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

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The action and trigger were very rough when we started. Wear and lubrication took off the “very” but couldn’t eradicate all of the “rough.” This little gun is not the glass-smooth Beretta 92/96, whose exquisitely polished moving parts and contact surfaces are the envy of the rest of the handgun industry.

Reliability? We ran just under 300 rounds through this gun. There were only two malfunctions, steep-angled 12 o’clock misfeeds that could not be cleared without stripping the mag from the pistol. Both occurred, surprisingly, with full-metal-jacket ball ammo, Winchester’s USA brand which is normally utterly reliable. Yet the gun was flawless with Federal ball, and with 20-some rounds of Speer Gold Dot and 50 of Winchester Silvertip, both 60-grain hollow-points. Go figure.

The two jams were cleared by ripping the magazine out of the gun, thumbing the topmost round either out of the mag or back in place, and then “reload, cycle, shoot.” As previously noted, there were no extraction failures. (Interestingly, we got into a bad batch of contaminated old .22 ammo when shooting a Beretta 21 next to the Model 3032 Tomcat. These rounds failed to cycle. We had to pop the barrel up and pry the spent rimfire casings out with a pocketknife. Determining what we would do if a Tomcat failed to extract a .32 hull if the round was too feeble to cycle the gun, we found that a #2 pencil would go down the barrel to punch the casing out. Colleague Marty Hayes, no fan of small-caliber pistols, commented dryly, “If you have to carry a #2 pencil anyway, cut out the middleman. Leave the .32 at home and just carry a sharp pencil. If you’re attacked by a violent criminal, stab him with the pencil until he dies. You’ll probably have about the same wound profile anyway.”)