The Beretta M9
I carried a Beretta 92F for quite a while as a civilian cop, and as a combat arms instructor in the ANG from 1991 until 2000 (when I retired).
I've had two Beretta pistols. I bought the first in April of 1986. I had somewhere around 35,000 rounds through it when the FRAME cracked on Valentine's Day, 1997. I sent it back to the factory and they replaced it with a brand new gun with night sights at no charge, and included a nifty Beretta lock blade knife . . .
The only other problem was that I broke a locking block about the 18,000 round mark. That's a user-replaceable part (cost $75 in 1992)
The new Beretta I shot a LOT the first few years I owned it. Now, not as much, although I still shoot enough to keep my hand in. In 2000 I bought one of the Beretta factory-made .22 conversion units (which they called a "practice kit"). I shoot that fairly frequently. My practice kit is reasonably accurate and is not ammo sensitive.
We never shot any of our M9s in the Guard enough to break any slides. Most of the guns assigned to the Combat Arms unit (the ones that most people shot when they came for pistol qual) got AT MOST 1200 rounds a year. Weapons assigned to somebody, like the Law Enforcement Section of the Security Police, and the side arms of the civilian Security Police Officers on Base got shot twice a year (usually in April or May and then again in September or October or November) and they totaled about 250 rounds a year.
Lots of guns and other mechanical devices have had functioning problems when combined with the fine, talcum powder like dust of the Middle East. And lots of the problems with M9s used in Iraq have been traced to poor quality after market magazines that the US government bought from a company called "Checkmate". Using OEM Beretta or Mec-Gar magazines, you probably won't have a problem. I have heard that if you take a Checkmate magazine body and replace the spring with a +10% spring from Wolff gun springs, they work somewhat better. (Supposedly the new Checkmate magazines have a smooth finish rather than a rough phosphate finish that works better in adverse environments)
For an "average user, if you replaced your recoil spring and locking block at whatever interval Beretta recommends, and if you replaced the mag springs in any magazines you routinely kept loaded for service use every two or three years, the gun should be perfectly reliable.
The biggest problem with the Beretta M9 from a shooting standpoint is the circumference of the grip and the reach from the trigger to the backstrap. Shooters with small hands have all sorts of problems with the M9 because it's just too big for their hands.
I have big hands and long fingers and a Beretta M9 or Sig 226 works fine FOR ME, but those guns are just too big in the grip for some people.
That's one of the major reasons that GIs bitch. The gun is too big for their hand and so they don't shoot it very well, but they don't have enough experience with handguns to understand exactly why they have trouble, and they repeat a lot of half-assed latrine rumors they heard from some other goof in their squad, without understanding the real issue . . .
The Beretta is also mechanically complex. Look at the schematic diagram sometime and see how many little gears and pins and springs and stuff are involved in the safety/decocker assembly.
So a lot of the complaints you may hear about the M9 probably come from the inexperienced and uneducated, but there are some legitimate problems. The grip is too big and the gun is more complex than it need to be.
On the other hand, having a safety you can use to sterilize the gun during routine loading and unloading at issue and turn-in in the armory is very handy when your users are a bunch of 18 and 19 year olds . . . and anybody gets fried and inattentive when they're working 12 or 16 hour shifts pulling perimeter security or doing convoy escorts or whatever in Iraq or Afghanistan.
