laststandonzombieisland

They’ve been around now for almost seventy years—those little Beretta pocket pistols with the tip up barrels. Just what is the deal with those things and why would you want one? Keep reading.

These small framed, Beretta pistols use a super simple blowback action. This also means the gun has a pretty stout recoil spring to keep the action pushed forward and a short slide—and this makes it hard for some to grip. To get around this, Beretta used a barrel with a pivot pin that pops up and out of battery when a latch is depressed. With the barrel tipped up, you can load, unload, reload, and check to see if you have a loaded chamber with the flick of the lever. The concept has long been used with one of the earliest examples seen on the 1908 Steyr 7.65mm pistol.

Introduced in 1950, Beretta came out with the Model 950B pistol. A single-action semi-auto with a 2.38-inch tip-up barrel, it had an overall length of 4.5-inches. Since the gun fired from a cocked hammer, the tip-up barrel made absolute sense from a safety perspective. Rather than use an extractor, the gun could pop spent casings strait up with the barrel tip lever, giving the gun the sometimes annoying habit of smacking the user with brass right in the forehead. The gun tipped the scales at a handy 9.5-ounces empty. Compare this today to the revolutionar-i-ly small Ruger LCP of 5.16-inches overall and 9.5- ounces, and you see why the 950 was a hit almost immediately…

Read the rest in my column at GUNS.com