we take it as a given that this article won’t be a diatribe against mouse guns, but rather an inquiry into how well the Beretta Tomcat fulfills the mouse gun role.
The Pistol
Built to be sold to the people who are tired of waiting in line for the Seecamp LWS-32, a hard-to-find pistol in the Czech double-action-only pattern that has no sights and is the size of a small .25, the Beretta Tomcat partially succeeds. It’s available now at your local gun shop, and at a remarkably affordable price, not the scalper’s ticket so many charge for a Seecamp. It’s the size of a .25, all right, but the size of Beretta’s own double-action first shot, 11-ounce Model 21 Bobcat .25 auto, which is 4.9 inches long with its 2.4-inch barrel. Somewhat more ruggedly constructed, the Tomcat weighs 13.1 ounces with chamber empty and magazine removed, and 16.6 ounces on my calibrated electronic scale when fully loaded with seven rounds of 71-grain ball in the magazine and an eighth round, the Gold Dot 60-grain hollow-point, in the launch tube.
The Tomcat is a cooler looking gun. Its trigger guard looks like it was part of the design instead of a piece of sheet metal folded over and stapled. Where the little Beretta DA .22/.25 has a thin blade front and V-notch rear sight, the .32 version has a small but much more visible square post/square notch rear sight picture.
It has a tip-up barrel, perhaps a tiny bit stiffer in the lever to operate than that of the other pocket .22 and .25 Berettas, but easier to manipulate than the 180-degree lever on the Model 86 .380. Good news. Weak or handicapped people can load the chamber easily without having to actuate a spring-loaded slide. Bad news: there’s no extractor, the design trusts blowback force to clear the spent casing out of the chamber, and if there is an extraction failure, you can’t just work the slide to clear it. Doing that will merely bring up another round against the jammed spent casing, the dreaded and erroneously-named “double-feed jam.”
More good news, however is that during tests, the gun never failed to extract, and a poll of half a dozen other owners showed the same collective experience.
A frontal view of the Beretta 3032 Tomcat. The barrel cannot move back if the muzzle is pressed into the target, an important consideration at the distances at which small pocket pistols are likely to be used, and an advantage it shares with smaller frame Berettas.
A push forward on this lever with the thumb pops the barrel up for cartridge insertion or removal, saving you from working the slide. This can be a godsend for those with limited strength in hands and upper body. Note also that chamber can be loaded or emptied
The Tomcat is bigger, significantly bigger, than the Seecamp .32. However, it’s smaller than any other .32 automatic on the market. (Yeah, I know, at least two companies are supposed to be offering Seecamp clones. Call me if you see one in a gunshop. I haven’t.)
Comparing the new Beretta .32 to my preferred off-duty backup gun, the S&W 442 Centennial Airweight .38 Special, the Beretta is a little smaller in height and distinctly smaller in overall length. Remove the barrel from your J-frame revolver, and what’s left of your gun will be the length of a fully assembled Tomcat. Weight, however, is less dramatically favorable to the .32. Empty, the Tomcat weighs 13.1 ounces and the S&W Airweight hammerless, 15.2 ounces. Fully loaded there’s even less difference. With five 158-grain +P lead hollow-points in the chambers, my favorite pocket .38 weighs 17.9 ounces. With seven Federal ball rounds in the magazine and a 60-grain Gold Dot hollow-point in the chamber, the Beretta .32 weighs 16.6 ounces. One and three-tenths ounces ain’t a helluva lot of difference.
Eight rounds for the .32 versus five rounds for the .38 is a significant difference, until you factor in the potency per shot. The total deliverable muzzle energy of .38 Special +P, times five, dramatically exceeds that of a .32 ACP times eight, even when you allow for the 2-inch barrel of the .38 and the 2.4-inch barrel of the Tomcat.
Does a Beretta Tomcat .32 beat a Beretta Bobcat .25? Oh, my, yes! A .32 auto is by any standard about twice as powerful as a .25 auto. This must, of course, be kept in perspective. A .380 auto is half again more potent than a .32, while a .38 Special can deliver more than four times the raw power of a .25 and more than twice that of the best .32 auto round. So often, there is time for only one shot …
Field Testing the Tomcat
I bit the itty-bitty bullet, as it were, and carried the test Beretta Tomcat, as a backup gun for almost the whole month of April 1997. Just under two weeks of that were in the Pacific Northwest, a week was in the South, and the remainder was in Northern New England. I was legal to carry loaded and concealed in all three jurisdictions.
I’m not gonna give you a lot of crap about getting in touch with my feminine side, or being secure enough in my masculinity to carry a .32 for backup. I will tell you that for all but a week of that time, the .32 was a third gun, since I had an Airweight .38 on my left ankle and a Glock .45 on my right hip. But during the week where the .32 was my only backup I didn’t start going through withdrawal symptoms or anything.
This is the latest incarnation of the Tomcat, with an enlarged and more ergonomic safety lever, and Inox construction.
For all this time I used one holster: Jerry Ahern’s excellent pocket scabbard. While some pocket holsters, like the Kramer, require an upward draw to strip off the holster and clear the sidearm, the Ahern design needs you to rock the gun back with its muzzle pointed tactically toward the threat. Now it clears both pocket and holster, the holster perhaps hanging out of the pocket lining as the separation takes place. I found it unerringly effective.
However, I discovered that while the Beretta .32 was almost as fast out of the Ahern pocket holster as a snub .38 out of one of my usual pocket holsters when I was wearing loose trousers (i.e., BDUs), this changed in tight jeans. With the jeans it wasn’t nearly as fast. This isn’t a fault of Ahern’s holster design or anything unique to the Beretta Tomcat; rather, it’s a fact of life with tight-to-the-body carry of any semiautomatic pistol. An autoloader’s grip profile is flat on the sides and tight clothing or holsters hug it close to your body requiring your fingers to sort of claw in to get a drawing grasp. The rounded profile of a small revolver’s grip frame allows a much easier draw in these types of carry. The rounded edges of the revolver’s stocks sort of guide your hand quickly into position.
Accuracy? The first thing I saw with this little gun was that it shot way low. At 7 yards, while it would put a decent group together, that group would be some two or three inches below point of aim. The trigger pull didn’t help. While it improved with lubrication, the double-action pull never got better than mediocre and the single-action pull had “bad creep” with about four stopping points through an almost interminably long stroke that seemed to reach all the way back to the rear of the frame before the gun went off.
The action and trigger were very rough when we started. Wear and lubrication took off the “very” but couldn’t eradicate all of the “rough.” This little gun is not the glass-smooth Beretta 92/96, whose exquisitely polished moving parts and contact surfaces are the envy of the rest of the handgun industry.
Reliability? We ran just under 300 rounds through
