Cranky caliber post.

[Greg Bell]

As far as I can tell people started shooting 9mm a lot (again, after its decline in the 1980s after everyone decided it was garbage) in the early 00s when the hard core training community exploded. Why wouldn't they, it is a hell of a lot cheaper than .40, 45 or 10mm. Most of the trainers , when it started, carried .45s. Oh, and everyone said that SMG were garbage and everyone wanted SBRs. But after a while all the trainers started promoting 9mm, because it was more conducive to high round count gamer style training--especially after the expiration of the mag ban. By the way, the despised James Yeager was WAAAAY ahead of the curve. Trainers live in a James Yeager world now (Glock 19, 9mm, 1000 round mag dump class...ok but even he couldn't trick everyone into carrying those awful big dots).


There was a period , not coincidently during the hottest part of the wars, where the military was trying to dump the 9mm and go with .40 or .45. But the wars wound down and they just decided that a cheap plastic 9mm would be fine, since pistols are basically nonsense. Combine this with the Obama-era FBI moving back to 9mm because they found it was easier for the new crop of more diverse agents to qualify with. Now I even see people pushing these PCC, which are basically just back to SMGs with no fun switch. It is fun watching the wheel turn.

I'm mostly a J-frame guy, so I am just an observer here! OK I'm trolling but there is some truth to what I say!

[sikiguya]

I condensed down to 9mm back when it wasn’t cool. When everyone was all over the .40 S&W, I stuck to the 9mm.

Funny because I was an early .40 fan. I bought the S&W 4006. For me it was economical, I realized I get to shoot more 9mm at a range session than a .40. That mean developing my skill set faster.

The other reason was I was sick of going to the range with 3 caliber handguns and being dictated what I shot based on the ammo I had on hand. With all 9mm, I basically shot whatever I wanted.

For years, I only had .22, .38(j frames), and 9mm. As of late, I do have all the various calibers with one or two...32 tomcat, 380 RM380, 45s, even a 40 caliber USP compact with a .357 Sig barrel. But a majority of my pistols are 9mm.

Full auto SMG are over rated. Don’t get me wrong. They are fun to shoot if you have never did it. However, the binary trigger are probably more practical.

But Greg, fads are cyclical. Pretty soon, lever guns will be back in style. I did see a lever gun with quad rail a few years ago that looked pretty cool!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[HCM]

As far as I can tell people started shooting 9mm a lot (again, after its decline in the 1980s after everyone decided it was garbage) in the early 00s when the hard core training community exploded. Why wouldn't they, it is a hell of a lot cheaper than .40, 45 or 10mm. Most of the trainers , when it started, carried .45s. Oh, and everyone said that SMG were garbage and everyone wanted SBRs. But after a while all the trainers started promoting 9mm, because it was more conducive to high round count gamer style training--especially after the expiration of the mag ban. By the way, the despised James Yeager was WAAAAY ahead of the curve. Trainers live in a James Yeager world now (Glock 19, 9mm, 1000 round mag dump class...ok but even he couldn't trick everyone into carrying those awful big dots).


There was a period , not coincidently during the hottest part of the wars, where the military was trying to dump the 9mm and go with .40 or .45. But the wars wound down and they just decided that a cheap plastic 9mm would be fine, since pistols are basically nonsense. Combine this with the Obama-era FBI moving back to 9mm because they found it was easier for the new crop of more diverse agents to qualify with. Now I even see people pushing these PCC, which are basically just back to SMGs with no fun switch. It is fun watching the wheel turn.

I'm mostly a J-frame guy, so I am just an observer here! OK I'm trolling but there is some truth to what I say!

You want cranky, here’s cranky:

You are trolling in that you are spouting a bunch of ignorant half truths and out of context statements that are beneath you based on your posts elsewhere and beneath this forum. Save the shit stirring for ARFCOM.

[UncleEd]

Greg Bell,

You say you are a J-frame kind of guy. May we assume it's
.22 shorts? Or do you go up to .22 LR?

[Ed L]

You want cranky, here’s cranky:

You are trolling in that you are spouting a bunch of ignorant half truths and out of context statements that are beneath you based on your posts elsewhere and beneath this forum. Save the shit stirring for ARFCOM.

His post was semicoherent. I think he has had too much of the 4th of July weekend cheer: PWI--posting while intoxicated.

[Danjojo]

Definitely some truth to the statements.

Past 18 or so gun forum years I've always favored and promoted 9mm and DA/SA - Beretta, HK, Walther pistols primarily - got a lot of crap for it.

Seems like in most cases it takes a couple big names (individuals or orgs) to change tune along with maybe a bit of boredom. That basic nature to mimic celebrity and fawn over what's new is always at play.

The rise and fall of trends is fascinating.
Part of everybody wants to be special/different, part wants to be accepted/validated...we all make excuses for both.

[Greg Bell]

Haha. More like sunstroke from cutting grass all day. I was being intentionally provocative and I’m sorry to anyone I offended.

[Trooper224]

Haha. More like sunstroke from cutting grass all day. I was being intentionally provocative and I’m sorry to anyone I offended.

Thanks for the clarification. I'm glad you weren't being a natural dumb ass. ;)

[admin]

Moved to GD.

[Greg Bell]

[QUOTE]Thanks for the clarification. I'm glad you weren't being a natural dumb ass. [QUOTE]

Oh I am that! I stand by the statement, I just know there is no profit in these discussions. I might as well show up at a Mosque munching pork skins and talking about the Holy Ghost.

[Hambo]

there is some truth to what I say!

True, 9mm is a pistol caliber. Other than that, don't skip meds.

[TGS]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQCU36pkH7c

[runcible]

Combine this with the Obama-era FBI moving back to 9mm because they found it was easier for the new crop of more diverse agents to qualify with.

That is not my understanding of the causality involved, nor was it for the 10mm to .40S&W transition beforehand.

[TGS]

That is not my understanding of the causality involved, nor was it for the 10mm to .40S&W transition beforehand.

Willful ignorance isn't worth engaging.

You can't fix stupid, you can only shame it.

[Sammy1]

Gregg Bell made some decent observations about the trend. Recently, an OIS video was released where the suspect armed with a knife was shot multiple times with a 9mm only to get up and physically take down the officer. The suspect then tried to disarm said officer before being shot again by a second officer. People immediately started questioning 9mm (where the bullets hit should be the focus of discussion) and I wondered if a couple of these type of incidents would swing the pendulum back to "self defense calibers start with a .4).

[Sammy1]

He's correct about SMG/PCC. Around 2000 we dumped our MP5s for 5.56 rifles. No one had any use for pistol caliber carbines because they couldn't defeat body armor and now everyone has one, include myself with an MPX.

[CWM11B]

Gregg Bell made some decent observations about the trend. Recently, an OIS video was released where the suspect armed with a knife was shot multiple times with a 9mm only to get up and physically take down the officer. The suspect then tried to disarm said officer before being shot again by a second officer. People immediately started questioning 9mm (where the bullets hit should be the focus of discussion) and I wondered if a couple of these type of incidents would swing the pendulum back to "self defense calibers start with a .4).

From my understanding, he was SHOT AT multiple times, hit few. The ratio of round fired to impact on target has always seemed the larger issue to me.

[Greg Bell]

People immediately started questioning 9mm (where the bullets hit should be the focus of discussion) and I wondered if a couple of these type of incidents would swing the pendulum back to "self defense calibers start with a .4).

Exactly

A prequel to my earlier post!....


When I was just getting into guns the 9mm was ascendant. .357 and .45 were on their way out, with the U.S. military and police agencies adopting da/sa wonder nines. An incident in Florida and a cranky Colonel with the ear of a few ammo and gun manufacturers resulted in the FBI adopting 10mm. Another incident in Florida and a lot of money spent on strippers at the Gold Club in Atlanta resulted in the parallel rise of the Glock. Everyone quickly dumped their old revolvers and slowly dumped their da/sa crunchentickers. Of course, the FBI couldn’t train people with da/sa 10mm boomers so they went to .40 caliber which bridged the gap between 9mm capacity and 10mm lethality. All was good.

But the AWB came along and that led to two things: (1) a revival of .45 and (2) the rise of compact 9mm. With high capacity magazines costing $50-100 and post 1994 models unavailable (except for Walther which hilariously got in zillions of pre-ban walther p-99 mags for a gun that was barely off the back of beer hall napkins in 1994). For a while the two streams split. Folks were carrying pre-ban guns, lots of Glock 23s, 229s. Others carried Kimbers, Wilson CQBs and other refined .45s that weren’t available before the late 80s except as customs. Others carried mini 9mms like the Glock 26, SiG P239 and amazing guns like the KAHR line. This is basically where things stood as the 00s began. This was before the current civilian training scene was popular. What outfits you did have were pretty much 1911 only.

[Cypher]

[QUOTE]Thanks for the clarification. I'm glad you weren't being a natural dumb ass. [QUOTE]

Oh I am that! I stand by the statement, I just know there is no profit in these discussions. I might as well show up at a Mosque munching pork skins and talking about the Holy Ghost.

So why start them ?

[Greg Bell]

It is fun to discuss the history of these things. Again, I apologize to those I offend.

[WobblyPossum]

An argument, although a very poor one, can be made for some of the things you stated in the OP but the pistol caliber carbine point was a red herring. It has nothing to do with duty/defensive use. PCCs are back and gaining in popularity but it’s strictly for fun and matches. No one you should take seriously is pushing PCCs for duty/defensive use. PCCs are really fun to shoot and you can shoot one at a pistol match. The skills translate to carbine use. No one is advocating replacing your bed side rifle or shotgun with one. No one is advocating replacing patrol rifles with PCCs for law enforcement. The tactical teams that dumped their MP5s for ARs aren’t regretting their choices.

[Greg Bell]

Also, does everyone remember when Marshall and Sanow stopping power ratings were a thing?

[Duelist]

Also, does everyone remember when Marshall and Sanow stopping power ratings were a thing?

Of course. Don’t you believe in the way of the Prophet Marshall and his mouthpiece Sanow?

[Greg Bell]

An argument, although a very poor one, can be made for some of the things you stated in the OP but the pistol caliber carbine point was a red herring. It has nothing to do with duty/defensive use. PCCs are back and gaining in popularity but it’s strictly for fun and matches. No one you should take seriously is pushing PCCs for duty/defensive use. PCCs are really fun to shoot and you can shoot one at a pistol match. The skills translate to carbine use. No one is advocating replacing your bed side rifle or shotgun with one. No one is advocating replacing patrol rifles with PCCs for law enforcement. The tactical teams that dumped their MP5s for ARs aren’t regretting their choices.

I suspect you will see it more and more given the nature of these things. Especially now that the military has adopted a new SMG.

[Greg Bell]

Of course. Don’t you believe in the way of the Prophet Marshall and his mouthpiece Sanow?

No way! I worship the Holy FBI jello molds! Praise their denim clad jigglines!

[TC215]

Exactly

A prequel to my earlier post!....


When I was just getting into guns the 9mm was ascendant. .357 and .45 were on their way out, with the U.S. military and police agencies adopting da/sa wonder nines. An incident in Florida and a cranky Colonel with the ear of a few ammo and gun manufacturers resulted in the FBI adopting 10mm. Another incident in Florida and a lot of money spent on strippers at the Gold Club in Atlanta resulted in the parallel rise of the Glock. Everyone quickly dumped their old revolvers and slowly dumped their da/sa crunchentickers. Of course, the FBI couldn’t train people with da/sa 10mm boomers so they went to .40 caliber which bridged the gap between 9mm capacity and 10mm lethality. All was good.

John Hall was the unit chief for the FBI Firearms Unit during the transition to 10mm. He is on record saying:


I couldn't go before Congress and ask for $3.5 million for a .45 when the army had just spent millions to replace the .45. So we came up with a cartridge that ballistically was identical to it -- the downloaded 10mm.

They wanted a bigger bullet and felt like they couldn’t ask for .45’s, so they went with 10mm.

[Greg Bell]

John Hall was the unit chief for the FBI Firearms Unit during the transition to 10mm. He is on record saying:



They wanted a bigger bullet and felt like they couldn’t ask for .45’s, so they went with 10mm.

That is an amazing factoid to add to my cranky caliber is a flat circle discussion. Thank you sir!

[Hambo]

Especially now that the military has adopted a new SMG.

You're overstating that. They're getting 350 units, with an option for 1000.

[Greg Bell]

You're overstating that. They're getting 350 units, with an option for 1000.

I’m just stating it. The PCC silliness will be the new thing for a while, and then it will go. I was just throwing that out there because so many local police and civilians have what Ken Hackathorn refers to as “super bowl syndrome.” When the military gets a cool toy, they figure they need one too.

Again, I’m not advocating a position—I am observing. I have a j-frame in my pocket and a Beretta 92g sd beside the bed. And I also have a .45 USP and 1911 for walking around my property (gators mostly). I am a universalist

[Chuck Haggard]

Gregg Bell made some decent observations about the trend. Recently, an OIS video was released where the suspect armed with a knife was shot multiple times with a 9mm only to get up and physically take down the officer. The suspect then tried to disarm said officer before being shot again by a second officer. People immediately started questioning 9mm (where the bullets hit should be the focus of discussion) and I wondered if a couple of these type of incidents would swing the pendulum back to "self defense calibers start with a .4).

That guy was shot AT multiple times.... There's a difference.

[Trooper224]

Also, does everyone remember when Marshall and Sanow stopping power ratings were a thing?

Sure do. My copy of Handgun Stopping Power is on the shelf next to my copy of von Danikens Chariots of the Gods.

[RevolverRob]

Gregg Bell made some decent observations about the trend. Recently, an OIS video was released where the suspect armed with a knife was shot multiple times with a 9mm only to get up and physically take down the officer. The suspect then tried to disarm said officer before being shot again by a second officer. People immediately started questioning 9mm (where the bullets hit should be the focus of discussion) and I wondered if a couple of these type of incidents would swing the pendulum back to "self defense calibers start with a .4).

If that's the video I'm thinking of.

The first officer fires several times and appears to only hit once, maybe twice, in the torso, both shots were likely low, since the suspect was running towards the officer and the officer was back pedaling.

The second officer put him down, by actually shooting him once, in the head.

If you shoot the guy in the head, it tends to work well.

Someone around here has a sig quote to the effect of, "I had an ER nurse in my class, who only took headshots. When I asked her why, she said, "I've never seen someone shot in the head fight in the ER." Point taken."

The idea that 9mm was a "poor stopper" is really a misunderstanding of ballistics and incapacitation. Why did/does .45 ball work better than 9mm ball at shooting people? Because the .45 stops inside. It deposits all of its available energy into the target, where the 9mm does not. Same with 125-grain SJHP .357, which did so by using soft'ish lead and expanding. No long likes shooting people with 158-grain LRN .357s. That's a waste. Once we got reliable 9mm HPs that expand and stop inside, there is no longer a gap in efficacy, between virtually any handgun.

And they still all suck compared to a rifle or shotgun.

The rise of PCCs or "re-emergence" of SMGs has nothing to do with efficacy in shooting. They're all gaming guns. They are for training rifle skills using pistol ranges and targets or for competing. It's not an and/or argument. We've had this discussion before, the only reason to choose a PCC over a pistol, is if you do not have a rifle or shotgun handy to use. I love my little 9mm AR, it shoots great and is fun and cheap to shoot. It's fine as a hunting tool for any small sized game within 150 yards. If I use it in a defensive role or to hunt mid-sized game, I load hot +P Barnes or Lehigh bullets in it, because it's not the optimal tool, you have to be choosy with your ammo and shot placement. That means it sucks compared to another option.

[TCinVA]

There's significant context missing from this narrative.

For most of my life I grew up hearing about Miami. There has probably been more ink spilled discussing Miami and more reference made to that one shootout than any other in history. Most of the gun world missed the lessons readily available in that fight and focused in on the performance of a single bullet that actually did a remarkably good job given the circumstances and didn't really seem to bothered about the dozens of bullets that missed entirely.

There was a lot of "why" to how Miami turned out, but gun magazines spent all their efforts on laments about that one silver tip that didn't penetrate "enough"...whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean. Nobody seemed to think it was a good idea to actually sit down with the dude who did the most work in that fight and listen to what he had to say...and maybe learn that one of the reasons he was able to perform was that he trained outside of the institutional requirements on the advice of an older experienced agent who mentored him in how the world really works.

That fight gave birth to the science of wound ballistics. I say "science" because wound ballistics was nothing new, but actual scientific rigor was in scarce supply.

It took a while for that science to actually be conducted and to reach useful conclusions. And even so there are plenty of people today complaining about "jello"

In the meantime, we had the caliber wars...which we'd had at the turn of the last century, too. This is where people remember the nonsense about Moro tribesmen and the like even though the majority of troops fighting in the Philipenes were actually armed with Peacemakers. We ended up with a semi-automatic Peacemaker as the standard US sidearm as a result.

It was kind of big and heavy, had damn near useless sights, and the ergonomics of a cheese grater but it by-god WORKED if you fed it the ammo it was designed for.

The United States is the most handgun focused nation on earth. Where they have often been viewed in other places as badges of rank or authority, here in God Bless America we shoot motherfuckers with handguns. Eurotrash might have been content with .32 ACP sidearms, but in God Bless America we invented the Magnum. The Eurotrash wanted pistols they wouldn't have to shoot much. Mr. America went to the gun store, looked down at the display case and said "I need to kill an elephant with a pistol. Whatchoo got?" Seriously. One of the things that Mr. Wesson did to publicize the .357 Magnum was go to Africa and kill big game with it. Oh, you make a .357 Magnum? How cute! I want to kill shit at 200 yards with a .44 caliber bullet, girly man. Make me a fucking .44 magnum! As you wish, sir...

Because we use handguns more than anyone else in the world, we actually shoot motherfuckers with handguns, and our answer to most questions is usually "More, please.", and we had bunches of people born into the legend of St. John Moses' Immaculate Conception rather than some strange contraption invented by Eurotrash, our preference for the .45 ACP fired out of a 1911 was pretty well guaranteed. When Cooper rediscovered formal firearms training with handguns there was really no other possibility for serious training.

Various gunsmiths learned how to tinker with them and make them better suited for the realities of using them as defensive weapons. Cooper's work started to show that sighted fire was really the right way to go...a memo that the FBI had not read when Miami happened. Institutional practices die the hardest of all deaths. The FBI had been bewitched by Delf Bryce's point shooting methodologies which he was exceptionally skilled at, but the methodology didn't translate easily to others. A lesson the FBI had to learn the hard way.

Anyhoo, in post WWII America there were some Eurotrash curiosities floating around as war trophies or surplus imports, but for semi-automatics the 1911 was king of the hill. If you were a serious gun guy you had a 1911 customized by a competent smith. If you were semi-serious you had a 1911 customized by a not-so-competent smith. Either way you were both using GI magazines that sucked so bad you had to perform reloads with retention or you'd destroy all your magazines in a 5 day class at the newly formed Gunsite.

If you were a cop you probably had a revolver. If you were a very clued in cop you carried at least two of them. And a shotgun. If you were one of a very small number of civilians who carried a handgun you carried a J frame. If you were a Texas Ranger you probably had two engraved 1911's carried in a tooled leather rig because NOBODY OUT-COWBOYS TEXAS. Also, the day you shoot a man is a pretty important day in his life so you might as well do it with something a little bit special, right?

In the 70's some new, strange semi-automatic pistols started to appear with double-action triggers chambered in 9mm because that's what NATO's standard cartridge was and maybe being able to carry the gun with a round in the chamber would be nice. And given the need to maybe kill a whole lot of Russians on short notice and with limited logistical support even in the American military people began to think "Maybe we should adopt a 9mm pistol"...and they were burned as witches for their heresy. We carry .45 by-God-and-John-Moses-ACP and if the Eurotrash doesn't want .45 ACP handguns then they're just fucking wrong. Besides, they'd all be speaking German if it wasn't for us and our semi-automatic Peacemaker.

By this point we had the accumulated writings and observations of a number of people who had occasion to shoot motherfuckers with pistols and had noticed that in the moment motherfuckers seemed pretty undisturbed by being hit with pistols. They started playing around with various things they could do to increase the cease-and-desist a bullet fired from a handgun would do.

A lot of people started to look at how hard it was to land a hit on dude with a handgun in a hurry and noted that it often took a few for him to get the point and they began to math. The 15 or so shots offered by the strange new breed of pistols that showed up to try and seduce the Army into sharing ammo with the rest of NATO started to look attractive. No cocked hammer to worry about and a double action trigger so you can safely carry it with a loaded chamber. (Carrying that thing cocked is dangerous, don't you know! You need to carry it with an empty chamber!) Plus it holds more bullets.

But, as I said, institutional practices die a hard death because it's damn difficult for an institution to admit it's wrong about...well...anything.

Then Miami happens.

It makes all the papers.

It makes the nightly news.

It ends up as multiple made-for-TV movies.

Just about every police officer in the country hears about it and looks down at that wheel gun on their hip and thinks "Maybe I should be carrying something Wyatt Earp wouldn't recognize to deal with this new breed of coked out maniac."

LE training quietly started to change.

I say "quietly" because the changes in training were making nowhere near as much noise as the caliber wars. According to much of the population the Miami shootout proved how "weak" the 9mm was. If that 9mm silvertip had been a by-god .45 ACP then it would have shredded that dude's heart and two FBI agents wouldn't be dead.

Clearly higher capacity weapons were needed. And higher capacity weapons that shot something bigger than those puny 9mm rounds. 1911's that needed a lot of custom work to make them useable as a daily-carried sidearm for LE were not practical, at least not according to police administrators. Very few of them seemed inclined to listen to some dude out in Arizona who wrote for gun magazines.

S&W worked with the FBI and came up with the 10mm pistols. Big, powerful all-steel pistols that were too big for a lot of FBI agents. The full power 10mm loads were essentially semi-automatic Magnums and were too much for most police types to handle. They started downloading the 10mm until they produced the ballistics of the .40 S&W and then said "Wait, if we're taking a bunch of the powder out of this case why do we need the cartridge to be this big?"

The .40 S&W was born, and hallelujah, it fit in 9mm guns! Which Glock jumped all over by drilling a slightly bigger bore in their Glock 17 pistols and then with clever marketing and a penchant for buying up all the guns and magazines from police departments that they then sold for a tidy profit thanks to Clinton's AWB, ended up taking over the handgun market for LE. These guns were cheap, we'll pay you for your existing guns and mags, and hey...you're getting the troops a more powerful sidearm!

So now police chiefs are presented with a situation that is budget friendly AND looks good to the troops. Police chiefs don't get to be police chiefs without having a keen eye for politics, so they jumped all over it.

The US Secret Service had bought Sig P228 pistols in 9mm, but they weren't content with any old 9mm round. They were using 115 grain bullets loaded on top of as much powder as could be crammed into a 9mm case. It was killing P228s in pretty short order. So they raised this issue with Sig and Sig came up with a 9mm magnum: .357 sig. They also came up with the only pistol that really works terribly well in .357 sig, the P229.

So now out there in the world we've got police departments carrying 9mm pistols, .357 sig pistols, .40 S&W pistols, and .45 ACP pistols. And they're all involved in shootings.

A little shy of a decade later people who have a clue start looking around at the accumulated record of LE shootings and they're noticing that there doesn't seem to be a stark difference in the performance of these calibers in the real world. In other words, if departments are using the decent bullets recently introduced as a result of all that IWBA stuff, it doesn't seem to make a whole lot of difference which caliber they are using. None of them prove to be the hammer of Thor. Anecdotes abound, but aggregated data is hard to argue with...and it doesn't show that any one of them does a significantly better job than the others.

What does start to become clear is that there ain't many things you can hit on a person that will make them stop trying to kill you. Most shots that get fired are really trying to convince the other guy to stop. Few were being fired with the accuracy necessary to truly make that guy knock it the fuck off.

GWOT kicked off and suddenly military personnel are shooting a surprising number of bad guys with 9mm ball fired out of Sigs and Berettas (and eventually Glocks) and they're getting pretty solid results when they hit the shit that matters. There were multiple occasions where one of our finest busted into a room full of smelly bad men only to have their primary weapon go down and they ended up killing a whole room full of baddies armed with machineguns using a relatively puny 9mm sidearm that they had learned to use well enough to hit shit that mattered. They got shot but thanks to body armor and the fact that God loves the American serviceman they survived while a bunch of smelly bad men did not.

So what you really have going on in that time frame you reference is a bunch of information gelling together to form a picture: The ability to put a decent bullet into something important is far more likely to predict success in the endeavor of stopping a threat in a timely fashion than the exact size of the bullet you're putting in it. This is not a new lesson, of course, as all throughout modern history people who could, as Chuck Haggard puts it "fucking shoot" seemed to be able to plant bad guys pretty regularly even with .38 spl LRN.

Training classes by people who had a clue reflected this by trying to get people to shoot better. Training exploded because of the liberalization of carry laws that began in the mid 1990's.

Police departments found buying ammo for training to be expensive and also had consistent problems from their .40 caliber Glock pistols they had been sold on previously. Turns out they didn't always work so good. The FBI learned that the hard way, too.

They also found out it was rather difficult to get people to pass qualifications when people had to contend with the recoil of .40 caliber pistols or the often sub-optimal ergonomics of bigger guns chambered for .45 ACP.

The FBI started giving small people Glock 19's and noticed something: Their qual scores went up immediately.

So they started quietly handing out a lot of 9mm pistols before pressuring Glock to design a 9mm for them.

They also went around the country telling police departments that training mattered more than anything else in effectively using handguns, that 9mm was cheaper to train with, and oh, by the way, the guns work better and people who struggle to qualify with your current guns beat the standard pretty easily if you just give them a 9mm.

9mm didn't make inroads because of marketing, it started eclipsing everything else because it works. And about as well as anything else you can fire out of a reasonably carry-able handgun. And you can have more bullets on board, you can train more inexpensively, and you can do a lot of shooting without ending up with your joints all fucked up from decades of trying to muscle the bigger calibers. You look at guys who spent decades shooting .45 and .40 guns and now they shoot 9mm because it doesn't absolutely destroy them when they do.

If anything, the post-Miami bigger caliber shit was the result of marketing and misunderstanding...not the 9mm swallowing the defensive handgun market that we see today. Had that one event not been so massively misunderstood we wouldn't have had .40 or .357 sig at all.

[TCinVA]

I’m just stating it. The PCC silliness will be the new thing for a while, and then it will go.

Not as long as rifle ammo is so much more expensive than 9mm, it won't. And you can shoot 9mm on steel without tearing it up.

The PCC is a big, easy to shoot pistol. But a lot of bad men have been put down decisively with 9mm rounds fired out of such a weapon.

I mean, the first really successful repeating long guns were essentially PCCs.

[Joe in PNG]

Bravo, TCinVA!

[RevolverRob]

We carry .45 by-God-and-John-Moses-ACP and if the Eurotrash doesn't want .45 ACP handguns then they're just fucking wrong. Besides, they'd all be speaking German if it wasn't for us and our semi-automatic Peacemaker.

Quoted for Truth.

Damn Eurotrash.

Carry a 'Merican gun or GTFO. :rolleyes:


GWOT kicked off and suddenly military personnel are shooting a surprising number of bad guys with 9mm ball fired out of Sigs and Berettas (and eventually Glocks) and they're getting pretty solid results when they hit the shit that matters. There were multiple occasions where one of our finest busted into a room full of smelly bad men only to have their primary weapon go down and they ended up killing a whole room full of baddies armed with machineguns using a relatively puny 9mm sidearm that they had learned to use well enough to hit shit that mattered. They got shot but thanks to body armor and the fact that God loves the American serviceman they survived while a bunch of smelly bad men did not.

The important thing to remember here is...it doesn't matter if it is a semi-auto Peacemaker or Eurotrash, when wielded by the greatest servicemen on the planet, it is the Hammer of Thor.



So what you really have going on in that time frame you reference is a bunch of information gelling together to form a picture: The ability to put a decent bullet into something important is far more likely to predict success in the endeavor of stopping a threat in a timely fashion than the exact size of the bullet you're putting in it. This is not a new lesson, of course, as all throughout modern history people who could, as Chuck Haggard puts it "fucking shoot" seemed to be able to plant bad guys pretty regularly even with .38 spl LRN.

So what you're saying is...you have to hit things in order for bullets to work? Damn. That's some new fangled thinkin' right there. Ain't nobody told me that before. I thought you just fired willy nilly to people fell over.

[Patrick Taylor]

http://vintagepistols.com/40isbad.html

Last class I took the only pistol in the class that was not a 9mm was mine and it was a Smith MP in .40 cal.

[Greg Bell]

There's significant context missing from this narrative.

For most of my life I grew up hearing about Miami. There has probably been more ink spilled discussing Miami and more reference made to that one shootout than any other in history. Most of the gun world missed the lessons readily available in that fight and focused in on the performance of a single bullet that actually did a remarkably good job given the circumstances and didn't really seem to bothered about the dozens of bullets that missed entirely.

There was a lot of "why" to how Miami turned out, but gun magazines spent all their efforts on laments about that one silver tip that didn't penetrate "enough"...whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean. Nobody seemed to think it was a good idea to actually sit down with the dude who did the most work in that fight and listen to what he had to say...and maybe learn that one of the reasons he was able to perform was that he trained outside of the institutional requirements on the advice of an older experienced agent who mentored him in how the world really works.

That fight gave birth to the science of wound ballistics. I say "science" because wound ballistics was nothing new, but actual scientific rigor was in scarce supply.

It took a while for that science to actually be conducted and to reach useful conclusions. And even so there are plenty of people today complaining about "jello"

In the meantime, we had the caliber wars...which we'd had at the turn of the last century, too. This is where people remember the nonsense about Moro tribesmen and the like even though the majority of troops fighting in the Philipenes were actually armed with Peacemakers. We ended up with a semi-automatic Peacemaker as the standard US sidearm as a result.

It was kind of big and heavy, had damn near useless sights, and the ergonomics of a cheese grater but it by-god WORKED if you fed it the ammo it was designed for.

The United States is the most handgun focused nation on earth. Where they have often been viewed in other places as badges of rank or authority, here in God Bless America we shoot motherfuckers with handguns. Eurotrash might have been content with .32 ACP sidearms, but in God Bless America we invented the Magnum. The Eurotrash wanted pistols they wouldn't have to shoot much. Mr. America went to the gun store, looked down at the display case and said "I need to kill an elephant with a pistol. Whatchoo got?" Seriously. One of the things that Mr. Wesson did to publicize the .357 Magnum was go to Africa and kill big game with it. Oh, you make a .357 Magnum? How cute! I want to kill shit at 200 yards with a .44 caliber bullet, girly man. Make me a fucking .44 magnum! As you wish, sir...

Because we use handguns more than anyone else in the world, we actually shoot motherfuckers with handguns, and our answer to most questions is usually "More, please.", and we had bunches of people born into the legend of St. John Moses' Immaculate Conception rather than some strange contraption invented by Eurotrash, our preference for the .45 ACP fired out of a 1911 was pretty well guaranteed. When Cooper rediscovered formal firearms training with handguns there was really no other possibility for serious training.

Various gunsmiths learned how to tinker with them and make them better suited for the realities of using them as defensive weapons. Cooper's work started to show that sighted fire was really the right way to go...a memo that the FBI had not read when Miami happened. Institutional practices die the hardest of all deaths. The FBI had been bewitched by Delf Bryce's point shooting methodologies which he was exceptionally skilled at, but the methodology didn't translate easily to others. A lesson the FBI had to learn the hard way.

Anyhoo, in post WWII America there were some Eurotrash curiosities floating around as war trophies or surplus imports, but for semi-automatics the 1911 was king of the hill. If you were a serious gun guy you had a 1911 customized by a competent smith. If you were semi-serious you had a 1911 customized by a not-so-competent smith. Either way you were both using GI magazines that sucked so bad you had to perform reloads with retention or you'd destroy all your magazines in a 5 day class at the newly formed Gunsite.

If you were a cop you probably had a revolver. If you were a very clued in cop you carried at least two of them. And a shotgun. If you were one of a very small number of civilians who carried a handgun you carried a J frame. If you were a Texas Ranger you probably had two engraved 1911's carried in a tooled leather rig because NOBODY OUT-COWBOYS TEXAS. Also, the day you shoot a man is a pretty important day in his life so you might as well do it with something a little bit special, right?

In the 70's some new, strange semi-automatic pistols started to appear with double-action triggers chambered in 9mm because that's what NATO's standard cartridge was and maybe being able to carry the gun with a round in the chamber would be nice. And given the need to maybe kill a whole lot of Russians on short notice and with limited logistical support even in the American military people began to think "Maybe we should adopt a 9mm pistol"...and they were burned as witches for their heresy. We carry .45 by-God-and-John-Moses-ACP and if the Eurotrash doesn't want .45 ACP handguns then they're just fucking wrong. Besides, they'd all be speaking German if it wasn't for us and our semi-automatic Peacemaker.

By this point we had the accumulated writings and observations of a number of people who had occasion to shoot motherfuckers with pistols and had noticed that in the moment motherfuckers seemed pretty undisturbed by being hit with pistols. They started playing around with various things they could do to increase the cease-and-desist a bullet fired from a handgun would do.

A lot of people started to look at how hard it was to land a hit on dude with a handgun in a hurry and noted that it often took a few for him to get the point and they began to math. The 15 or so shots offered by the strange new breed of pistols that showed up to try and seduce the Army into sharing ammo with the rest of NATO started to look attractive. No cocked hammer to worry about and a double action trigger so you can safely carry it with a loaded chamber. (Carrying that thing cocked is dangerous, don't you know! You need to carry it with an empty chamber!) Plus it holds more bullets.

But, as I said, institutional practices die a hard death because it's damn difficult for an institution to admit it's wrong about...well...anything.

Then Miami happens.

It makes all the papers.

It makes the nightly news.

It ends up as multiple made-for-TV movies.

Just about every police officer in the country hears about it and looks down at that wheel gun on their hip and thinks "Maybe I should be carrying something Wyatt Earp wouldn't recognize to deal with this new breed of coked out maniac."

LE training quietly started to change.

I say "quietly" because the changes in training were making nowhere near as much noise as the caliber wars. According to much of the population the Miami shootout proved how "weak" the 9mm was. If that 9mm silvertip had been a by-god .45 ACP then it would have shredded that dude's heart and two FBI agents wouldn't be dead.

Clearly higher capacity weapons were needed. And higher capacity weapons that shot something bigger than those puny 9mm rounds. 1911's that needed a lot of custom work to make them useable as a daily-carried sidearm for LE were not practical, at least not according to police administrators. Very few of them seemed inclined to listen to some dude out in Arizona who wrote for gun magazines.

S&W worked with the FBI and came up with the 10mm pistols. Big, powerful all-steel pistols that were too big for a lot of FBI agents. The full power 10mm loads were essentially semi-automatic Magnums and were too much for most police types to handle. They started downloading the 10mm until they produced the ballistics of the .40 S&W and then said "Wait, if we're taking a bunch of the powder out of this case why do we need the cartridge to be this big?"

The .40 S&W was born, and hallelujah, it fit in 9mm guns! Which Glock jumped all over by drilling a slightly bigger bore in their Glock 17 pistols and then with clever marketing and a penchant for buying up all the guns and magazines from police departments that they then sold for a tidy profit thanks to Clinton's AWB, ended up taking over the handgun market for LE. These guns were cheap, we'll pay you for your existing guns and mags, and hey...you're getting the troops a more powerful sidearm!

So now police chiefs are presented with a situation that is budget friendly AND looks good to the troops. Police chiefs don't get to be police chiefs without having a keen eye for politics, so they jumped all over it.

The US Secret Service had bought Sig P228 pistols in 9mm, but they weren't content with any old 9mm round. They were using 115 grain bullets loaded on top of as much powder as could be crammed into a 9mm case. It was killing P228s in pretty short order. So they raised this issue with Sig and Sig came up with a 9mm magnum: .357 sig. They also came up with the only pistol that really works terribly well in .357 sig, the P229.

So now out there in the world we've got police departments carrying 9mm pistols, .357 sig pistols, .40 S&W pistols, and .45 ACP pistols. And they're all involved in shootings.

A little shy of a decade later people who have a clue start looking around at the accumulated record of LE shootings and they're noticing that there doesn't seem to be a stark difference in the performance of these calibers in the real world. In other words, if departments are using the decent bullets recently introduced as a result of all that IWBA stuff, it doesn't seem to make a whole lot of difference which caliber they are using. None of them prove to be the hammer of Thor. Anecdotes abound, but aggregated data is hard to argue with...and it doesn't show that any one of them does a significantly better job than the others.

What does start to become clear is that there ain't many things you can hit on a person that will make them stop trying to kill you. Most shots that get fired are really trying to convince the other guy to stop. Few were being fired with the accuracy necessary to truly make that guy knock it the fuck off.

GWOT kicked off and suddenly military personnel are shooting a surprising number of bad guys with 9mm ball fired out of Sigs and Berettas (and eventually Glocks) and they're getting pretty solid results when they hit the shit that matters. There were multiple occasions where one of our finest busted into a room full of smelly bad men only to have their primary weapon go down and they ended up killing a whole room full of baddies armed with machineguns using a relatively puny 9mm sidearm that they had learned to use well enough to hit shit that mattered. They got shot but thanks to body armor and the fact that God loves the American serviceman they survived while a bunch of smelly bad men did not.

So what you really have going on in that time frame you reference is a bunch of information gelling together to form a picture: The ability to put a decent bullet into something important is far more likely to predict success in the endeavor of stopping a threat in a timely fashion than the exact size of the bullet you're putting in it. This is not a new lesson, of course, as all throughout modern history people who could, as Chuck Haggard puts it "fucking shoot" seemed to be able to plant bad guys pretty regularly even with .38 spl LRN.

Training classes by people who had a clue reflected this by trying to get people to shoot better. Training exploded because of the liberalization of carry laws that began in the mid 1990's.

Police departments found buying ammo for training to be expensive and also had consistent problems from their .40 caliber Glock pistols they had been sold on previously. Turns out they didn't always work so good. The FBI learned that the hard way, too.

They also found out it was rather difficult to get people to pass qualifications when people had to contend with the recoil of .40 caliber pistols or the often sub-optimal ergonomics of bigger guns chambered for .45 ACP.

The FBI started giving small people Glock 19's and noticed something: Their qual scores went up immediately.

So they started quietly handing out a lot of 9mm pistols before pressuring Glock to design a 9mm for them.

They also went around the country telling police departments that training mattered more than anything else in effectively using handguns, that 9mm was cheaper to train with, and oh, by the way, the guns work better and people who struggle to qualify with your current guns beat the standard pretty easily if you just give them a 9mm.

9mm didn't make inroads because of marketing, it started eclipsing everything else because it works. And about as well as anything else you can fire out of a reasonably carry-able handgun. And you can have more bullets on board, you can train more inexpensively, and you can do a lot of shooting without ending up with your joints all fucked up from decades of trying to muscle the bigger calibers. You look at guys who spent decades shooting .45 and .40 guns and now they shoot 9mm because it doesn't absolutely destroy them when they do.

If anything, the post-Miami bigger caliber shit was the result of marketing and misunderstanding...not the 9mm swallowing the defensive handgun market that we see today. Had that one event not been so massively misunderstood we wouldn't have had .40 or .357 sig at all.


I think this as fine a restatement of the current caliber narrative as you will find. I suspect in 20 years, if we are still alive, it will be considered silly by the new crop of guys who are all shooting 41 AE or whatever. They will be equally right and wrong.

Quibble. I don’t think the military recommitment to 9mm happened exactly the way you stated. Once the hot wars started in the early 00s, what they actually started seeking were high capacity .45s or possibly even .40s. That’s when you saw delta carrying .40 caliber Glocks and of course the Army got H&K, FN and smith to blow a bunch of money developing high cap .45s. This seemed, at the time, to be a reaction to the field performance they were seeing with the 9mm pistols they were always saying they weren’t going to need much anyway. Now, maybe those were all .40 plus dead-Enders and Delta guys caught up in the caliber wars. You also saw other moves for better carbines etc that sputtered when the money ran out.

[TCinVA]

Quibble. I don’t think the military recommitment to 9mm happened the way you stated. Once the hot wars started in the early 00s, what they actually started seeking were high capacity .45s or possibly even .40s. That’s when you saw delta carrying .40 caliber Glocks and of course the Army got H&K, FN and smith to blow a bunch of money developing high cap .45s. This seemed, at the time, to be a reaction to the field performance they were seeing with the 9mm pistols they were always saying they weren’t going to need much anyway. Now, maybe those were all .40 plus dead-Enders and Delta guys caught up in the caliber wars. You also saw other moves for better carbines etc that sputtered when the money ran out.

The various incarnations of the .45 ACP military pistol electric boogaloo were prompted by some of the very same things that drove the adoption of the .45 ACP in the first place:

1. A belief that smaller calibers sucked (hence our delay in getting an intermediate cartridge for our main rifle systems)
2. Massive training deficits resulting in poor performance in the field that backed that narrative.

Generally speaking, the people in JSOC get far more training on using a pistol than anyone else and they ended up sticking with 9mm despite having the budget to get anything they wanted. Certainly there was some institutional identification with the sidearms going on (NSWG uses P226es, bro!) but a lot of it resulted from them learning the same lessons: It all works pretty good if you can fucking shoot. A compelling need to get a bigger pistol that is significantly heavier wasn't seen.

Hell, for a lot of guys in those units pistols were regarded as just extra weight. They didn't carry them out in the field when they weren't doing stuff like direct action.

Delta did indeed end up with .40...but Delta ended up with .40 back in the late 90's. They had formed using 1911s in .45 ACP and had been using them since. They had found that keeping a fleet of custom 1911 pistols up and running sucked and the limited capacity of the 1911 was kind of a problem when part of your mission was going on to aircraft to shoot terrorists in the face before they could kill everybody on the plane.

They experimented with a number of different options. One of the first was STI 2011 style guns chambered in...40 S&W.

I don't take warm showers with anyone at Bragg, but as best I understand there were a number of legal and logistical reasons why they went with a .40 chambering. The fact that a number of big federal LE agencies used the .40 had a lot to do with it. Imagine, if you will, there's a domestic terrorism scenario and the services of a group of specialists at counterterrorism are needed in multiple locations at once to rescue hostages. There's only so many dudes out there who can actually do that kind of work and a big chunk of them are military guys. Posse Comitatus and all that. But what if those military guys were sworn law enforcement before they actually performed a mission? And what if they were using the same calibers as the other agencies working the problem?

Well, that tends to keep the questions to a minimum, don't it?

Most military personnel who were issued a 9mm sidearm were not trained to anywhere near the level necessary to actually put bullets where they needed to go. Not to mention they were also issuing magazines that didn't work well in sand and were generally using guns they had "maintained" so poorly that they were assembling guns out of other deadlined guns and were shocked they weren't working. Lots of people in the DOD wanted a new handgun and cited problems in the field as a reason to go back and buy .45 ACPs because there were still plenty of people in who thought that the 9mm transition was a betrayal in the first place.

Keep in mind that this is the same organization that taught people not to "overlubricate" weapons, continued to use magazines that were originally intended to be a single use item, and then couldn't figure out why troops kept experiencing stoppages in the field.

When 9mm pistols were wielded by people who could actually shoot them, they performed extremely well.

[RevolverRob]

What else can we include in this garbage thread:

.22s have killed more people on Earth than any other cartridge.

Assassins only use .22s, because they bounce around inside the skull like a superball dropped from the top of the gym bleachers.

5.56 is a poodle shooter and the AR15/M16 is a hunk of shit.

You don’t have to aim shotguns. They fire a flying wall of death.

Revolvers never jam/break.

Glocks can’t be detected by metal detectors.

Delta Operators only use Desert Eagles, unless they need to “go quiet” then they use Beretta 70s borrowed from Mossad.

I’m sure there is more.

I’m gonna go sort my Eurotrash ammo and make sure it doesn’t sit next ti my by-God American calibers. Don’t want my .45s thinking they can be weak sauce.

[Trooper224]

Internet win for the week for TCinVA for that awesome post.

Runner up status to Greg Bell, because he mentioned .41AE.

[Greg Bell]

.41 AE Super, you heard it here first.

I would like to point out that I today I shot 150 rounds through my Beretta 92, 50 through my shield and 75 through my HK UsP .45. I’m good no matter who is right. Unless it is somehow 5.7.

[TCinVA]

So what you're saying is...you have to hit things in order for bullets to work? Damn. That's some new fangled thinkin' right there. Ain't nobody told me that before. I thought you just fired willy nilly to people fell over.

A .45 doesn't just kill a dude. It goes back in time and kills his ancestors, wiping him entirely from humanity.

[TCinVA]

.41 AE Super, you heard it here first.

I would like to point out that I Shot 150 rounds through my Beretta 92, 50 through my shield and 75 through my HK UsP .45. I’m good no matter who is right. Unless it is somehow 5.7.

5.7 is only suitable for old women and Stargate weebs who are intent on justifying their choice with the Fort Hood murders.

[Sammy1]

If that's the video I'm thinking of.

The first officer fires several times and appears to only hit once, maybe twice, in the torso, both shots were likely low, since the suspect was running towards the officer and the officer was back pedaling.

The second officer put him down, by actually shooting him once, in the head.

If you shoot the guy in the head, it tends to work well.

Someone around here has a sig quote to the effect of, "I had an ER nurse in my class, who only took headshots. When I asked her why, she said, "I've never seen someone shot in the head fight in the ER." Point taken."

The idea that 9mm was a "poor stopper" is really a misunderstanding of ballistics and incapacitation. Why did/does .45 ball work better than 9mm ball at shooting people? Because the .45 stops inside. It deposits all of its available energy into the target, where the 9mm does not. Same with 125-grain SJHP .357, which did so by using soft'ish lead and expanding. No long likes shooting people with 158-grain LRN .357s. That's a waste. Once we got reliable 9mm HPs that expand and stop inside, there is no longer a gap in efficacy, between virtually any handgun.

And they still all suck compared to a rifle or shotgun.

The rise of PCCs or "re-emergence" of SMGs has nothing to do with efficacy in shooting. They're all gaming guns. They are for training rifle skills using pistol ranges and targets or for competing. It's not an and/or argument. We've had this discussion before, the only reason to choose a PCC over a pistol, is if you do not have a rifle or shotgun handy to use. I love my little 9mm AR, it shoots great and is fun and cheap to shoot. It's fine as a hunting tool for any small sized game within 150 yards. If I use it in a defensive role or to hunt mid-sized game, I load hot +P Barnes or Lehigh bullets in it, because it's not the optimal tool, you have to be choosy with your ammo and shot placement. That means it sucks compared to another option.

The NYPD stakeout squad had a famous case of 11 rounds to the head. The two stakeout cops figured he was dead and called it in. Later, the suspect sat up and sneezed out a bullet. He walked to the ambulance. All eleven rounds of 38 spl. traveled around his cranium never penetrating it. When we trained with Phil Singleton his emphasis ws the open mouth shot and later, NTOA came out with the T- triangle which was the eyebrows down to the upper lip.

[TC215]

Delta did indeed end up with .40...but Delta ended up with .40 back in the late 90's. They had formed using 1911s in .45 ACP and had been using them since. They had found that keeping a fleet of custom 1911 pistols up and running sucked and the limited capacity of the 1911 was kind of a problem when part of your mission was going on to aircraft to shoot terrorists in the face before they could kill everybody on the plane.

They experimented with a number of different options. One of the first was STI 2011 style guns chambered in...40 S&W.

Not that it matters, but my understanding is that the .40 caliber Glocks came about in the early 2000’s (2003 or 2004, maybe?). The STI’s were in the 2006 timeframe.

I don’t have firsthand contact with any Delta guys, but I do have contact with a couple guys that used to work for us that are now on a team/unit that would know.

[JAD]

? Because the .45 stops inside. It deposits all of its available energy into the target, where the 9mm does not.

Were you being serious?

[BehindBlueI's]

Were you being serious?

I was about to ask the same thing.

[TCinVA]

Not that it matters, but my understanding is that the .40 caliber Glocks came about in the early 2000’s (2003 or 2004, maybe?). The STI’s were in the 2006 timeframe.

I don’t have firsthand contact with any Delta guys, but I do have contact with a couple guys that used to work for us that are now on a team/unit that would know.

I believe the Glocks came after the competition inspired double stack 1911-style pistols didn’t work out so good

It wouldn’t surprise me if they tried raceguns again after the first attempt with them in the late 90’s

[Greg Bell]

The setup I remember them running in the mid 00s was a 40 Glock with an Aimpoint, which I gather was for shooting people in the face on airplanes. I think they also got Glock to run them some tan mags.

[YVK]

. One of the first was STI 2011 style guns chambered in...40 S&W.


Gamers.

[DocGKR]

In the late 1980's and early 1990's, most 9mm loadings offered relatively poor terminal performance, particularly through intermediate barriers--.45 Auto was only a bit better. Conversely, almost all .40 S&W ammo was designed after the Army Wound Ballistics Lab, FBI BRF, and IWBA had identified ideal characteristics for defensive handgun ammunition--as a result, a lot of .40 S&W ammo outperformed both 9 mm and .45 Auto at that time. As older loadings of 9mm and .45 Auto fell by the wayside and ammo engineers developed new reliable barrier blind handgun offerings for the major service calibers, it quickly became apparent that there was relatively minimal difference in terminal performance between calibers; "shootability", cost, and human factors became more important selection criteria when choosing a defensive handgun for duty use.

[Tom Duffy]

I think TCinVA's post deserves it's own sticky!

[Chuck Haggard]

If the Miami incident had involved a .45acp Silvertip instead of a 9mm people would have attacked the bullet, not the caliber, but "9mm sucks" because emotion trumps logic for way too many people.

Delta started to get away from the 1911 after the Blackhawk Down fight according to personal conversation with Kyle Lamb. Several dudes in that fight had 1911s that were dead in the water after fast roping into the target due to dust. Kyle will tell you that 1911s are not suitable for a austere environment, he's very vocal about cops and military not using 1911s.

Before somebody says "muh two world wars!", nobody carries a 1911s chamber empty in a flap holster anymore, and 1911s were only legendary because literally everything else back then sucked in comparison.

Pannone reports that the unit has been very satisfied with both 9mm NATO ball and Federal EFMJ in the incidents where they'd used said ammo.

To steal a quote from a member here who may not be able to say it himself open source, he's been around to have shot or seen shot more than 20 bad guys, all with 9mm ball from handguns. "None of them were unimpressed with the cartridge".

To steal a quote from Pat Rogers, ref being issued .38 SWCs, "They worked pretty good, if you could shoot". The secret is that nothing works if you can't.

[Chuck Haggard]

“…there is no appreciable difference in the effectiveness of the 9 mm and the .45 ACP cartridges.”
Vincent J. M. Di Maio, GUNSHOT WOUNDS: Practical Aspects of Firearms, Ballistics, and Forensic Techniques SECOND EDITION, Page 150.

[Robinson]

Before somebody says "muh two world wars!", nobody carries a 1911s chamber empty in a flap holster anymore, and 1911s were only legendary because literally everything else back then sucked in comparison.

There also wasn't the obsession with tight slide to frame fit on 1911s back then. It actually goes against the original build philosophy. 1911s don't need to rattle like a marble in a tin can in order to run, but they don't need to be "hard fit" in order to be accurate either. I have no idea where the Unit guns fit into that spectrum, but they were probably built tighter than world war era guns because "custom".

[TC215]

There also wasn't the obsession with tight slide to frame fit on 1911s back then. It actually goes against the original build philosophy. 1911s don't need to rattle like a marble in a tin can in order to run, but they don't need to be "hard fit" in order to be accurate either. I have no idea where the Unit guns fit into that spectrum, but they were probably built tighter than world war era guns because "custom".

I listened to a Seeklander podcast with Pat Mac the other day, and Pat was talking about how well their 1911's ran in the early 2000's. I'm guessing they weren't Les Baer-tight. ;)

[Robinson]

I listened to a Seeklander podcast with Pat Mac the other day, and Pat was talking about how well their 1911's ran in the early 2000's. I'm guessing they weren't Les Baer-tight. ;)

Some of those may have been the guns they got from Springfield Armory with the buried adjustable rear sights. From what I've seen in the public domain those were pretty cool guns. The TRP Operator is sort of a descendant of those guns from what I've read. Could be just an internet rumor though.

[Darth_Uno]

To steal a quote from Pat Rogers, ref being issued .38 SWCs, "They worked pretty good, if you could shoot". The secret is that nothing works if you can't.
A very good friend of mine who has been places and done things told me just last week that nobody he’s shot has given much consideration to whether it’s been 9, or .40, or .45, or ball, or hollow point.

I’m not just parroting what I heard. Well I am, but it’s someone whose opinion I respect very much.

[BehindBlueI's]

So I used to really really really be a .45 guy. Then I saw a couple hundred people shot with handguns. I pretty quickly figured out that as long as the particular bullet would break bone and was hard to deflect by teeth, skulls, forearms, etc. that it would drop people if you put the bullet where it needed to go. I'm now caliber agnostic as far as the common duty calibers go. I'll carry whatever. Currently a 9mm. Not a fan of rimfire handguns or "shotgun" handguns.

[HCountyGuy]

TC that essay may be one of the best gems I’ve read on this site. I swear we need to be able to like some posts more than once.

[TCinVA]

TC that essay may be one of the best gems I’ve read on this site. I swear we need to be able to like some posts more than once.

I was on a lot of medication at the time.

...and a little bit of Isaac Bowman single barrel.