Travis Haglin stopped me at the Beretta booth during last year’s Safari Club International Convention, moving with the haste of a man who had found something he wasn’t supposed to show anyone.
“You gotta check out this room.”
Coming from someone with the Beretta Gallery in New York, that invitation could reasonably lead to walnut worth more than my first car. Instead, Travis ushered me into a technology room that looked like something out of The Matrix. Here was a company whose name belongs on heirloom doubles, showing me how much of gunmaking’s future it intended to invent.
I went in expecting beautiful guns. I came out thinking about the people who refuse to leave a perfectly successful idea alone.
Beretta turns 500 this year. Its documented beginnings date to 1526, when Bartolomeo Beretta supplied 185 arquebus barrels to the Venetian Arsenal. Five centuries gives a company considerable material for an anniversary brochure. It also supplies a dangerous temptation: become so pleased with your history that you start manufacturing souvenirs of it.
Beretta seems constitutionally incapable of doing that.
The old skills remain in use. In its custom studio, the SO10 EELL is still hand-built and finished. Engravers still turn steel into something you can study long after you have forgotten to ask its price. One anniversary SO10 required more than 1,000 hours of hand engraving. That is a substantial devotion to making certain nobody mistakes your shotgun for his.
Elsewhere in the operation, the tools include five-axis laser technology, additive manufacturing, and 3D printing. Beretta’s Small Series Department already uses those technologies, and the company has announced an Innovation Hub to carry the work forward. Looking at the modern side of Beretta, you could be forgiven for wondering whether the next product leaving the building was a microchip or a precision medical instrument.
The pursuit of precision makes sense to anyone who has ever needed a gun to work. The interesting part is how broadly Beretta applies that thinking, including to problems hunters have tolerated for so long that we sometimes confuse them with tradition.
Consider the AX800 Suprema, the new waterfowl shotgun that has several serious duck-hunting friends talking as though they have discovered a trade secret. Their enthusiasm is emphatic enough that I suspect some would rather I leave its name out of this story. A waterfowler’s wet dream, if you will forgive an expression that practically writes itself.
There is substance beneath the excitement. Beretta brought Steelium Pro barrel technology from its DT11 competition gun into the duck blind, with an extended forcing cone designed to improve patterns and shooting comfort. The redesigned B-Link Pro gas system is designed to build up fewer deposits. Adjustable stock dimensions and interchangeable grip and cheekpiece components give hunters more ways to make the gun fit.
Beretta says its hydraulic Kick-Off Pro system reduces felt recoil by up to 70 percent. That is the company’s claim, but the problem it addresses needs no explanation to anyone who has spent a morning shooting heavy duck loads. Less punishment and a gun that returns to the bird more readily are advantages a shoulder can appreciate without consulting an engineer.
A few weeks ago I walked into the Denver Bass Pro shops off of I-70, climbed up the stairs to the hunting and gun department, and saw an endless row of firearms lined up behind the counter, I asked to see the AX800 and they had three left. I asked how many they had in stock and there were only three left. “We put all of these we have on the shelf,” he said, “they don’t last long.”
Most recently, I took a pair of Giubileo 20s to Yorkshire for driven grouse, the second time I have used that pair for such work. The memories tied to those guns are immense from trips for driven partridge in Spain, to perdiz in South America to ptarmigan in Alaska. Who doesn’t love carrying a beautiful gun that performs as well as it looks? Fast grouse have a way of exposing the difference.
I also regard Beretta auto-loaders as a definitive standard for performance and reliability. You understand their reputation especially well in places where shotguns digest thousands of rounds, and the nearest gunsmith might as well live on another continent. A broken gun there has about the same practical value as a fencepost, though the fencepost probably cost less to transport.
I also value Beretta’s investment in the institutions that keep American hunting alive. Its longtime support for the NRA and conservation giving belong in any fair account of the company. The NRA Foundation recognizes Beretta USA as a major supporter; Beretta’s relationship with SCI Foundation includes the Conservation Leadership Award and fundraising for conservation work. Such commitments help sustain the sporting world that gives all this fine equipment a purpose.
A company planning beyond its fifth century ought to care whether future generations have somewhere to hunt or the right to hunt at all—especially given the rash of ballot-box-biology that’s sweeping the country and upending our state wildlife agencies and conservation funding models. Beretta’s participation gives me another reason to respect the name.
But my most personal reason has become clearer with age. We spend years assuming another season, another trip, another gathering of the same friends will come. Eventually, an empty place in camp corrects that arithmetic. The days we once treated as renewable prove more precious than anything printed on a gun tag.
While I cannot buy another morning with someone who is gone, I can choose equipment that gives the mornings still ahead their best chance. That is how I have come to see a Beretta: a hedge against losing a day I will never get back.
– Chris Dorsey
Chris Dorsey is a Coloradan, 30-year media veteran, biologist, outdoor television producer and natural history filmmaker whose writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Forbes and dozens more national titles.