Tag Archives: rare beretta

Getting Raffica with the Beretta 93R

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Beretta has been in the firearms-making business for nearly 500 years in the Gardone Val Trompia region and, while we visited the amazing complex, we were asked what three guns we would like to shoot in the company’s on-site shooting range, located inside a mountain. Because Beretta.

Our choice was easy: the classic Cold War-era PM12 “Spaghetti Uzi” submachine gun, the exciting new NARP rifle, and the elusive 93R machine pistol.

If you are pure of heart and wish hard enough, dreams can come true. (Photo: Chris Eger/Guns.com)

While we’ll get into the first two later, let’s go ahead and get into the 93R.

The 93R in its most basic form. Note the folding handguard and extended compensated barrel. The frame-mounted two-position select fire lever (with three dots denoting its 3-round burst) is above the grip. The safety button is behind it.

Select-fire, with options for a three-round burst or single shots, the “R” in its model designation stands for “Raffica,” which roughly translates into “gust” or “flurry.” To help control this zippy 9mm with its 700 round-per-minute cyclic rate of fire, the frame has a hinged metal forward grip and an extended barrel with compensator cuts. Beretta marketed the pistol with an extended 20-round magazine to feed the brass-chewing little beast, which would allow for six bursts of three rounds and a seventh of two.

The company produced (and continues to develop) several generations of submachine guns, and a similar select-fire pistol had already preceded the 93R. The M951R was adopted by several Italian special forces and police units in the 1960s.

The M951R, which was a select-fire variant of the Beretta M1951. Note the folding foregrip. Whereas the M1951 is a single-stack 1950s forerunner of the Beretta 92, the M951R (again, with the Raffica) was a select-fire great uncle to the 93R.

From one of Beretta’s period brochures on the 93R, emphasizing the gun could be fired both with and without its stock. Ideally, a uniformed officer could carry the pistol with a standard 15-round flush-fit mag inserted, with a spare 20 or 30-rounder and folding detachable stock carried in belt pouches. (Photo: Beretta)

To see the gun in action and read the rest of this, check out my column at Guns.com.

The Rare Berben Imported Beretta BM 62 .308 Rifle

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Following the end of the war, Italy was among the 12 founding members of NATO, established in 1949. Needing to rebuild its armed forces, the country soon adopted the M1 Garand as a standard infantry rifle, and local firearms legend, Beretta, soon got in the business of both refurbishing old guns and producing thousands of new ones– including rifles sold to fellow NATO members such as Denmark. 

By 1959, Beretta engineers Domenico Salza and Vittorio Valle had updated John Browning’s venerable design by replacing the fixed magazine– which was fed via a top-inserted 8-shot en bloc clip– with a more modern 20-round detachable box mag along with a stripper clip guide on the top of the receiver. Likewise, the caliber was 7.62 NATO rather than .30-06, the barrel length was shortened, it was made select-fire, the gas system was tweaked, a folding integral bipod was fitted, and a new muzzle device/ 22mm rifle grenade launcher with accompanying sight was installed. This new rifle still had a lot of M1 commonality but a more M14/FAL/HK G3 kind of flavor to it, and was promptly adopted by the Italian Army as the BM-59 in 1962.

These assorted BM-59 models, including Alpini and Paracadutisti variants, are seen under glass in the Beretta Museum in Italy. (Photo: Chris Eger/Guns.com)

Beretta had a good deal of success with the BM-59, licensing the design for overseas production to Indonesian and Nigerian state arsenals as well as producing the gun in Italy in several variants for a quarter century. 

While a precious few select-fire BM-59s were imported to the U.S. before the 1968 ban on overseas machine gun parts, the American consumer market was left hungry for this updated box-fed “spaghetti Garand.” That was until the semi-auto BM-62 and BM-69 sporters were introduced. Chambered in .308 Winchester, the commercial twin to the 7.62 NATO, these guns were not made in anywhere near the same quantity as the BM-59 or even Beretta’s M1s, making them highly collectible. 

This excellent Beretta BM-62 includes a distinctive integral front gas cylinder assembly that functions as a flash hider but is sans the bayonet lug and grenade launcher sight of its more martial BM-59 big brother.

It also has a shorter ~20-inch barrel rather than the M1 Garand’s more typical 24-inch barrel, giving the rifle a “Tanker” feel to it.

In a nod to the lineage, many of the small parts on these rifles are marked “PB BM59”  and the P. Beretta pedigree is unmistakable.

The rifle was one of around 2,000 imported by the Berben Corporation of New York in the early 1980s. The company, on Park Row in Manhattan, was the exclusive distributor in the U.S. of Beretta products for several years until the Italian gunmaker set up its own facility in Accokeek, Maryland in 1985.