This is a compact pistol in .32 ACP, with a single-stack magazine holding eight cartridges. Beretta calls it a pocket pistol, but the grip is chunky enough and the pistol wide enough overall that this is a dubious claim unless you have pretty big pockets.

It's a development of the 3032, an earlier model also called the Tomcat. That one really was a pocket pistol, flat-sided and slim like a Walther PPK, but it had a relatively weak frame design and couldn't be used with ammunition developing more than 130 foot-pounds of muzzle energy. This was fine when the 3032 was originally released, but modern ammunition has had sort of a "power creep" problem for a while now, and even some factory .32 ACP ammo comes across with more than that these days.

Hence the 30X, which has been beefed up to address the issue, but at the cost of adding a bit of girth. Middle age... it happens to us all.

Anyway, the neat thing about the 3032 and its successor, and the main reason why I bought it apart from the facts that a) it was inexpensive and b) I like .32s for some reason, is what Beretta's marketing people call the "Effortless Loading System". Basically, that means you never have to operate the slide by hand. Instead, you press that button on the lefthand side, where the slide release would be on a grown-up semiauto, and...

... the barrel pops up. You then place a cartridge in the chamber, close the barrel, put in a loaded magazine, and you have nine rounds ready to go. The trigger is double-action, which even saves you the trouble of cocking the hammer, although it's heavy enough that first-shot accuracy will probably suffer without fairly extensive training.

I should note that this loading system isn't exactly new. Tip-up barrels used to be, if not common, at least far from unknown in small pocket autos back when small pocket autos were a common thing. Today, Beretta is one of the only manufacturers left that still makes them, which I guess is why they felt free to name the thing like they had invented it. Still pretty cool, though. I mean, I wouldn't have thought that a blowback .32 would really be that challenging to operate in the first place, but what do I know? I'm just some guy on the Internet. :)

As a side effect of this feature, the pistol doesn't have a last-round hold-open mechanism. It doesn't really need one, since it can be loaded without needing the slide to be open in the first place. That is admittedly not as fast as popping in a new magazine and dropping the slide, but then, if you're doing Tactical Reloads with your .32 pocket pistol, you're probably in a situation you should've avoided getting into in the first place.

One more interesting feature of the pistol that I didn't actually notice until after I got it home is that it is, a tiny bit preposterously, preconfigured for covert work. I noticed that the sights seemed oddly tall when I was considering it at the store...

... but it wasn't until I was looking it over more closely at home that I noticed the muzzle extension was knurled. I hadn't given that much thought before, because a lot of Beretta pistols have a muzzle that protrudes a little beyond the frame like that. The knurl caught my eye, though, and there's only one reason to put a knurl on something like that: so that you can unscrew it. It's a thread protector. The barrel is factory-threaded for a suppressor, and suddenly that makes the weirdly tall sights make sense--it's so you can aim over the can with them.

Weirdly, this is the second handgun I have with a factory-threaded muzzle. I haven't shown you the first one yet, because I want to do a full proper entry on it and I haven't found the time. This one feels funnier to me, anyway, because they're really taking the covert-operations-we-have-at-home thing to an extreme. In some parallel universe, James Bond's gun is a tip-up Beretta. (OK, in the books and the first ten minutes of the Doctor No movie that's actually true anyway, but work with me on this.)

As it happens, suppressors are easier to get nowadays than they have been in ages. They're still National Firearms Act items for the moment, but the ATF removed the $200 tax on short-barrelled longarms and suppressors a little while back. There's even a movement afoot to remove suppressors from the NFA altogether, though as far as I know that hasn't gained traction in the courts outside of South Carolina (it's... it's complicated) as of yet. This is making more people willing to buy them, which in turn is starting to make them less jaw-droppingly expensive, so... who knows? Maybe I'll actually pick one up for one or the other of the pistols I have that are set up for them one of these days.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Anyway, neat (if slightly weird) little pistol!

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

The Tomcat is a fun little gat, but I wouldn't rely on it for defense purposes. It seems to like to jam a bit. Might just be finicky about ammo; I only had the one type on hand, so I couldn't test that out. It's fun when it works, though.

Unfortunately, after one magazine, the 951 decided it no longer felt like extracting empties. So I'll have to see if I can figure that out...

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.