Has a piece of media featuring a firearm ever left a lasting impression on you? I’ve been subject to several. From the Colt 733 featured in Heat to the SPAS 12 in Jurassic Park, my interest in firearms came from pop culture. In the year 2000, I was a little fella who was into sci-fi, and the Beretta 9000S became a gun that captured my attention. The Beretta 9000S found its way into Minority Report as the gun of choice by the Pre-Crime division.
Beretta also squeezed a pair of the 9000S guns into the video game The Matrix. Enter the Matrix used live-action scenes between levels, so it was more than pixels poorly representing the gun in a PS2 video game. As a sci-fi fan, I loved both these movies, and even as a kid, I was a gun nut and took notice of these interesting little Berettas. That being said, I memory-holed the gun.
That was until I found one priced to move at a small-town gun store. All the blue-tinted scenes of Minority Report came running back to me, and I knew I had to have it. The Beretta 9000S came in 9mm and .40 S&W and in DA/SA and DAO variants. The most common model I can find online is the DA/SA .40 S&W model. I stumbled into a 9mm DAO model.
The DAO 9mm model seems to be the rarest but also the least desirable. It’s an interesting spectrum of rarity and desirability, to be sure. I’m a DA/SA guy, but when you find a 25-year-old Beretta that’s been out of production for decades, you snatch it up.
The Beretta 9000S – Design Issues
The Beretta 9000S is interesting, but in the same way that infectious disease is interesting. It’s not a terrible gun, but it’s probably Beretta’s worst modern pistol. That’s a compliment because it’s still better than good pistols from bad companies. Beretta went through a weird phase where they produced sci-fi-inspired firearms, which got us the 9000S and the 90-Two.
Beretta also teamed up with Giugiaro Design, which works with cars. Giugiaro Design has teamed up with Italian companies like Ferrari and Maserati, gone international with Volkswagen, and even had a hand in the DeLorean. The design cues are clearly supercar-inclined, with swooping curves and a futuristic touch.
The design is plagued by weird decisions that are seemingly unexplainable to me. They kept the Beretta signature open-top slide design, but they reversed the slide rails like a CZ-75. This created a micro-sized slide without much room to grab it to manipulate it. They did use a three-position frame-mounted safety on the DA/SA guns.
This allowed for the user to decock the gun or to carry it locked and cocked. It uses a double-stack magazine and removable sights. The 92FS famously has the front sight as part of the slide.
A Failure of Design
The 9000S was Beretta’s first polymer frame pistol, and the grip was a permanently embedded rubber wrap-around grip. This became one of the gun’s biggest problems, as the rubber grip tended to chip away, leaving behind a mutilated and ugly grip. That’s not the problem with my gun; hopefully, it won’t ever be.
The grip’s width from left to right as it sits in your hand is fine—nothing we don’t expect from a double stack. However, the grip measurement from the front strap to the backstrap is far longer than needed. It’s wider than my PSA Rock, which fires the much longer 5.7x28mm round. It’s hard to handle for my 2XL-sized hands. The trigger reach feels ungodly for someone with normal hands, and for me, my trigger finger pad falls naturally in line with the trigger.
The gun did come to be during the assault weapon ban. This limited the double-stack magazine capacity to ten rounds of 9mm, even though there is clearly more room. The magazines sold to LEO held 12 rounds of 9mm. Did Beretta use the same pattern magazines as the 92FS, which would give you a ton of available capacities and magazine options?
No.
The Beretta 92 magazines will seemingly lock-in, but they are too thin and will fall out with a wiggle. Beretta did produce a magazine adapter for 92 and 96 magazines, but that’s long out of production. It’s crazy that the double-stacked magazines designed for the full-sized duty gun didn’t fit the subcompact because they were too small.
Shooting the 9000S
The 9000S excels in a few spots. It’s accurate and reliable. The sights are a simple three-dot variety, but I can get them lined up and on target. It prints decent groups for a subcompact, and I can pile rounds into the black of a B8 at 15 yards. The trigger is doing it no favors.
It’s very smooth but quite heavy, and the travel feels ungodly long. Before it breaks, you can take a break and watch a YouTube video. It’s also difficult to fire quickly, at least for me. A long trigger reset, as I am slapping the trigger guard and wasting a little time to get back on the trigger. It’s fine for self-defense, but I won’t ever have a Sub 2-Second Bill drill with this gun.
The gun runs reliably. I only fired a couple hundred rounds through it, so it’s not an exhaustive review, but it had no problems on that short-range trip. Across the internet, the gun always gets points for reliability.
The grip width from front to back makes it interesting. I don’t feel like I can get a solid grip on the gun, so I can’t run it quickly with maximum recoil control. Reaching the magazine release is a real challenge. You have to rotate your whole hand to hit it. The grip and grip design are the gun’s biggest flaws.
Live Inventory Price Checker
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Beretta LE Trade In 92 SB 9mm 4.92" 15rd Pistol, Black - 92 SB | Palmetto State Armory | $ 599.99 $ 399.99 |
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Beretta 92 Full Size Police Special 9mm Pistol | Bereli | $ 595.00 |
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Beretta 92 FS Inox 9mm 10 Round Pistol, CA Compliant - JS92F510CA | Palmetto State Armory | $ 976.99 $ 879.99 |
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Beretta 92 FS Inox 9mm 10 Round Pistol, CA Compliant - JS92F510CA | Palmetto State Armory | $ 879.00 |
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Simple Made Complicated
It turns out that guys who design cars might not be the best at designing guns. The Beretta 9000S didn’t have to be all that different. Just make a subcompact 92 and call it a day. I applaud them for trying the polymer frame and the reverse rails, but everything else was just weird decisions that made no sense. The Beretta 9000S is now a relic, largely forgotten, but it certainly has its own level of charm.
About Travis Pike
Travis Pike is a former Marine Machine Gunner, a lifelong firearms enthusiast, and now a regular guy who likes to shoot, write, and find ways to combine the two. He holds an NRA certification as a Basic Pistol Instructor and is the world’s Okayest firearm’s instructor.
