Gun Digest Book of Beretta Pistols. Massad Ayoob

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