This is the Best .380 Pistol Ever Made

Even though you get greater capacity and less recoil than 40 or 45 ACP, several decades ago, 9mm was considered weak, suboptimal for personal defense. However, with advances in firearm and ammunition technology, 9mm is now more or less the standard. Similarly, .380 has seen a character arc of its own. Only until recent history has .380 been anything but a lady's garter belt gun, or a men's garter belt gun, I guess it is, 2023. After all, we always ask, why carry a .380 when you can just carry a 9? It's a fair question. We'll get into the ballistics in a second, but playing pro .380 devil's advocate here, there are quite a few reasons .380 is as popular as it is. The main one being that .380 can be put into a much, much, much, much, much smaller pistol than 9mm. Look at the smallest, lightest .380 ever made, the Kel-Tec P3AT. It's just three quarters of an inch thick, or less. It weighs eight ounces, lighter than a cup of water, but less refreshing if someone throws it in your face. You just can't get a gun that small with 9mm, not possible. Number two, reduced recoil. Some people describe .380 recoil as snappy. I like to think of it as high-pitched. It's certainly not a greater recoil impulse than 9mm, even in smaller guns, and it can be snappy, but so can 9mm. Have you ever shot a micro compact 9mm? Bottom line, .380, lighter recoiling, offering roughly the same capacity in a much smaller and lighter package than you get with 9mm. But, then again, .22LR also holds more rounds in a smaller gun with less recoil than 9mm, but you wouldn't carry a .22, would you? I mean, I guess there's nothing wrong with that. It's like there's supposedly nothing wrong with grown men buying Legos, watching Friends, or going to Disney. Here's where we very briefly go over the ballistics, because I've done it like a thousand f***ing times in a thousand other videos. .380 is capable of meeting the FBI's guidelines for terminal performance, that is, penetration of at least 12 inches of ballistic gel after passing through a barrier of clothing, but a weakness with .380 is it often doesn't have the speed to expand, and the performance of good penetration will get limited by poor expansion. Expansion is the second most important wounding factor after penetration, according to the FBI. Good 9mm rounds will penetrate easily between 12 and 18 inches of gel, double their diameter with expansion. .380 does the bare minimum, 12 to 14 inches of penetration, but there are a few rounds out there that'll actually expand to a half inch or more, including Federal HST and SIG V-Crown. According to the gel testing I've seen online, those rounds will perform. Now, what helps with better expansion is more velocity. What helps with velocity is to have a barrel of the proper length, say around 4 inches. A lot of However, 4-inch barrel .380s can push defensive rounds 50 to 100 feet per second faster than a 3-inch gun, about a 10% increase in energy just by having an extra inch of barrel. Although I personally prefer 9mm and recommend that people carry 9mm if they're comfortable with it, .380 still a viable option, at least according to the data. And there are some amazing .380 carry options out there, like the Ruger LCP-MAX, one of the best pocket pistols out there. I think the Smith & Wesson Shield EZ is great. A year or two ago, I probably would have said the Beretta 84BB Cheetah was the best .380 you could carry. It's light, about the same weight as a Glock 26, while still being made entirely of metal. It's compact, it holds 14 rounds of .380, which is great capacity. It's reliable, it's got a 4-inch barrel, it shares design and engineering cues with the legendary Beretta 92. It's well made, it's elegant, cocked and locked carry as an option. It's just a phenomenal pistol. Fortunately, many of you have figured this out from my prior videos, and we've seen a resurgence in popularity of the Beretta 84 Cheetah. A little over a year ago, Beretta calls me. They say, hey James, there's something you ought to see. You should come to our headquarters in Vardon, Valtrompia, Italy. Of course, I wasn't interested in doing this at all. Next thing I know, I wake up, one of my horse's heads is in my bed. So, I go over to Italy, I screw around with some of Gaddafi's golden guns in the Beretta Museum, have some pizza, and then Beretta says that we want to show you this. That's when they pull out the best .380 that I think has ever been made. The Beretta 80X. And I had to sit on this secret. Couldn't share it with you guys for about a year. At SHOT Show 2023, Beretta finally let this cat out of the bag. You like that? What is the 80X? In short, it's a modernized Cheetah. It has all the things you know and love about the 80 series of pistols. Fantastic fit and finish. Made in Italy. Simple and reliable straight blowback design while retaining a 180 degree ejection port from the Beretta 92 for excellent extraction reliability. Uses a steel slide, 3.9 inch barrel with an alloy vertex frame, and it's a double action, single action, hammer fired gun. Perhaps one of the greatest improvements of the 80X is that unlike the other versions of the Cheetah, the 80X has a three position safety. You have fire. We all know what that does. You have safe. We all know what that does. Now the safety position will not decock the action the way it does with a lot of Beretta hammer fired pistols, meaning that you can carry cocked and locked. Press the safety all the way up and the gun will decock. That means you have the choice of either carrying with a heavier, longer double action first trigger pull or the lighter four and a half pound single action trigger pull. Double action safety off, single action safety on, double action safety on for you new carriers out there, or if you got a tab open with your urologist, you can carry single action hammer cocked, no safety appendix. I would actually recommend carrying no safety with the hammer down. Although the Beretta 80X has this wonderful ambi safety lever that's tucked out of the way for carry, but still easy to manipulate. Let me talk to you about the double action trigger. It is freaking amazing. Perhaps the best in this class of pistol. It's a much longer pull than single action, but at six and a half pounds, it's barely heavier and it's smooth. Plus you have the ability to thumb down the hammer when drawing or holstering, which could prevent you from popping your PP off. I really can't emphasize enough how great the double action trigger is on this pistol. It's even better than the original, which is about a nine and a half pound double action. Speaking of the original, the Beretta 84 has a permanently affixed front sight and I think maybe you could replace the rear sight. I don't know. Probably not. The 80X on the other hand has a dovetailed replaceable front sight. You can put a night sight on there if you want. And the rear sights are on the plate for the optics. So these also will be replaceable. That's another huge plus. The 80X comes ready for optic and accessory mounting. It has an optics footprint up top and a rail dust cover. Talking first about the rail, not much to say other than if you want to, you can attach a light and or laser to this real pick rail dust cover. Non-proprietary. However, I did a poll of TFBTV viewers about a year ago and only roughly a third of you actually mount a light or a laser on your carry gun. So I, for that matter, would love to see an ultra melted down version of this gun without a rail dust cover that was ideal for carry. They've done it, Beretta, in the past with like the PX4 Storm series. So I don't see any reason why they wouldn't do a melted down 80X. I think that'd be cool. Obviously having a light's great, but some of us like to have a light separate from the gun rather than on it. Now the optics mounting platform requires a plate adapter, which unfortunately I didn't have for this review. But I've seen Beretta's system with the 92. Because the top of the slide is so thin, you essentially have to get plates for the optic of your choice. That plate will screw into this footprint on top of the pistol with two screws, while plates are another potential point of failure. And therefore, it's generally better to have an optic that screws directly into the gun slide. More and more manufacturers are using plate system mounting and they seem to be working well enough. I've shot several copies of this gun for over a year now. Reliability has been 100%. No failures of any kind. And for that matter, I've never had a failure with my original 84 BB either. Every single time I've shot this before at SHOT Show and a year ago at Beretta in Italy, I've used ammo supplied by Beretta. So we're subjecting the 80X to a little bit of a cornucopia today. We've got all different types of 380, all different types of manufacturers. Here we've got a magazine full of PMC hollow points. I've got Norma's new personal defense ammo that I'm shooting through it. I've got Ventura Munitions ammo ink. You name it, we're shooting everything through it. I think this gun's going to run flawlessly, but there's one way to find out and only one way. This gun's a fantastic potential option for concealed carry. At just 21 ounces without a magazine, it weighs less than some polymer frame 9mm compact handguns. you saw just drawing and relative rapid fire at about 25 feet, a little over seven yards, or at least there about. That's pretty good. The single action trigger is great. The double action trigger is great too. This makes for excellent accuracy even without an optic mounted like a fat boy at Barnhill's Country Buffet. I can't wait to get a plate. I want to mount an optic on this son of a bitch and really push the accuracy envelope with this tiny gun. I was shooting extremely small groups at 15 to 25 feet. Lindsay even shot an outstanding group at 15 feet the very first time she picked up this gun. Holy shit, man. That was with personal defense ammo. This is probably the best .380 I've ever shot. But is .380 a good idea for concealed carry? I don't know. Is Buffalo Wild Wings and the movie 300 a good idea for a first date? You're going to get strong opinions either way. And for what it's worth, I got Lindsay a Buffalo chicken wrap and a heaping helping of... This is Sparta! That movie is so good. Makes me want to cry like a bitch and then go max my deadlift. But here we are, Lindsay and I, 17 years later. So if it sounds dumb, but it works, it's not dumb. The same can be said of .380. Is it ballistically inferior to 9mm? In every single way, yes. But it still meets a standard. It still put plenty of dicks in the dirt, even though Uncle Clint says that he wouldn't carry a .380 up his ass if he had room for a tugboat. The additional barrel length on the .80x is going to give you that edge, a little bit more performance. That .380 needs to get good penetration and expansion with that extra velocity. Additionally, you're now seeing more of these alternative lifestyle type projectiles that look like screwdriver heads at the top of the soft serve ice cream cone. I am 40 years old now. I am a 40 year old man. So I am skeptical of anything new, but the results are promising for that matter. Beretta sent me some of this Norma NX-D projectile, the soft serve ice cream cone. I know 56 grain projectile moving 1,300 feet per second allegedly works as well as a hollow point because of the Venturi principle or some shit like that. I don't know. All I know is in spite of it being a defensive caliber, it shoots with as much recoil as any of the soft .380 range ammo we were using. And because it uses a standard conical bullet, it should be more reliable than your average hollow point. The point is 2023 .380 is not the same as 1973 .380. These guns are performing way better than they used to. So if you're thinking about getting a smaller, lighter .380 for carry, or you want one for your wife or your mom, for that matter, Lindsey and my mom, Connie, we all went out to the range today with this gun and they loved it. They shot it well. You should consider the Beretta .80x. To use a Clintism for carrying, none of them are small enough for fighting. None of them are big enough. So it's a personal decision for you whether or not you're going to compromise and get an LCP .380 or carry a Glock 40 10 mil long slide with an optic and compensator or something in between. Different situations, different shooters mean different tools. The .80x certainly has a place in the toolbox and it looks good too. There are a couple of things that are less than ideal. It's slightly larger and heavier than other .380s in its class. For example, the Ruger LCP Max. The LCP Max holds 10 rounds in the mag versus 13 in the Beretta, but it weighs almost exactly half of the .80x. That's a lot of parmesan. And speaking of cheese, the .80x has a 799 MSRP, making it one of the more expensive .380s on the market, but I think well worth it. Street price is around 700 bucks. Right now there's only a couple of holsters for it, but I bet this gun's going to be popular enough that we will see more. Beretta also claims that they re-engineered the magazine for increased reliability with hollow points. I didn't use my .84 mags at the range I should have with the .80x, but hand cycling them here at home seems to work flawlessly using either mag and either gun, the .84 or the .80x. Ergonomics, typical Beretta. Like I said, the trigger's wonderful, so is the ambi safety. You've got forward slide serrations, rear slide serrations that are very aggressive. Love the grip panels. They feel great. This uses the Vertec grip, as I mentioned, with excellent grip checkering. Magazine release, basically identical to the old Cheetah. Big picture, the .80x is elegant, well-made, well-featured, well-thought-out. A reliable .380 with good size, good capacity, optics mounting capability, light mounting capability, the flexibility to carry, how you want to carry in terms of trigger modes, double action, single action, cocked and locked, whatever. There are smaller .380s out there. There are lighter .380s out there. There are cheaper .380s out there, but take it from me, a guy who owns PPKs, Sig P230s and 232s, Bursas, Kel-Tecs, Rugers, Kars, the original Beretta 84BB, Cheetah, the .80x is the total package, and it's probably the best .380 on the market today. Finally, it's here. Would you potentially like to purchase one of these at a deep discount, maybe with a gift certificate for Top Gun Supply? You can pick up a Beretta .80x at Top Gun Supply, and we give away six $250 gift certificates. If you are a member of our Utreon or Subscribestar at the $5 level or higher, you're automatically entered to win. All you do is sign up. And guys, by the way, Beretta didn't pay me to do this video. We do not take money in exchange for reviews, so we are viewer-supported, so we need you to help us out on Patreon, Utreon, or Subscribestar. Also, thank you to Ventura Munitions for sending all the ammo that we used in this video today, but thank you, as usual, for watching, and take care.