Gun Digest Book of Beretta Pistols. Massad Ayoob

be applied to informal target shooting – plinking – but aren’t geared for something like a pistol match, and don’t have the precise accuracy you’d want for small game hunting. For that, you need to branch to three other points in the Beretta line.

      In the current Beretta catalog, I see three options that make particularly good sense for the recreational shooter. The choice will depend on what the shooter’s needs are. Will it be preparation for defense with a bigger Beretta? Small game hunting? Match shooting? Or just general plinking? As always, we need to tailor the tool to the task. Let’s examine each of Beretta’s .22 caliber “fun guns” in their own right.

       The Beretta Neos in short-barrel …

       … and long-barrel configuration.

       Ayoob does not like the front trigger guard shape of the Neos. It goes too far forward leaving the fingertip on an incline that wants to slide back to the trigger, getting in the way of the “finger out of the trigger guard” safety principle.

       U22 Neos

      Joe Kalinowski wrote to the Beretta website, “Last Saturday myself and two friends were experimenting with the new pistol that my wife had bought for herself. She has a U22 NEOS. We attached a Red Head red dot sight to it. Using standard .22 LR ammo, we were hitting a 5-inch target consistently at 100 yards. We found it to be just a great pistol for target shooting. Both of my friends went out to purchase one after we were done shooting!”

      The Neos is a futuristic pistol that would look at home in a Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon comic. The frame is polymer. The grip sweeps backward at a rakish angle that puts the shooter in mind of the German Luger or a 1950s era High Standard Supermatic .22 target pistol. Rising high above the frame, the flat-sided barrel and sleekly sculpted slide flow upward into a full-length rib with a ventilated space that makes you think of an ancient Roman viaduct. To that look of Rome, Beretta adds a touch of Greece.

      “The pistol gets its name from the Greek word meaning ‘new.’ And the Neos is one neat gun, thanks to its ultramodern styling,” says friend and fellow gun writer Wiley Clapp in the Guns & Ammo online magazine, www.gunsandammomag.com. At 25 yards, firing with a two-hand hold from a sandbag rest, Wiley was pleased with the results. “Early on it was obvious that this was a decent gun,” he wrote. “The creep in the trigger system was annoying and made me wonder what a good pistolsmith might be able to do. But even with the annoyance – you don’t get a match trigger in a plinker – the accuracy was there. Shooting six premium .22 Long Rifle loads produced an overall group average of 1.40 inches. That is smaller than the X-ring of the Standard American Pistol target (1.695 inches). And the best single group, fired with Eley Tenex, measured .97 of an inch. I think that is far better than we have any right to expect.”

      Handgun hunter and all around pistolero Paco Kelly got good accuracy with his Neos, too. Using Remington/Eley target rifle ammo, with a 4-power Simmons handgun scope mounted on Neos’ handy rail, he was able to get a 1.6-inch group. With PMC’s cost-effective new Scoremaster .22 LR match load, he got an outstanding 1.1-inch group. And these were 10-shot groups, not the usual five-shot sequences. Impressive!

      Helping them achieve these excellent accuracy results was the full-length mounting rail that constitutes the topmost portion of the pistol. Continuing the viaduct allusion, the edges look like the hand-rails on a bridge. The flat surface is great for pointing rather than precisely aiming. It’s like looking down an aircraft carrier’s deck in one sense, and for a clay bird shooter, it’s more like looking down the wide ventilated rib of a Browning BROADway shotgun.

       The wheel above the trigger releases the barrel, a’la the old High Standard Duramatic. The slide stop is ergonomically placed, but check out the location of the thumb safety, near the grip tang.

      The sights themselves are an integral part of this design theme. The rear sight takes up the entire width of the sighting plane and proved to be reliably click-adjustable. The front sight rises boldly to give a clearly visible outline to the marksman’s eye. Explains Clapp, “Out front there is a superb front sight. It is really just a block of blued steel, but this one was cleverly designed. It’s tapered from the rear edge forward. This means the shooter who wants a crisp sight picture focuses on the front sight where he is looking at three edges (top and both sides) and not three surfaces. It is a small contour change, but it pays big dividends. Also, the top rib on the Neos is set up as a full-length Weaver base that allows for the mounting of various projected dot or scope sights.”

      The Neos is a combined effort of Beretta engineers and the house of Guigiaro, the Italian designers. As noted elsewhere in this book, I thought the Guigiaro-designed Beretta 9000 was a spectacular failure, a triumph of eye candy over ergonomics and good mechanical function. But not all Guigiaro-styled Berettas are clueless. Witness the excellent ergonomics and function of the Extrema shotgun. In the case of the Neos, the engineers didn’t let the designers go nuts. They merely let them fancy up a very solid, functional .22 pistol.

       The open-side Neos magazine has clean lines and an easy window through which to count rounds.

       From this angle, we can see the fluted slide and ambidextrous safety of U22 Neos.

       The front profile of U22 Neos gives good view of the protected muzzle.

      I recently had a chat with one of the Beretta engineers who did the internal design work on the Neos project. He has since moved on to accept a similar position elsewhere in the industry. He told me, “Mas, it took us four years to get the Neos perfect with the whole range of American .22 ammo as well as the European ammo it was originally tested with. But we got it right … ”

      And that’s the key. Most .22 Long Rifle is not an interchangeable commodity, as it might look to the uninitiated. There are lots of subtle differences between ammo types and manufacturers. But those four years were well spent. Everyone I know who owns a Neos or has shot one is without complaint as to the gun’s reliability.

      “J” Stuckey runs a busy gun shop, Southern Sportsman in Live Oak, Florida. He says, “The Beretta Neos is by far my best selling .22 handgun. I order them half a dozen at a time, and they sell right out. And, you know, I’ve never had one of them come back.”

      To find a Neos that “came back,” I had to “surf the net.” This particular customer didn’t post to beef Beretta, but to compliment them. He had found something wrong with his Neos, and Beretta had instantly made it right. He now had a Neos that worked perfectly.

      Priced similarly to the Bobcat pocket pistol, itself an extraordinary good value, the Neos is an amazingly good buy. It’s in the price range of other polymer-frame plinkers, such as the Walther P22 and the Ruger 22/45.

      I have friends who use the U22 Neos as entry-level bulls-eye target pistols in local league competition. They do OK with them. They tell me the guns never miss a lick, unlike some of the finicky target autos the heavy hitters use, which jam more frequently. When I was at Camp