Читать книгу Gun Digest Book of Beretta Pistols. Function | Accuracy | Performance онлайн

73 страница из 126

The Tomcat, whose name is a quintessential tribute to truth in advertising, is not particularly accurate and, in the feline menagerie of the Beretta catalog, is pathetically feeble. Comparing the Tomcat .32 with a Cougar .40 is rather like putting your own little housecat up against a mountain lion. Consider the following ballistics, courtesy of Winchester:

The Tomcat can be carried three ways with a round in the chamber, though all contravene the owner’s manual. Here is its optional cocked and locked mode …

… here the hammer is down, and safety engaged …

… and here the pistol is off safe, ready to fire in double-action mode.

Mouse Gun Factor

Yeah, I know, I’m the guy who says “Friends don’t let friends carry mouse guns.” Why then am I writing this article?

Mouseguns are a fact of life. There are X number of good people who will carry a tiny gun or no gun at all, either as backup or as first line of defense, and a basic law of life is that “something is better than nothing.” Jeff Cooper once said he’d rather have a hatchet than a .25 auto for self-defense. At belly-to-belly distance, me too, though I’d likely trade the hatchet for my Richard Sokol custom Arkansas Toothpick. However, Jeff was always big and strong, and I am comparatively little and weak. At a range of 20 feet, if the bad guy has a firearm, I’d rather have the mouse gun than the hatchet since I know he can empty his weapon into me in the second and a half it’ll take me to reach him with a blade.