Worst Handgun Adopted by US Military in the 20th Century?

[Music] hey guys welcome back so today we're going to talk about what i believe to be the worst military pistol adopted by the u.s government in the 20th century hopefully you guys find this video fun because the gun that i pick might be surprising for some of you guys let's get going guys please swing by and check out big daddy unlimited bdu they help support us here at the military arms channel with products and things like that so we can continue to bring you content there's a link in the video description down below that'll take you to the mac blog and website please follow that link and from there you'll find a link to big daddy unlimited and try them out just for 99 cents you can see what they're all about in essence they're just like a big online store that has amazing prices so please again check out bdu right at the beginning of the 20th century the turn of the century the us military adopted the m1911 service pistol it chambers 45 acp the original military version fires from a single stack seven round magazine and this gun was actually quite genius it's the product of john moses browning and this handgun despite the fact that's well over 100 years old in design still influences handgun designs to this day this handgun went on to serve 75 years as our primary infantry our service pistol and even after it was replaced in military service officially in 1985 by by the beretta m9 handgun the gun continued on to be used by many military units into the 2000s delta force would use them special operations would use them and the united states marine corps continued to use them but today you're not going to find them in any common use with any branch of the military it's pretty much been completely retired but i'm not saying it's completely because i'm sure somebody out there can name a unit that might still be using them but the handgun has a long history of not only just being a really good handgun itself but also of influencing other firearms designs and yeah people love this thing it's as american as baseball and apple pie the gun is a single action only handgun very simple handgun to use for it to fire you must have a round chambered the hammer cocked you have a manual safety that is applied over here and it has a grip safety typically this handgun would have been carried with a seven round magazine in the grip in a holster and then when the soldier or marine or airman or sailor needed to use their pistol they would charge it and it would be ready for use this by a long shot is not the worst military handgun adopted in the 20th century by the us military it's one of the best yep every american should own one of these so as i already mentioned the 1911 was replaced in 1985 by this handgun this is the beretta m9 pistol right out of the gates this handgun met with controversy during the military trials this handgun went up against the p226 from sig and many people thought the sig actually won the military trials but the beretta got the contract because they undercut sig and the price department and so people were angry that the cheaper gun won the military contract whether or not that's true that's open for debate that debate's been raging since since 1985 but the handgun had other problems right out of the gate we had slide separations that i believe happened with u.s navy seals they were shooting the pistols the slides split right here and the rear part of the slide came back and i believe actually hit one of the shooters in the face again lots of stories around that floating around the internet but beretta did put a safety mechanism in there that would catch the slide should it separate but we've never seen those slide separations really past that initial issue at the very very early stages of the adoption of the handgun but then when you get to the wars in iraq and afghanistan soldiers really didn't like the m9 some of them not all soldiers didn't like them jason carried one of these in iraq and he liked the pistol i think that boils down to the armorer level type of thing if the pistols are maintained they're actually really good service pistols i like the m9 service pistol but some folks said that it was unreliable and in typical government fashion they didn't use beretta manufactured magazines or even mega quality manufactured magazines they went out to the lowest bidder and bought a bunch of junk magazines issued them to troops and that coupled with the moon dust in the middle east the guns became unreliable another problem that this gun ran into fairly early on was the locking block was failing prematurely beretta rectified that by redesigning the locking block and by the end of its service life in 2017 was replaced this handgun actually became one of the better military service nine millimeter pistols out there where the 1911 used a single stack magazine with seven rounds this one has a 15 round magazine but you can get as many as 17 rounds now it's it's actually turned in again to a very nice handgun this handgun was different than previous weapons used by the us military of course it's self loading but it also has a double action single action trigger so right now it's in double action mode so if i pull this trigger you'll see it [ __ ] the hammer and then fires the weapon you also have the option of cocking it and firing it in single action mode which will be very similar to the 1911 which is a single action only pistol and then if you want to make the weapon safe the safety is right here on the slide you flip it down it safely drops the hammer on a live round and turns the trigger off to put it back into fire you do that that was confusing to some troops and some troops hated that feature also when you charge the weapon or clear a malfunction you typically grab it by the slide back here some folks will do this but either way the same thing can still happen it was corrected with the g modification later but when they would charge the pistol they'd pull back and you see what i just did i put the safety on even though i just chambered around the gun's inoperable to a troop that's not well trained in the field who does that and they pull the weapon up to fire at the enemy and get nothing but a dead trigger they might not know what just happened to them again that comes with training you got to make sure that that safety is on despite all those issues i think that the m9 is actually one of the best nine millimeter service pistols in the world but that means this isn't the worst pistol that the us military adopted in the 20th century not by a long shot beautiful elegant very fun to shoot and another thing that some people complained about was the rather large thick grip where some people with smaller hands couldn't get a good grip on the handgun one of the things i get asked all the time is mack how can i get involved in the firearms industry well one of the best ways to do that is to consider going to modern gun school it's an accredited school and they offer all the modern classes that will get you up to speed and be able to empower you to go out and find a job in the gun industry you can learn gunsmithing and things like that and you learn from home so please check them out i have a url down in the video description below in the 1990s the us special operations command started looking for a handgun that would be specially built for a specific purpose they called it the offensive handgun weapons system program and there were a couple of entries but primarily the two entries were one from colt which was eliminated in phase one and the other offered by h k which we now know is the mark 23 mod 0. the mark 23 mod 0 was designed to be well an offensive handgun which to me seems like a strange concept if i'm going to go into a fight i don't want to be offensive with a handgun but potentially would be used for sentry removal but you could use smaller lighter weight easier to carry handguns than this so the mark 23 first of all was actually an exceptional piece of engineering the us military had pretty high requirements for the handgun they had the gun had to be able to handle plus p ammunition which this one can actually shoot the 45 super if you don't know what that is google it and a steady diet of it it is extremely accurate they had very high accuracy expectations for the handgun had to shoot a two inch group at 25 meters the gun had to be suppressable so it has a threaded barrel on it but it had a lot of mass many people would say it's about the same size as the desert eagle but shoots the 45 acp and they wouldn't be wrong it's a big handgun and it's not that ergonomic and it has a slightly awkward controls so over here on the right hand side you have this little tiny safety because the handgun is double action and single action so when it's in single action mode with the hammer back you can put the 1911 style safety on that safety is present on both sides of the handgun but then right here by the the slide safety or slide lock i want to call slide lock safety like a 1911 but it's just a manual safety right in front of that you have the decocker but this decocker is flush with the grip so you have to really especially if you have gloves on make a conscious effort to hit that decocker to put it back into double action mode and then we have a slide stop slide release over on the left hand side of the gun but nothing on the right hand side of the gun has pretty good high visibility sights and the gun was offered with a module called the lam module which was made by insight it would attach the rail system down here and it offered a white light an ir laser i believe and also a visible laser a big thing that would hang off the bottom of the handgun for back in the 90s it was quite sizable as compared to modern lights but uh yeah and i don't have one because they're extremely rare and expensive but they also the gun was intended to be suppressed which is why you have that threaded barrel out on the end the handguns fire from a 12 round magazine and we are shooting federal this afternoon this is some 45 acp ball but the nine millimeter we were shooting is also from federal today we want to thank our friends over at federal for supplying the ammunition to the channel for free great ammunition been using them since i was a kid and please check them out all right so as i mentioned the handgun is a double action single action handgun so you can charge it and then put the hammer down with that kind of flush mounted hammer drop safety now that first shot's going to be double action you cannot put the handgun on safe in the double action mode which is actually a good thing and it's just a big unwieldy type of a handgun extremely reliable has treatment to the slide that makes it extremely corrosion resistant again very accurate very well engineered handgun but the socom the special operations community really didn't take a shine to the gun really the only group i'm aware of that used them in any numbers was the us navy seals but the rest of socom basically ignored them these things are expensive they're big they're heavy and smaller options exist on the market the seals also use the mark 25 and the mark 24 which are different hand guns mark 25 being a sig sauer p226 basically in the mark 24 being an hk45 compact variant that they adopted as the mark 24 mod 0 later that would be around 2011. so this thing went into service in 1996 it's still in us inventory but it's kind of the standing joke in the special operations community because nobody wants to carry a handgun this big it's just unwieldy now it does have that threaded barrel again i don't have that lamb module for it i wish it did but i do have the cac suppressor so there was a requirement for the gun to be suppressable so the gun had to be suppressable and they had pretty high standards i want to say it was something like 30 decibels of reduction which is just insanely high hk submitted a suppressor with the handgun and it had something right around 22 decibels i believe of noise reduction so they went with the cac suppressor the cac suppressor it's a standard right-hand thread but trying to get this can to thread on can be a little bit challenging you wouldn't want to do it in a hurry but once you get it on there it does not detract from the the accuracy of the gun again a two inch group at 25 meters and the can was not supposed to mess with either the point of impact or mess with the the accuracy some more federal let me take that out here really quick let me also point out that it does not have a push button mag release on the gun it has the vp9 or european style of lever that's present on both sides of the trigger guard you push down on which releases the 12 round magazine and now you can fire it suppressed and i can see the sights over the suppressor the suppressor does not mess with the reliability of the gun and it doesn't mess with the accuracy as i'd said but in this configuration how do you carry this thing it is massive if this is meant for sentry removal the thing is huge it's heavy the controls are awkward some folks find it to be uncomfortable to fire because the safety actually bites into the web of their hand when they shoot it it's just a very very awkward handgun that's not to say that it's poorly made it's not it's extremely well made it met the requirements that the us army was looking for but i think the us army didn't know what they were actually asking for and again it was probably one of the biggest flops of the 20th century love the gun cool collectors piece lots of fun to shoot but this is the gun that the u.s government spent a lot of money on testing and adopting ultimately for barely anybody to actually use so this in my opinion was the biggest mess up the us government made in the 20th century in adopting a handgun just to reiterate guys i am not calling the mark 23 mod 0 a piece of junk it's far from that it's an exceptional piece of equipment the reason i've chosen it is because a lot of money was spent in developing the handgun testing the handgun adopting the handgun for what many people consider to be a flop the concept of an offensive handgun is kind of awkward i think and that's probably the reason why many in the usocom community opted not to use the firearm outside of some folks in the seal teams using them uh you know other guns were more commonly used so the handgun you know met all the requirements that the army was asking of it but i just think that the us army went looking for something that they didn't really need but this thing definitely met the requirements and probably exceeded those requirements and that's a testament to hk's engineering but because it's such an expensive endeavor to test it and buy it and field it only to let it sit that's why i've chosen it in this video so i just wanted to stress that because i know a lot of my hk viewers are just going to completely lose it because i've chosen hk as one or the worst handgun adopted by the us military in the 20th century and that's only because it just really didn't have a role for the handgun in my opinion all right guys if you'd like to support us here at the military arms channel so we can continue to bring you information like this we're not supported by the gun companies we're supported by you there's a link in the video description down below please follow that link and consider becoming part of our patreon family where you get special you know behind the scenes information you have direct access to us and things like that you also get to see videos before they release also right here on youtube there's a little join button right underneath the video player you're watching right now click that join button and consider supporting us here on youtube and last but not least guys please swing by and check out coppercustom.com thank you for 12 years of support and we'll talk to you guys soon oops guess i had one in there you

Channel: Military Arms Channel

Views: 590,561

Rating: 4.8241143 out of 5

Keywords: firearm, rifle, pistol, review, iraqveteran8888, forgotten weapons, demolition ranch, military arms, military, small arms, call of duty, video game, movie, gun review, firearms review, testing, firearm testing, gun testing, worst, worst handgun, worst military handgun, worst pistol, sig sauer, 1911, beretta m9, p226, mk25, mk24, mk23, mk23 mod 0, top five, us navy, us military, us army, us navy seals

Id: qs_bBFrMNqA

Length: 16min 23sec (983 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 02 2021