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Magnificent Mouse Guns: The Smallest Berettas

Small pistols with small bullets have a place. I don’t want a small-caliber pistol for self-defense. If, after taking all things into consideration, you make the informed decision that you want a small-caliber pistol, I don’t think you can do better than those made by Beretta.

I’ve heard it said, “If the Beretta .25 was good enough for James Bond it’s good enough for me.” Just remember that James Bond was a fictional character. Another scribe commented that he had read the Beretta .25 was the preferred handgun of the Boston mob, and they knew about killing people. Well, the Boston mob certainly knows about committing murder, but shooting helpless victims in the back of the head with a small-caliber pistol has nothing to do with defending yourself against a violent, aggressive creature that may come at you on two legs or four.

Fine accuracy and extreme reliability make the Beretta the .25 caliber pistol of choice in my book. A lot of these very small guns are prone to malfunction. The .25 Berettas are not. No more reliable pistol has ever been manufactured in the caliber. Beretta has produced the double-action Model 21, a.k.a. Beretta Bobcat, for many years. For almost half a century they made the Jetfire, which is perhaps the finest very small single-action .25 ever produced.

The Bobcat is also available in .22 Long Rifle. Whether the .22 LR or the .25 ACP is the more effective is a matter of debate. The ballistics tables give it to the .22, but the ballistics tables are calibrated on longer barreled pistols that produce more velocity and therefore more energy. When you chronograph the two calibers out of identical short-barrel pistols, the .25 is generally seen to be putting out a little bit more power.

The tiny Beretta Jetfire may be the best vest-pocket size .25 auto in the world, says author.

The .22’s big advantage is its cheap ammunition. If you need to defend yourself with a small cartridge you need to place the bullet with surgical accuracy. That sort of accuracy with a small pistol under stress comes only from constant practice that makes precise shooting a matter of autopilot. Because of its much lower cost, .22 LR ammunition is much more conducive to skill-building practice than even the cheapest .25 caliber ammo. Reliability, however, is a factor that cannot be compromised in a defensive firearm. The .22 LR is a long, narrow cartridge with a proportionally wide rim that has given gun designers and engineers fits when they try to build a small pistol around it. I have seen some Beretta 21 series pistols that were 100 percent reliable in .22 LR, and some that were not. Every Beretta .25 ACP I have seen has been totally reliable.

The fixed sights of baby Berettas can’t be compared to the fine ones on their larger cousins, but are better than most of the tiny pistols available.

Taurus PT-22 in .22 Long Rifle is a very good copy of the Beretta Model 21 Bobcat, rendered in double-action-only.

The Bobcat is “drop safe.” That is, can be carried with a round in the chamber without fear that it will discharge accidentally if dropped or struck.

“The Bobcat/Model 21 pistols have a light firing pin moving within a heavy firing pin spring,” explains Gabriele de Plano of Beretta. “The gun is drop safe because the gun can’t be hit with enough impact to make the firing pin move sufficiently inside its channel to cause a discharge. Only the hammer striking the firing pin will make it fire. This is why it passes the drop test.”

A pistol with a round in the chamber is what you want in a gun of this type. With calibers this feeble, your only chance is to get the gun out quickly and place an accurate shot swiftly. There may well not be time to get a round into the chamber. The double-action first shot of the Bobcat/Model 21 series pistols makes most people more comfortable carrying them with a live round up the spout. While I, and I’m sure Beretta, would recommend that a gun in the pocket be carried in a pocket holster, we are both aware that some people are just going to drop the gun into the pocket or purse. When it is carried like that there is the potential for the manual safety to be “rubbed” into the “fire” position unintentionally. The double-action first shot is a safety fallback.

My best advice would be to get a .22 Bobcat and shoot the heck out of it. If after several hundred rounds it has not had a malfunction, it’s probably good to go. Just keep it clean and properly lubricated and it should stay reliable. If you get any malfunctions after the first couple hundred break-in rounds, send it back to the factory, and when it is returned to you, repeat the process. If it still isn’t working, swap it for the .25 caliber version. If you don’t want to go through that hassle, just get the .25 caliber to start with.

Make sure you do a goodly amount of your practice in double-action firing mode. If that’s how you carry it, that’s how you should train with it. The first shot is the most important, in most cases. A long, heavy pull exerted against a short, light gun requires lots of experience working the trigger before the shooter can keep the muzzle on target as the index finger manages the double-action firing stroke at combat speed.

The Bobcat is basically a pocket pistol. Its key design feature is its double-action first-shot trigger mechanism. A long, heavy pull of the trigger for the first shot is seen by those people who have long experience in the investigation of unintentional firearms discharges as a bulwark against accidental discharge under stress. The Bobcat/21 series also has a frame-mounted manual safety located in the same place, and operated in the same way, as the safety catch on the classic Colt 1911 and Browning Hi-Power pistols.

A short forward press on the thumb lever activates the tip-up barrel feature on small-frame Berettas produced since 1954.

Here is a 950 BS Jetfire .25 shown cocked and locked with a live round in the chamber. What looks like a large, knurled screw at the lower rear of the grip panel is actually a push-button magazine release.

As is common, the sights on these little guns are small, but they’re better than a lot of what the competition offers. Painting them a bright color may help your eye to pick them up. Use enamel from a hobby shop or refrigerator enamel from an appliance store.

The smallest of Beretta pistols is the 950/Jetfire series, which was produced for nearly 50 years beginning in 1954. The reliable, accurate Jetfire .25 will fit not just in your jacket pocket, but also in the little business card pocket most clothing manufacturers sew inside the pocket of a blazer or suit coat. If you need a really tiny backup gun, this is one to consider.

A variation of the Jetfire and its .22 Short companion gun is the Beretta Minx, with a 4-inch barrel. In perspective, the Jetfire made the little Minx look like a long-barreled miniature target gun. These fell out of favor and were dropped from the catalog because they were incongruous to the Model 950’s function as a pocket pistol. However, for the person looking for a very small and light pistol to introduce shooters with very small hands to recreational handgun shooting, a .22 Short Minx with a 4-inch barrel is ideal.

The Minx and Jetfire are neat little guns. Toward the end of their epoch, they were produced in stainless steel, called Inox by Beretta. If the 950 series is ever brought back, which I hope one day it will be, I would like to see a 4-inch barrel .22 Short plinking version with larger front and rear sights that would be more amenable to the development of good shooting habits. A small adjustable sight like the ones found on Smith & Wesson’s little Kit Guns, or on the smallest .22 revolvers produced by Taurus would be ideal.

The 950 series was so popular it is now widely available on the secondhand shelves of gun shops. I hope they are returned to the line eventually.

I wrote about these baby Berettas in an article in the 2000 edition of Harris Publications’ The Complete Book of Handguns. Everything I said then still goes now.

The Littlest Beretta

The .22 pistol comes into its own as a recreational handgun. Plinking – informal target shooting at things like tin cans – is always more fun if you can bring one or more kids along and introduce them to the shooting sports. Because of that a pistol adaptable to small hands has particular value for recreational shooting. The little Beretta Minx in .22 Short fills this bill nicely. Its light weight, 10 to 11 ounces, made it a darling of those who wanted to carry a gun but didn’t expect to need one, and that feathery weight makes it an ideal “fun gun” for people who don’t have much upper body strength.

In his excellent book, Modern Beretta Firearms (Stoeger Publishing Company, 1994), gun expert Gene Gangarosa, Jr. notes that the first version had no manual safety. That original Model 950 was typically carried with the hammer at half-cock if a round was in the chamber. Many users simply carried it with the chamber empty. In 1978, when Beretta began assembling these guns in Maryland instead of Italy, a manual safety was added. Thus was born today’s Model 950 BS, which can be carried cocked and locked. Because it was understood that when worn loaded the gun was likely to be carried loose in a pocket, the factory made sure there was a strong detent to hold the thumb latch in place. This has required firm pressure to engage or disengage the safety on every sample I’ve examined. (A source at Beretta once told me that while the 950 series has no designated internal, passive firing pin safety device, the nature of the firing pin spring was such that tests convinced the factory that the pistol was “drop safe” under all reasonable circumstances with a round in the chamber.)

Left: the .25 ACP Jetfire. Center: the .22 Short Minx. Right: A 950 EL, Beretta’s deluxe version.

When my first child was 8, she had been shooting a .22 rifle for two years and was ready for handguns. I started her with a Beretta 950. She was able to operate the controls, even though she needed her off hand to help sometimes with the safety catch. She quickly progressed to bigger guns, but not before she had acquired an S&S courtesy of famed gunsmith John Lawson. John likes kids, and the “S&S” stands for “Sugar and Spice.” It was a 950 EL, the deluxe model with gold inlay. John eased up the trigger and made the safety a little lighter to operate since he knew she wouldn’t be carrying the gun in a pocket. He even had the barrel ported, which was really cute. Ted Blocker made up one of his ISI competition rigs for it, right down to an itty-bitty double magazine pouch. He said it was the smallest dress gunbelt set he had ever made. Still, it was with this gun and rig that she learned quick draw. Eleven years later, using another Ted Blocker holster and a bigger Beretta, she would win High Woman honors at the National Tactical Invitational at Gunsite Ranch.

Many carried the Beretta 950BS with the hammer down on an empty chamber.

The longer-barreled version of the 950 seemed unclear on the concept for concealment and didn’t sell well, but greatly improved its shooting characteristics.

Handling The 950 BS

Though small, this pistol does not bite the hand with the edge of the slide as so many .25 through .380 pistols will do, when fired by average-size men. It doesn’t seem to ding the hands of petite females or kids at all.

The trigger pull is surprisingly good for a pocket pistol. The 950 BS seems to average 5 to 6 pounds of pull weight. Lawson brings that down to an easy and crisp 4 pounds.

Like bigger Berettas of the mid-20th century, the 950 BS has a push-button magazine release located at the lower rear of the left grip panel. Some are of the opinion that’s not the best place to put it. It looks to this writer as though the Italian designers simply bought into the German concept of the 1930s, where the thinking was it would be a good idea for weapons with removable magazines to have designs that forced the shooter to remove them by hand instead of ejecting them and leaving them behind on the battlefield. (You see this concept today with other German small arms, notably the HK series of submachine guns and battle rifles.)

The shooter used to pressing a button with his thumb to eject a magazine has a tendency to try to do this with the baby Beretta by flipping it upward in his hand. DON’T DO IT! This gives you a very tenuous grasp on the pistol, and creates an excellent chance that you’ll drop it, with a round in the chamber, the hammer cocked and the safety off. You don’t need me to tell you that this would be a bad thing.

The best very small plinking pistol ever, in the author’s view, was this uncommon 4-inch variation of the Beretta Minx.

The smoothest reload for the right-handed shooter is to bring the left palm down under the butt of the pistol. Now, as the left thumb pushes straight in on the button, the magazine drops cleanly into the palm of the hand to allow for a secure grasp. Take it out, put it away, reload and carry on.

That’s the smoothest magazine removal, presuming casual plinking. The most efficient reload, which presumes a “need for speed,” is the one I taught my little girl. Withdraw the fresh magazine, holding it between thumb and middle finger with the bullet noses toward the index finger, which is alongside the front of the mag. Extend your thumb and jab the mag release. The spent mag will fall away cleanly if you press in hard and the pistol’s grip is perpendicular to the ground. Now, insert the fresh mag.

This pistol has no slide release lever and no slide lock. If it has been run completely dry, you have to “jack” the slide to the rear and let it fly forward.

A signature feature of the 950 pistol is the tip-up barrel. Beretta continued this concept with their double-action Model 21 .22 LR and their Model 86 .380 ACP. Taurus applied it to their double-action-only clones of the Model 21, the PT-22 and PT-25. On the 950 there is a lever above the trigger guard on the left side of the frame that’s pushed forward to cause the barrel to pop up with its breech in the air and the muzzle down. To allow for the tip-up feature, the 950’s straight blow-back action has no extractor.

The author’s daughter, Cat, looks back from adulthood at the .22 Short Beretta Minx pistols with which she started a distinguished pistol shooting career.

For comparison, here is a S&W Model 342 AirLite (top, with Crimson Trace LaserGrips) and “long-barrel” Beretta Minx.

The tip-up design eliminates the need to jack a slide at all. Its mechanism is easily manipulated, and readily allows anyone to check a chamber, even if they have very little strength. This is one reason I really like this auto pistol for teaching handgun techniques to kids. It also makes enormous sense for adults whose physical strength in the hands or upper body is limited.

Many years ago, a very good friend of mine who was quadriplegic and had only very limited use of his hands asked my advice on a carry gun. He couldn’t handle the recoil of even a .32 or .380, and he couldn’t draw back the slide of his Walther PPK. I got him into a pair of 950 BS pistols: a Jetfire .25 for carry, and the functionally identical Minx .22

Short for practice. It worked for him, and until his death he was confident that he had a gun that would work to protect himself and his wife. He knew the limitations of the .25 auto cartridge, but he also knew his own limitations. I knew his determination, and I wouldn’t have wanted to be the thug who tried to mug him or his wife.

Why a .25 for carry, and a .22 Short for practice? First, my friend didn’t reload his own ammo, and .22 Short rimfire rounds were a whole lot cheaper. Second, while the .25 ACP is pretty pathetic as a self-defense round, the .22 Short is even weaker. Third, while the 950 pistol holds six rounds in the magazine and a seventh in the chamber in caliber .22 Short, it holds eight in the magazine and a ninth up the pipe when chambered in .25 ACP. Finally, while the Beretta 950 is unexcelled for reliability in the world of .25 autos, the 950 in .22 Short jams often enough that I wouldn’t trust if for anything more serious than recreational shooting or small vermin eradication at close range.

Left: The magazine for .22 Short Minx …

Above: … is distinctly different from that for the centerfire .25 ACP Jetfire.

The trigger finger, when held straight, approaches the muzzle of these tiny pistols.

I 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 inches. (The distance was 25 yards.)

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 of an inch. The target loads were again tighter, with all five in of an inch. And once more the standard load was most accurate of all, with five shots in ½ of an inch and four of them in a cluster measuring of an inch.

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-inch group, the best three in of in inch. The target loads plunked five shots into 5 inches. The standard ammo delivered a 5-inch group, with the best three in 2 inches.

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-inch Beretta barrel. Tests by Phil Engeldrum and others show that in short-barrelled pocket pistols, the .25 Auto clearly outperforms the .22 LR. If that’s the case, where do you think that leaves the .22 Short?

Still Deadly

Make no mistake, the .22 Short is still lethal. Smith & Wesson introduced the cartridge just before the Civil War, and it’s been killing people ever since. Just for the heck of it, I took the Beretta to my basement along with an old, hardcover Reader’s Digest Condensed Book, and shot it with each of the rounds I had tested at the range.

The hollow point went in 1 inches, expanding to ½ an inch at its widest point and shedding some lead. The standard copper-washed solid round nose projectile went in 1½ inches, expanding to by ½ an inch. Even the slow-moving lead round-nosed target bullet pierced to 1 inches, though there was more deformation than expansion.

How does this equate to performance in flesh? You can’t really correlate it, scientifically. I can tell you that a .45 ball round will go through a good 6 inches of the same type of material, and will pierce some 26 inches of simulated solid muscle tissue (Fackler formula ballistic gelatin). That’s about a 4.3:1 factor, which would extrapolate to the .22 Short solid bullet going in roughly 6½ inches, and the hollow-point a good five inches. That’s less than half of what the FBI accepts as adequate penetration for defensive handgun ammo, but it’s more than enough to cause death. The .22 Short is not a toy. When used improperly it can be deadly. When used for self-defense, however, it would take surgical bullet placement through an open part of the skull (such as the nasal cavity) into the brain stem to guarantee an immediate cessation of violent action.

Final Notes

Even with its tiny sights, the Beretta 950 BS in .22 Short is an excellent “starter gun” for close-range plinking and firearms safety training. It would be better if they had made more of them with the 4-inch barrel. That’s a gun I’ve rarely seen and never could find to purchase. Even the 950 BS in .22 Short is no longer offered in the U.S., though they seem to be plentiful at gun shows (doubtless traded in by people who bought them for self-defense and smartened up).

The Beretta 950 BS is, quite simply, a neat little pistol. It occupies a special niche in the handgun world.

Beretta has not offered the Jetfire since the end of 2002, and they stopped making the Minx even before that. Says de Plano, “The market made the decision. Sales of the Jetfire and Minx had become miniscule because the people who used to buy them were buying the Bobcat instead.” Certainly the double-action feature and the optional .22 LR chambering of the slightly larger Model 21 made these guns highly desirable. Today the Bobcat is available in blue or Inox, and either .25 ACP or .22 Long Rifle.