Beretta 92 - Design

Design

The Beretta 92's open slide design ensures smooth feeding and ejection of ammunition and allows easy clearing of obstructions. The hard-chromed barrel bore reduces barrel wear and protects it from corrosion. The falling locking block design provides good accuracy and operability with suppressors due to the in-line travel of the barrel. This is in contrast to the complex travel of Browning designed barrels. The magazine release button is reversible with simple field tools. Reversing the magazine release makes left-handed operation much easier.

Increasingly, it has become popular to reduce handgun weight and cost and increase corrosion resistance by using polymers. Starting around the year 2000, Beretta began replacing some parts with polymer and polymer coated metal. Polymer parts include the recoil spring guide rod which is now also fluted, magazine release button, magazine floor plate, magazine follower and the mainspring cap/lanyard loop. Polymer coated metal parts include the safety levers, trigger, trigger bar, slide lock/release and disassembly latch.

The 92 also spawned several variants of similar internal design. The Beretta 90two is a full-size variant of the 92-series with a redesigned slide and a redesigned aluminum frame with an internal recoil buffer, user changeable monogrips and an accessory rail.