You’re Worst Trigger?

The worst that I have ever pulled the trigger on was an HK VP70Z 9mm pistol that a gun shop had back in the late 80's. I pulled the trigger and it felt like a 20lb trigger pull. My curiosity was satisfied and I handed back the pistol as I was no longer interested in buying it. The second worst trigger pull was a Beretta 96D DAO .40 S&W pistol that my agency issued to us. They required us to pass a quarterly qualification course twice in a row in order to be qualified to carry this honking, ugly monstrosity. The trigger pull was easily 15 lbs and was super long. The trigger went all the way back until it hit the grip, before it released the hammer, for each and every single trigger pull. It was a mandatory carry gun by the agency and all other authorized carry pistols were no longer authorized to carry.

I knew that there was some fishy business going on with the adoption of this abortion. None of the firearms officers would say how this monstrosity became adopted and why all other authorized handguns were no longer authorized. I finally met one firearms officer from another office that refused to talk about the adoption, except to say that he suspected that someone at HQ was probably driving a Ferrari. His attempt at humor regarding bribery. I got the distinct impression that all firearms officers in all offices had signed a non-disclosure agreement to keep them from telling anyone about how this thing was adopted.

That Beretta 96D was ugly in addition to having an obnoxious trigger pull. The surface of the slide looked like it wasn't smoothed out at all. It looked like what I jokingly referred to Rugers, as being chiseled out of a crude rock without any smoothing of the rough surfaces, and then applied with some kind of thin, black finish. Or, more realistically, it looked like Walther P38 pistols that were made near the end of WWII when the factories were hurriedly making them without regard to quality control and the slides were full of unfinished manufacturing marks cut into the steel.

The fact that HQ required that everyone had to qualify twice in order to be authorized to carry that monstrosity told me that they knew that the trigger pull was excessively long and excessively heavy and that women would have more difficulty to qualify with it because of that trigger. So, they wanted everyone to shoot twice through the qualification course to be able to carry it on duty. Fortunately, they discarded that piece of carp about one year later. Who knows how many millions of $ of taxpayer money they wasted to adopt that garbage gun as well as holsters, magazines, and magazine carriers for every agent.

Years later they almost did the same thing with a Glock 17 with that garbage, so-called New York trigger. It must have been at least 10lbs for every trigger pull. Fortunately, they didn't adopt it for mandatory carry. Cooler heads must have prevailed.