CCW Story Part 31: Nervous about my first firearm.

At home, the first thing I did was put the ammunition into our gun bag, zip the bag and shut it in a closet. Next, I disassembled the pistol to clean it, as Bruce had instructed us to do. The Bersa has a small lever on the left side, just above the trigger that releases the slide. Removing the slide and flipping it upside down reveals the recoil spring, spring guide pin and the bottom of the barrel. I removed the recoil spring and slide then pulled the barrel out of the slider and examined it, it appeared to be made of stainless steel. After I had removed it, I looked down the barrel, now just a nondescripts tube of stainless steel, and shivered, at the thought of having it pointed at me. .45 caliber, under half an inch in diameter, it felt like I was looking down a rifled train tunnel.

I cleaned the barrel with a brass brush, then ran a cotton wad through it, then oiled it with Breakfree CLP. I cleaned the rest of the components, brushing them with nostril burning solvent, then lightly lubing the moving parts with CLP. The outside of the Bersa was a smooth matte black, while the moving parts were another story. As Bruce had said there would be, there were scratches and machining imperfections on the underside of the slide. The frame appeared to be made of black anodized aluminum. I was satisfied with my purchase. Inexpensive, easily concealable, large caliber, semi-auto. All the things I was looking for in my first defensive handgun purchase.

I reassembled the pistol and dry fired it, for all of it's machining roughness, it had a smoother trigger pull than my wife's Kahr. The moment the trigger dropped the hammer to fire the weapon – called the "trigger break" felt much more consistent than other pistols I had fired, even the Glock. A reasonable amount of force was needed to drop the hammer in double action mode, where the trigger pull moves the hammer to the rear, before dropping it to move the firing pin. In single action mode, the pull was very light. I put the gun up for the night, unloaded at my wife's behest. She felt uncomfortable with me fiddling with it in the house, as I didn’t have a lot of experience with firearms. I complied, as at this stage of firearms ownership, the idea of a loaded .45 in the house made me nervous.