For twenty years since the late ‘60s, Italian manufacturers Beretta firearms had kept with only two handgun designs; the tilt up fixed barrel, open frame blow-back design of its .22, .25 and .32 caliber small framed Tommycat and Bobbycat pistols, and the notable 9 mm and .40 cal. Model number 92 and 96 short-recoil pistols with their wide open frame and falling block barrel locking system. The .380 cal. Cheetah would take something from those two designs. All of them are hammer-fired double-action variants, unlike some other types of guns. Then in 1994 Beretta introduced an all-new design called the “Beretta Compact Frame Pistol Family”. This pistol had a special all enveloping slide and a more unique rotating barrel locking system. It was called the Cougar, and was available in 9 mm, .40 and .45 calibers. This design was quite successful. Not quite as successful in my opinion was Beretta’s first endeavor into a polymer frame pistol, the Model 9000. Introduced in 2000, this design is a compact frame with a dropping-barrel locking system similar to the Kahr and Taurus Millennium, and is available in 9 mm or .40 cal. This compact design suffers from a top-heavy balance and a hard-hitting recoil.

Now as good as the Beretta Storm‘s rotating-barrel design was, particularly for reducing felt recoil, its grip was more bulk and was too big for certain tiny hands.

After more than ten years of production the Cougar was eventually discontinued in 2005. But that won’t be the last we will see of the Cougar. It has been re-incarnated, enhanced, and has returned as the new polymer framed beretta firearms PX4 Storm.