Gun Digest Book of Beretta Pistols. Massad Ayoob

       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.

Beretta’s .22 Caliber Fun Guns

      Beretta has built a lot of .22 rimfire pistols over the years, including many fine