My flight day was a bust. I had seen exactly zero ducks since before daylight. I was shivering and bleeding, having stabbed myself while opening an Epic bison bar. At that moment, I hated duck hunting. Then I saw the mallards. Four, all drakes, materialized the way ducks sometimes do, not there one instant, hanging over the decoys the next. These would turn out to be the only ducks I saw all day.
It’s because of days like this that duck hunters don’t want to worry about whether their gun will work. If you get one chance, you don’t want to lose it because of gun troubles, nor because your gun doesn’t shoot where you want it to. I let the greenheads circle once, then raised the AX800 Suprema in my lap, dropped two of them, and just like that, I loved duck hunting again. More important, the AX800 was now blooded, both in duck blood and in some of my own, and I could give the gun an honest, preliminary appraisal. Here's a closer look at the all-new Beretta AX800 semiauto shotgun.
Beretta AX8000 Specs
Chambering: 3 ½-inch 12-gauge
Length: 49.25 inches with a 28-inch barrel
Weight: 7.75 pounds with a 28-inch barrel
Barrel: Beretta Steelium Pro with raised rib, twin beads, Cerakote finish
Action: Gas semiauto
Trigger: 4 pounds
Finish: Black, solid earth colors, Realtree, Mossy Oak, and Optifade camos
Price: $2499 in black, $2599 in camo and colors
Beretta AX800 Overview
The AX800 is a 3 ½-inch, 12-gauge gas semiauto designed with waterfowlers in mind. The first thing you notice about the AX800, and the most unusual thing about it, is that the grip and receiver are one piece of plastic. Beretta spun the AX800 design off its experience with the largely polymer ARX160 rifle, developed for the Italian military. Lockup in the AX800 is still steel-to-steel, between the bolt and the robust barrel extension. In such a design, the receiver isn’t much more than a box to hold parts, so why shouldn’t it be polymer? Polymer has its advantages. It is weather and temperature-resistant. It doesn’t need lubrication, and dirt and carbon don’t stick to it. Plastic doesn’t corrode.
Polymer receiver aside, the AX800 bears a strong family resemblance to the A400 Xtreme. All the parts of the gas system, which Beretta calls the Blink-Pro, including the action spring, lie underneath the forearm. The cylinder on the barrel ring that houses the piston can now be disassembled for cleaning, which is a nice improvement that makes de-clogging the gas ports much easier. In fact, the whole system comes apart very easily when the time comes to take the gun down to care for it.
Speaking of take-down, the gun uses the same B-Lok magazine cap from the A400 Xtreme that works essentially like a child-proof cap: push down, give it a half-turn, and it comes off. And it has the same hi-viz green interior that makes it easy to find when you drop it in the water. Having dropped mag caps into the water, I support this feature and love the B-Lok cap in general.
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Beretta AX8000 First Impressions
My gun had a 28-inch Cerakoted barrel with the same raised rib seen on the A400 (which will remain in the Beretta lineup). Plastic may have its advantages, but it doesn’t make this gun any lighter. Mine was 7 pounds, 12 ounces, which I happen to think is an outstanding weight for a duck gun. The gun balanced just at the front of the loading port, and when I mounted this gun, I forgot all about its looks and plastic parts. It feels great in hand and fit me out of the box. It also shot exactly to point of aim.
The trigger pull is excellent. It’s a flat trigger with no curve in it at all, and the pull is just under four pounds and very clean. Four pounds, give or take, is as light as a duck gun trigger should be. It’s very shootable, without being so light that your numb fingers set it off before you’re on target.
The huge and easily reversible round safety is another ergonomic plus for the AX800. It's mounted ahead of the trigger guard, and it is too big to miss. The carrier release button is large and convenient, and the magazine spring is soft enough to make loading easy with cold hands. The bolt handle is big and easy to grab without being obnoxiously oversized. The only thing I dislike about the gun is the slammer button. I am generally anti-slammer on hunting guns, and this one has a hair-trigger. Bump the slammer slightly, and the bolt slams shut. I hate it.
The stock has a new version of the Kick-Off recoil reducer, the Kick-Off Pro. It is very stout and designed for reducing recoil with heavy target loads, which it does effectively. The absorbers are so stiff that I didn't notice any reduction when I shot this gun with target loads. My old 391 Sporting gun, the previous generation of Beretta, was much softer-shooting with target loads than the AX800 was.
Beretta AX800 Field Test
At the range, I found the AX800 very easy to shoot. For me, it was the right combination of balance and fit to make busting clays with it just about effortless. Beretta says the final production guns will cycle virtually any target load, and I believe them, because Beretta semiautos shoot everything. That said, my pre-production gun cycled fine with hunting loads but not so much with target ammo. Apparently, some tweaks were made for the production guns to improve light-load reliability.
The gun has Beretta’s highest-tech barrel design, Steelium Pro, which features a 17-inch-long forcing cone, the same one used in the DT-11 competition gun. I patterned it with Migra’s 24/7 2×4 stacked loads, a Modified choke, and got good 65 percent patterns.
The gun can be adjusted with shims, and optional cheek pieces and grips will be available. It has attachment points for traditional and tactical slings, a receiver optic plate, and holes in the ribs for a barrel-mounted optic. It is a very modular gun. With the right cheekpiece, grip, and sight, this would be a wonderful turkey gun. In all, the AX800 seems like a winner to me so far: it’s shootable, customizable, durable, and easy to care for. Time and rounds through the barrel will tell how reliable it is. All I know is that I really like shooting this gun, and that in a moment of need, it did not fail me.
THE 1871 CLUB
