Originally Posted by
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.
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