Beretta 950 Jetfire

I mentioned yesterday that I had picked up a Beretta 950 Jetfire from Gander Mountain, it’s a little pocket sized .25 ACP. Beretta has been making pocket pistols in .25 ACP since the early 1900s, in fact, I have one of their early 1919 models – sort of the great grandfather to the Beretta 950.

The Beretta 950 is a single action, semi-automatic magazine fed pistol; like most pocket guns it’s blowback operated. Because it’s chambered for .25 ACP, it lacks an extractor, although the Beretta style open slide usually allows for positive ejection of spent cases. While pre-1968 models lack an external safety, mine does the safety which allows me to carry the little pistol cocked-and-locked.

Of course, you want pictures. Click for a fullsize picture.

With the pocket holster, it just drops right into a jeans or trouser pocket, and can basically go anywhere that there aren’t metal detectors or pat searches. Sure, the .25 ACP isn’t a manly super-blaster of a cartridge, but when I can’t carry the 9mm or the .45, it certainly beats going around unarmed. Sort of by way of compensation for the tiny, tiny bullets, the 950 does have an eight round magazine, plus one round in the tip-up barrel/chamber – giving you nine rounds of .25 ACP.

The biggest appeal of this gun to me, aside from the fact that it says “Beretta” on the gun, is that it really is a spectacular deep concealment piece in terms of ease of carry. I’ve never made any bones about the fact that I’m a small of stature, and being able to be carrying a 9 round pistol plus an 8 round reload without even a hint of a “print” is a nice feeling.

7 Comments

  1. used to have one. boy I hated the 25ACP. It always struck me as a harsh round – not so much more powerful than a .22 nor smaller than a .380 to justify its use.

    It was a nice gun, but clearly not a pleasure to shoot.

  2. Caleb,

    I’ve had excellent luck concealing my Kel-Tec P3AT in a pocket holster. Have you thought of one of those?

    6+1 rounds of .380 ACP is, IMHO, a significant improvement over 8+1 .25 ACP…

  3. I have a pocket holster for the .25, it’s absolutely fantastic. I really want to get a Beretta Tomcat next, the .32 ACP bigger brother of the Jetfire.

  4. I love the Jetfire. I’ve owned three of them. I abandoned my first one in favor of the Tomcat, but when I got another Jetfire, I ditched the ‘Cat.

    Neither .25 nor .32 is exactly the Hammer of Thor, and I shoot the single-action Jetfire so much better than the pivoting-trigger Tomcat, plus it is much more concealable. When you just can’t carry a gun, a Jetfire is the next best thing.

  5. When I was making extra $ delivering pizza, I carried the (then-)wife’s Beretta Bobcat. I’ll take a .22LR over a .25 any day.

  6. I used to think that, but the unreliability of rimfire ammo vs. centerfire ammo made me give it up.

  7. I own a 22LR version of this Beretta, and tested it extensively with as many brands of ammo as I could get. I settled on Remington Golden Bullets as the most reliable ammunition when the gun was new, with zero failures to fire, zero failures to eject, and zero jams after 100 rounds, compared with up to 8 failures for other brands of 22LR.

    However, now that the little gun has about 1000 rounds through it (light use over the course of 2 years at a gun range), retesting ammunition showed that performance of Remington Golden Bullets depended on the individual box of bullets, more than the gun, as one box produced 5 dud rounds within the first 50 from a box of 550.

    I’ve retested with multiple brands of ammo, and while a good box of Remington Golden Bullets seems to still work just fine, the gun now also fires without failure for any brand of 22LR with bullet weight of 36 grains or higher, and standard to high velocity. Subsonics are a bit iffy, with some failures to eject, and shorts or CBs won’t work except as single shots manually loaded in the chamber.

    All this goes to show that for a mousegun, a centerfire wimpy caliber like a 25, that does go bang every time the trigger is pulled, might have an advantage over a rimfire with reliability that shows a strong ammo dependency.

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