Gun Digest Book of Beretta Pistols. Massad Ayoob

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 this gun. There were only two malfunctions, steep-angled 12 o’clock misfeeds that could not be cleared without stripping the mag from the pistol. Both occurred, surprisingly, with full-metal-jacket ball ammo, Winchester’s USA brand which is normally utterly reliable. Yet the gun was flawless with Federal ball, and with 20-some rounds of Speer Gold Dot and 50 of Winchester Silvertip, both 60-grain hollow-points. Go figure.

      The two jams were cleared by ripping the magazine out of the gun, thumbing the topmost round either out of the mag or back in place, and then “reload, cycle, shoot.” As previously noted, there were no extraction failures. (Interestingly, we got into a bad batch of contaminated old .22 ammo when shooting a Beretta 21 next to the Model 3032 Tomcat. These rounds failed to cycle. We had to pop the barrel up and pry the spent rimfire casings out with a pocketknife. Determining what we would do if a Tomcat failed to extract a .32 hull if the round was too feeble to cycle the gun, we found that a #2 pencil would go down the barrel to punch the casing out. Colleague Marty Hayes, no fan of small-caliber pistols, commented dryly, “If you have to carry a #2 pencil anyway, cut out the middleman. Leave the .32 at home and just carry a sharp pencil. If you’re attacked by a violent criminal, stab him with the pencil until he dies. You’ll probably have about the same wound profile anyway.”)

       The rear sight on Tomcat is better than those on most guns its size …

      But I won’t make any mouse gun jibes here. I won’t ...

      The tradition is to test pocket pistols at no farther than 7 yards, the theory being that this is the greatest distance at which you’ll have employ one. I’m sorry, but I can’t buy that. I’ll go with Affirmative Action hiring so long as it’s enlightened Affirmative Action hiring.

      What that means is, Affirmative Action hiring does no one any good if it’s construed as lowering the standards to let in people who otherwise wouldn’t qualify for the job. Enlightened Affirmative Action hiring is, you let people of every size, color, gender, and belief system compete and the ones who can do the job better are the ones you put to work. The history of it is, if you hire people who can’t do the job because it seems politically correct or convenient, the job doesn’t get done and people who needed the job done right end up suffering. But if you throw out height and weight and color and similar requirements and hire people who can do the job well however they do it, you end up getting the job done.

      When cops were whining in the 1970s and 1980s about having to be backed up by women and small-statured men, they shut up after the new hires showed they could do the job.

      With this in mind, I test even pocket guns the way I test service pistols, including 25-yard shootability tests. If the bad guy doesn’t cooperate with your game plan of being in close when the fight starts (and, let’s face it, he didn’t cooperate with your game plan when he started the fight in the first place), you need equipment that will allow you to engage successfully at parking lot distance. My Tomcat .32 shot so low that with a 12 o’clock hold on a piece of 8½- by 11-inch typing paper, Federal 71-grain ball put five rounds in 5 inches, the best three in 2; Winchester ball put the five in 7 inches, the best three in 3. Some people find that acceptable. I find it beyond the edge of acceptability, having perhaps been spoiled by the exquisite accuracy of Beretta’s .380, 9mm, and .40 pistols.

      Yet all is relative. Its group is enough to shoot a 300 out of 300 on the police qualification course’s generous B-27 target, assuming you have your Kentucky windage right. While I’ve qualified with the sightless Seecamp on that course, I wouldn’t bet my life on shooting a 300 with one.

       Feedback From Others

      One career cop I know bought two Tomcats and carries one in each front pocket. He likes the portability, hates the trigger pull, and doesn’t find the gun hurts his hand. Neither of his Tomcats shoot where they look.

      A male civilian I know liked the grouping capability but didn’t like it being someplace other than where he was aiming, and found the sharp edge of the safety catch painful. A female civilian noted similar concerns and found the slide and the barrel tip-up lever difficult to operate. Both of them found the gun hurt their hands.

      Another woman found the gun too weak in output, too inaccurate, and painful to shoot due to sharp edges. A large male cop found its slide bit his hand when he shot it and went back to a .38 snub for his second gun. A large male civilian fell in love with it, finding it easier to shoot every shot in the same place than his Seecamp .32, even though his Beretta didn’t shoot spot on.

      Personally, I found hand bite – a common thing with pocket autos and male hands – to be minor. Like the other users, I was disconcerted that the gun was not sighted in at the factory. The other Tomcat users, like me, carried the gun off safe because its sharp-edged safety worked too stiffly to rely on in a crisis.

       … as is the front sight.

       The Owner’s Manual

      Many have lauded the Seecamp owner’s manual for its refreshing approach to user instructions, such as, carry it loaded with a round in the chamber ready to fire. It is, after all, something you bought to protect your life in an emergency. Duh! Kudos to Seecamp.

      I was disheartened when I compared that to the Tomcat owner’s manual. “IN THE FIELD, the pistol should be carried unloaded (empty chamber, magazine removed, the hammer fully-lowered and the safety ‘ON’) in a holster, with the magazine in a pouch or pocket. It takes only a second to insert a loaded magazine and to retract and release the slide for chamber loading and cocking.” (Introduction.) “WARNING!! If the pistol is carried chamber loaded (NOT RECOMMENDED) with the hammer full-lowered, ENGAGE the SAFETY: DO NOT try to override the Safety by asserting (sic) excessive trigger pull force. Also, the mechanism may be damaged by forceful manual hammer cocking.” “The Model 3032 has an INERTIA type firing pin which, when used with the hammer down, external safety engaged and with the double-action trigger pull, assures the greatest degree of safety if it is necessary to carry the