Surgeon
Here’s something you don’t see every day. Note that the safety
on this Beretta 92F pistol is on, yet the hammer remains cocked.
Somebody actually did this
on purpose.
The tale that follows is so arcane as to induce brain damage in normal folk. If you’re not a proper gun nerd, you’ll never get through it. I naturally found the details simply riveting.
Like many of my generation, Mel Gibson and Bruce Willis sold me a Beretta 92F pistol. Like most of us, I had very few resources starting out. I’d set my sights on some ballistic conquest and then scrape for months, if not years, accumulating the cash to buy it. Horse trading and haggling at gun shows were the keys to the kingdom. After seeing Mel Gibson wielding a Beretta 92F as the uber-cool Detective Martin Riggs in Lethal Weapon, I knew I had to have one of my own. I mistakenly thought owning such a gun might make me cool, too. What an idiot.
Anyway, I actually traded a .357 Magnum Desert Eagle for that NIB Beretta. Uncle Sam had only recently adopted the weapon, so they were both expensive and tough to find. While I lost a good bit on the trade, the Desert Eagle is likely the most impractical firearm ever contrived, so I was okay with it.
I kept that Beretta for several years only to find, much to my disappointment, it did not make me cool at all. I was still just some skinny, awkward Southern kid no matter what sort of iron I secured on my bedside table. As a result, in a fit of short-sightedness, I eventually traded that Beretta for something else I thought I needed worse and moved on.
Eventually, I began writing for gun magazines and appreciated the foolishness of having let John McCain’s signature hogleg get away. I needed a Model 92F for pictures or something, so I hit the giant Dallas gun show at Market Hall in search of a fresh copy. I found one carried by Some Regular Dude just wandering the show. Nancy Pelosi, plug your ears, but I have no idea who he was. We struck a deal, money changed hands, and I left with the lightly used GI service pistol.
Somebody actually removed these three components
of the safety system on my Beretta 92F.
Things Get Weird
I figured a Beretta 92F was a Beretta 92F, and I didn’t pay much attention to the gun at the show beyond just assessing the finish. Once I got home I came to appreciate that this wasn’t just any old Beretta. It was configured for Condition 1 carry.
Back when it was first introduced, a gunsmith friend of mine described the Beretta as having a “Heart Attack Safety.” To drop the hammer over a live round, one simply thumbed the slide-mounted safety down. This rendered the pistol inert and also dropped the hammer safely. The snap of the hammer falling over a hot chamber caused traditionalists such as myself some small discomfiture early on. In the case of my new Beretta, thumbing the safety down rendered the gun safe, but inexplicably did not drop the hammer.
In this configuration, should one be so inclined, the gun could have been theoretically carried with the hammer back and the safety on. I figured it was some rare factory variant, but I hated the gun. I wanted the GI version, and this one just wasn’t right. Just owning the weapon was like having a speck of sand on my eyeball. I considered selling it to some other witless slob at a gun show someplace but had too much Jesus in me to actually follow through. And so things languished … for a quarter century.
Now, all is right with the world. Will just had to restore the
safety system on his trusty Beretta back to factory standard.
Epiphany
Every time I saw a Beretta 92F at an online gun auction I’d put it on my watchlist. However, those guns never go cheap. For whatever reason, these vintage Berettas hold their value really well. And then, one day, I was between pressing deadlines and decided to take the old girl apart.
I got some guy on YouTube to help me out with the details. Once I got the pistol’s frame gutted, I made a remarkable discovery. Three parts of the trigger mechanism were simply missing. Google informed me they were the hammer release lever, the firing pin catch lever and the pin that secured them both. It seemed some Rocket Surgeon had actually done this on purpose.
Naturally, nobody on the Internet offered all three parts, so I had to pay shipping twice to get everything I needed. However, now my trusty Beretta has been restored to the state God originally intended. As a result, I sleep better at night. If whoever actually did that back in Texas some 25 years ago is out there reading these words, I can only say shame on you. Your nefarious efforts to offend the fabric of the universe have finally been made right.
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