Beretta M62 .308 Semi Auto Rifle Serial 002873. Rifle is in very good condition. Stock and handguard have a ding from storage on the left side. Buttplate also show minor damage. Come with 1 original BM59 20 round magazine and original sling. The rifle was one of around 2,000 imported by the Berben Corporation of New York in the early 1980s. The company, on Park Row in Manhattan, was the exclusive distributor in the U.S of Beretta products for several years until the Italian gunmaker set up its own facility in Accokeek, Maryland in 1985. See pictures for more information.
Pictures are of actual firearm you will receive.
Perhaps the pinnacle of the post-WWII M1 Garand was the Beretta BM 59 series rifles, and only about 2,000 commercial BM 62 variants were imported to the U.S. in the 1980s. Following the end of the war, Italy was among the 12 founding members of NATO, established in 1949. Needing to rebuild its armed forces, the country soon adopted the M1 Garand as a standard infantry rifle, and local firearms legend Beretta got in the business of both refurbishing old guns and producing thousands of new ones – including rifles sold to fellow NATO members such as Denmark.
By 1959, Beretta engineers Domenico Salza and Vittorio Valle had updated John Browning's venerable design by replacing the fixed magazine, which was fed via a top-inserted 8-shot en bloc clip, with a more modern 20-round detachable box mag along with a stripper clip guide on the top of the receiver. Likewise, the caliber was 7.62 NATO rather than .30-06, the barrel length was shortened, it was made select-fire, the gas system was tweaked, a folding integral bipod was fitted, and a new muzzle device/22mm rifle grenade launcher with accompanying sight was installed. This new rifle still had a lot of M1 commonality but a more M14/FAL/HK G3 flavor to it, and was promptly adopted by the Italian Army as the BM-59 in 1962.
Beretta had a good deal of success with the BM-59, licensing the design for overseas production to Indonesian and Nigerian state arsenals as well as producing the gun in Italy in several variants for a quarter century.
While a precious few select-fire BM-59s were imported to the U.S. prior to the 1968 ban on overseas machine gun parts, the American consumer market was left hungry for this updated box-fed "spaghetti Garand." That was until the semi-auto BM-62 and BM-69 sporters were introduced. Chambered in .308 Winchester, the commercial twin to the 7.62 NATO, these guns were not made in anywhere near the same quantity as the BM-59 or even Beretta's M1s, making them highly collectible.
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