Gun Digest Book of Beretta Pistols. Massad Ayoob

the Tomcat .32 with a Cougar .40 is rather like putting your own little housecat up against a mountain lion. Consider the following ballistics, courtesy of Winchester:

       The Tomcat can be carried three ways with a round in the chamber, though all contravene the owner’s manual. Here is its optional cocked and locked mode …

       … here the hammer is down, and safety engaged …

       … and here the pistol is off safe, ready to fire in double-action mode.

       Mouse Gun Factor

      Yeah, I know, I’m the guy who says “Friends don’t let friends carry mouse guns.” Why then am I writing this article?

      Mouseguns are a fact of life. There are X number of good people who will carry a tiny gun or no gun at all, either as backup or as first line of defense, and a basic law of life is that “something is better than nothing.” Jeff Cooper once said he’d rather have a hatchet than a .25 auto for self-defense. At belly-to-belly distance, me too, though I’d likely trade the hatchet for my Richard Sokol custom Arkansas Toothpick. However, Jeff was always big and strong, and I am comparatively little and weak. At a range of 20 feet, if the bad guy has a firearm, I’d rather have the mouse gun than the hatchet since I know he can empty his weapon into me in the second and a half it’ll take me to reach him with a blade.

      Thus, 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,