recently accepted an assignment to teach in a foreign country where I could be licensed to carry a gun, but couldn’t carry anything larger than .32 caliber. We were able to postpone the trip long enough for me to decide on a .32 Magnum or a .30 Luger auto pistol. I expect it will be the latter. If I were to find myself in a country that said I could carry a gun, but it had to be a .25 caliber or smaller, I would unhesitatingly carry a Beretta Jetfire .25. Or two. Or three.
But I wouldn’t carry a .22 Short. It’s tough enough to get a sharply rimmed round to feed in a small semiautomatic pistol without making it a Short rimfire round. As it is, Beretta had to build a little ramp into each magazine to make this pistol work in .22 Short. Not for nothing did John Browning design the .25 ACP cartridge expressly to feed in small auto pistols.
Shooting the Baby Beretta
This gun is a decent fit for a very small hand. This is true even if the finger is so short that only the pad or even the tip of the index finger can reach the trigger. Sights are rather crude with a knife-type blade front and a V-notch rear, neither very large. The sight picture looks like three tiny teeth, all pointed upward, with the middle one on target. They’ll do for slow-fire fun shooting, though.
I dug out the two 950 BS pistols my daughter had used so long ago, and took the plain blue one to the range. The .22 Short ammo that was so plentiful in my youth is not so available today. I finally found the CCI brand at a well-stocked local gun shop. It came in three flavors: target, standard and hollow-point.
The phone hadn’t stopped ringing at the office, and by the time I got to the range it was past the dark side of the end of the day. Even in the car headlights, I couldn’t distinguish the aiming point crudely drawn in pencil on the white side of the IPSC targets, nor could I get a good visual fix on the miniscule blade that is the Minx’s front sight.
Even so, the wee pistol easily delivered thorax-sized groups. Five hollow-points went into 6 inches even, five target loads into 5 inches even, and a like number of the standard copper-washed solid bullets delivered a group that measured 4
Here is the the John Lawson Custom “Sugar and Spice Special.” Note the porting of .22 Short barrel.
Gold inlay including the Pietro Beretta logo was a staple of the EL series
As always, I had a SureFire 6P on my belt. Moving forward to the closest firing line marked on the range, 4 yards, I went to the Harries flashlight shooting position, which essentially is strong-hand-only. I aimed for the center of the head. Even though the front sight was still awfully indistinct, the pistol delivered surprising accuracy. The five HPs punched a group measuring just
We moved to the indoor range, which is only 50 feet long at this facility, to give the gun a fair chance. I laid out some rapid-fire bull’s-eye targets. Alas, I discovered that it wasn’t the light. Aging male eyesight had struck again. I couldn’t get a focus on a front sight that small and that close without taking off my prescription shooting glasses.
Under these conditions, the hollow-point bullets delivered a 4
Given the “old guy’s eyes” problem, I don’t think the above was a fair test of the gun’s accuracy. I’m sure it can shoot better than that. However, that will do for barnyard rats at close range.
It will also do in terms of accepted accuracy standard for small-caliber pistols. These are not 25-yard guns, though this one kept everything well inside the 8-inch circle of an IDPA target’s center zone at that distance, even under terrible eyesight conditions and worse light conditions.
Some perspective is in order, though. Officer survival authority Terry Campbell has called the little .22 and .25 automatics “nose guns,” on the theory that you can only survive with them if you stick them up your attacker’s nose before you pull the trigger. At 12 feet from the target, even with poor light and vision circumstances, this gun gave groups tight enough that you could not only put the bullet up the nose, you could pretty much select which nostril.
The accuracy is quite sufficient for tin cans, plastic soda bottles and the like. I personally see this as a close-range plinking gun for beginners. It’ll do fine there.
I can’t help but notice that muzzle flash was mild with the low-powered .22 Short, and this was especially true of the target load. The latter gave just enough flash signature to silhouette the sight picture in the dark, and give the shooter feedback on where the sights were when the shot broke.
I did not experience any malfunctions with any of the CCI .22 Short cartridges in the 950 BS. In the past, I had noted that the Minx in .22 Short didn’t even come close to the reliability of the Jetfire, the same gun in .25 ACP. I can’t recall ever seeing a Jetfire jam in any way. When my older daughter was a little girl we figured out that the Minx was jamming once every 29 shots. However, we were using a brand other than CCI. From now on, the CCI ammo will be my load of choice in the Beretta .22 Short pistol.
For Defense?
I was the first guy to say it, and I’ll say it again: “Friends don’t let friends carry mouse guns.” If “defense” means defending the chicken coop from rats at close range, the .22 Short Beretta will do the job. Some squirrel hunters I know have told me the .22 Short is just right for those most edible of rodents, if they can be killed at short range. But a squirrel is to an aggressive human assailant as a man is to a Tyrannosaurus Rex. You wouldn’t take a .38 Special as your primary armament if you went to Jurassic Park to hunt the elusive T-Rex.
You shouldn’t take a close-range squirrel pistol as your primary weapon if you think there’s a chance you’ll be attacked by a 200-pound speed freak armed with a stolen .45 automatic. It’s just Logic 101.
Velocity, energy and most other measurements of power drop off radically when fired from the 2
Still Deadly
Make
