Beretta Model 70 fired when dropped

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DirtyHarold

New member
I just heard of a story where someone dropped a loaded Beretta Model 70 .380 and it went off. (No, it wasn’t me.)

I have been searching around trying to find out if these guns should technically be drop safe, to no avail. All I found is that they have inertial firing pins, which sounds like they should be more resistant to firing when dropped, but no guarantees.

I imagine that safety was off and hammer was decocked and it landed right on the hammer. Does this sound right? Otherwise what else could have happened?
 
An inertial firing pin specifically precludes your scenario happening.
More likely someone was carrying it on half-cock and dropped it.
 
DirtyHarold said:
The bullet was fired upwards so it would have had to land on the hammer or something.
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"Or something" is the key phrase. Without knowing more specifics, it's impossible to make any knowledgeable guesses.

Ain inertia firing pin is not a guarantee that a gun won't fire when dropped. 1911s have inertial firing pins. For years, the prevailing wisdom was that a 1911 would not fire if dropped on the muzzle. This was based on experiments conducted years ago using a barrels taped into a slide and dropped through a length of plastic pipe. More recently, a pair of respected firearms guys did their own experiment, using a complete pistol, and they demonstrated (on video) that a 1911 can and will fire if dropped on the muzzle from as low as three feet.

To fire up? It might have fallen in the hammer and broken the sear. The impact might have dislodged the sear. I think we need more details.
 
I wonder if the reason the 1911 was considered drop safe was because Hammer down on a loaded chamber was more common in the old days. If dropped on the muzzle there could be a little give in that the slide could move back slightly cushioning the impact. Modern cocked and locked carry makes the gun rigid making the inertial firing pin more likely to inertia foreword. Then again there might have been a lower bar for what was considered safe back then.
 
Then again there might have been a lower bar for what was considered safe back then.
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The pistol has to land muzzle down on a hard surface. Steel, concrete, stone, or something like that. Wood might not be "hard" enough to provide the sudden stop needed.

I think that, in the past the odds of the pistol landing squarely on its muzzle and on a sufficiently unyielding surface were considered an acceptable risk. Likewise if the pistol did that, it would fire into that hard surface so the danger would be from a ricochet, which, while far from none is not the same as danger from the round fired directly.

This does not mean there was NO risk, only that the SMALL risk wasn't considered a deal breaker, and compared to other contemporary pistols the 1911A1 was really quite safe.

In order to test something, it has to be repeatable, and as far as I know, the only way to repeatedly ensure the pistol lands square on the muzzle is to use some kind of guiding fixture or apparatus. Without that, you can drop the gun thousands of times without getting the exact right combination of factors needed for it to overcome the inertia firing pin.
 
The "old" 1911 test -- the one that showed it was drop safe -- was conducted by taping a barrel into a slide with a primed case in it and dropping the assembly down a length of plastic pipe from a ladder to maintain the orientation.

When Walt Kuleck and Drake Oldham ran the more recent experiment, they used a complete pistol. They tied a string to it, ran the string over a pulley and released it. Gravity is gravity -- the orientation of the object doesn't change once the string is released.

I didn't intend to hijack this Beretta thread into a 1911 discussion. I mentioned this to respond to someone's statement (above) that guns with inertial firing pins are inherently drop safe. They aren't. That's why, for example, Wolff Gunsprings includes an extra heavy firing pin spring with every 1911 recoil spring they sell, and why Springfield Armory uses a lightweight firing pin in their 1911s.
 
No gun is "drop-safe" if dropped in a manner that breaks the safety mechanisms.

Of the last 6-7 "fired when dropped" incidents that I've seen discussed, 4 of them were hammer-fired guns that landed on the hammer and broke the sear or 'half-cock' notch on the hammer -- including the recent death of John Koziol.

The best drop safeties are a good holster and an empty chamber.
And don't be a complacent jerk. Most people that have ADs and/or NDs with a dropped firearm were already breaking more than one safety rule, before they dropped it.
(Again, including the death of John Koziol. Don't fiddle-f*&k with your gun and holster when in a hurry, and especially if you don't know what you're doing. John died as a result of the drop, but the loaded pistol was pointed behind the firing line, multiple times, before being dropped.)
 
Most hand guns will go bang if you abuse 'em. The whole "drop test" thing is an anti-firearm ownership gang, on so-called 'social media', BS thing anyway. Supposedly started with a SIG 320 issued to Dallas PD.
Then those very decidedly anti-firearm ownership States Massachusetts and California jumped on it as a way to further persecute the law abiding.
 
The inertia firing pin guns can not fire if the hammer is fully down, and the gun is dropped on the hammer. It's physically impossible.
You can make them fire when hit precisely on the muzzle, but when dropped on the hammer sear failure or half cock failure are the only the gun can fire. In condition 2-hammer fully down, the guns can not fire.
 
My Dad was a WWII vet...a weapons Sgt and gun guy, and, in fact, brought a 1911 home from the war.
I recall him describing the inertial firing pin as protecting against the gun going off if dropped...but he was very clear that it wasn't foolproof, and the best thing was not to test it.
 
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