So Beretta asked me if I wanted an MR73 and I said “do you want to ask me another stupid question?” Next thing you know I had a brand new MR73 Gendarmerie in my grubby little hands. I thought to myself “self, what’s a good way to see what this gun can really do?” I know! Shoot it at some IDPA matches. So I took it to the 2021 IL State Championship, and I guess I did okay. Here’s the hype reel
https://facebook.com/213740424000409
And here’s the end result
And now for the stuff people actually care about: support gear. Good news, if you didn’t know already, Safariland Comp-III for K-frames work great with the MR73. Holsters are a bit wonky, it’s bigger than a K-frame and smaller than an L-frame, so it wouldn’t fit quite right in my Combat Master. A Kydex gun bucket from Blade Tech for a GP100 worked well enough for matches, although I had to crank the retention down a bit.
Trigger was 8.5 lbs out of the box, I left it alone. It cracked everything that went under it, but to be fair all I fed it was Federal and Speer.
Now, the grips. How do they work for shooting at speed? Surprisingly well, actually. It turns out that my strong hand thumb rests nicely on the “hump” which leaves a lot of space for my support hand to establish surface contact area.
The only downside to my grip being this high is there’s the possibility of getting hammer bite from the hammer spur, but I’ll probably just delete that with a dremel at some point, because as I’ve said, single action mode is for the old and feeble.
The MR73 is stupid accurate and stupid easy to shoot well. If I wanted to make it into the ultimate Go-Fast speedloader gun for IDPA and ICORE, I’d give it a smooth trigger, chamfer the charge holes, bob the hammer, and give it a thinner front sight with a fiber optic. Proving once again that even if you give a competition shooter what is basically the best gun on planet earth, they still want to tinker with it.
This gun fucks though. It fucks so hard I’m going to shooting at the Hoosier Regional in July, and the Ohio Regional in September.