My mind found itself off the reservation again and before I had it back and corralled it had thought. Why did the Wonder Nine take so long to come about?

The DNA was there and proven back to the early 40’s really. Walther had proven DA/SA trigger system, Browning had proven high capacity double stack magazines (in an ergonomic frame to boot) and the 9mm was well proven at that point. Semi auto pistols as a whole had become very reliable so all the “magic” was there. Hell even striker fired triggers were around.

So why did it take basically 40 years to put it all together and “start the revolution” so to speak?

Also if the Pyramids were built by Atlantean’s………. WHOA BOY!!! Calm down you are back in the stable. .

Ol' man Gaston had to show them that it could be done.

My thinking is that there wasn’t any demand. Cops had revolvers and “why would you need more than 6 rounds?”

Military sidearms have always been a secondary concern and not really used for combat except in an emergency or special ops, and 7 rounds of 45 or 8 rounds of 8mm was deemed suitable.

Institutional inertia among law enforcement and the shooting population.

Folks were focused on revolvers and ever more powerful revolver rounds in constant search of the elusive "stopping power" of one-shot mankiller rounds. Or else the well-proven reputation of the 1911 and .45 ACP that had been used by a huge portion of the pistol shooters during their military service, so it was familiar and trusted.

9mm was viewed as too "weak" compared to the larger calibers (see my earlier comment on the obsession at the time with "stopping power"), and semiautos were viewed as "jam-o-matics" by the legions of revolver purists.

You also have to keep in mind that this was pre-internet and information moved much slower and wasn't that widely accessible. Much of the thinking about pistols and pistol calibers was guided by just a few gun writers, as well as (perhaps even more so) by the gun shop/hunting camp/squad bay anectdotes, bluster, and old wives tales that were passed around.

If the veterans/salesmen/old school "experts" said 9mm semis were worthless and you needed a magnum revolver, that's just the way it was, because you had no info or frame of reference to refute them.

I think there are a few things:

-Americans liked revolvers, ergo police departments liked revolvers.

-Americans liked .45 ACP, but even venerated 1911's still fell under the belief that a lot of semi-autos were "jammomatics." Reliability was perceived to be far less than a revolver.

-9mm was considered a puny European cartridge, considered less powerful than .45 ACP, aka speed vs mass. Semiautos chambered for it were considered to have the same liabilities, as any other "jammomatic." There was no upside.

-Semiautos usually required some kind of throating of the feed ramp to reliably feed hollow points.

A couple of things helped turn this around.

-The War On Drugs. A common perception in the early 1980's was that the police were hopelessly out gunned by the bad guys, the latter of whom were perceived to be armed with guns like the Mac 10 9mm sub machine guns, versus the police with six shot revolvers. How true this was on the day to day back then, I'm not sure.

-Agencies like Illinois State Police that issued S&W 9mm semi autos since the late 60's were developing a good track record. I think New Jersey State Police may have been issuing H&K P7 9mm's starting in the early to mid 80's were also having good luck.

-The issuing of the Beretta 92FS to the U.S. Military in the mid 80's lent A LOT of street cred to the 9mm semiautomatic.

_Berettas, Sig Sauer, and Smith & Wesson 9mm's were proving very reliable, and 15 round magazines were more than doubling a police officers on board fire power, not including the spare mags they carried.

-9mm hollow points such as the 115 grain +P+, as issued by the Illinois State Police, were showing that the cartridge could get things done.

-9mm handguns by the mid to late 80's had the reliability, increased firepower, could fit a lot of hands across the board, remember this is the era where we start seeing more females enter police work, as well as smaller statured men that didn't fit the mold of the 6 foot plus male officers of days got by.

_And as .38supersig pointed out, the Glock really changed everything a lot!

It's still crazy to me watching movies from the mid-1990s and all the cops are still carrying revolvers for the most part.

My last agency kept their revolvers until 2000. When I got on a few years later in the mid-2000s there were still some of the older guys who bemoaned the "good old days" of their 686s and wished they could still carry them.

quote:

Originally posted by Sig Sauer: For Hire:
-The issuing of the Beretta 92FS to the U.S. Military in the mid 80's lent A LOT of street cred to the 9mm semiautomatic.

One of the guys I work with now who's about to retire had gotten permission from his agency in the mid-80s to carry a Beretta 92 instead of the issued revolver. He got a whole rash of crap from all the guys he worked with about it, for a few years.

He says even moreso than the military's adoption, it was the prominent appearance of the Beretta in movies like Die Hard and Lethal Weapon a few years later that had most of the department that had been giving him shit not that long before start asking "Hey... Where can I get me one of those Berettas too?"

Ammo/caliber. 45 was the auto of choice. It fought 2 world wars. 9mm ammo was weaker and the projectiles weren’t as advanced as they are today.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: ruger357,

I've always wondered if the 9mm round was also looked at for years as too "German" or "Nazi" or "Euro" or just not "American" enough for us.

Inertia, the belief that because America won WW2 that everything we had there was awesome and didn't need to be changed, inertia, the belief in marksmanship over capacity (quality over quantity), and then 1986 and the Miami shootout. Oh, and inertia, forgot to mention that.

And it didn't take a long time really, the Hi-Power was around in 1935. It just took time for the belief that 9mm was a valid pistol caliber to penetrate into American thinking. Europe loved 9mm and we know those cheese eating surrender monkeys there know fuckall about pistols.

Change is almost always a difficult thing but at a certain point it can come rapidly.

My parents were both law enforcement, starting in the mid 70's and retiring in the 90's and early 2000's. My mother purchased a Python, as it met her department's approved open purchase requirements and was the best she could afford. It's what she carried until she retired. It lives in my safe now.

My father went through a bunch of duty guns. There was a Colt Gold Cup National Match for a while, then a 4" Smith 66 Combat Magnum for a long time. Then they issued the 96D, and then the USP Compact in .40. He retired loooong before the G47 got issued.

Mom wasn't "into guns" but my old man was. He never had a favorable opinion of the 9mm, and I'm not entirely sure he actually ever even owned one. His mindset was probably pretty representative of the time. He told me if he had to shoot someone, he didn't want to have to shoot them thirty times, he wanted it to be a one or two shot ordeal. He really liked that Smith and resented being issued a semi-auto that wasn't a .45. He also resented having to qualify yearly with M16's and called them ".22 pop guns." Like a lot of folks, he eventually bought into the .40 hype until the day some random stray dog wandered onto our property and chased after my mother, growling and barking. Dad didn't think that was too funny and went to chase it off, whereupon it gave him the same business and as a result, we got to see firsthand what the .40 does. I quote: "Well... maybe it's the ultimate man stopper, but it sure as shit isn't the ultimate dog stopper." Dog ran off somewhere and presumably died. Dad wasn't really impressed with the .40 after that, but retired not long after, so it was a bit of a non-issue.

I kinda got to witness the end of the "dead right there" .357 Magnum fan boy back room conversations law enforcement use to have while the kids are playing in the other room. There was a respect for the larger magnum calibers, and disdain for the smaller or intermediate pistol and rifle calibers. I have a huge Rubbermaid tote full of cases of the last of the .357 and .40 he got issued about 25-30 years ago, testament to the mindset of the time. Big calibers make big holes and all that. The thinking has obviously completely changed.

I think another thing that also evolved over time was the shooting cognoscenti’s answer as to what the purpose of a DA trigger pull in a DA/SA pistol is.

1. Weapon drawn: allows second strike capability
2. Weapon drawn: helps mitigate ND/UD during SD situation
3. Weapon holstered: allows carrying a chambered round w/o a manual safety

All three of these have almost always been advantages of DA/SA. How necessary each one is considered to be or how accepted each one is, is what’s changed over time. For example, the function of the decocker on a Walther PPK, HK P9S, or Beretta 92S is obvious (to safely lower the hammer on a loaded chamber), but the function of the manual safety on those same pistols is much more open to interpretation (there’s more than one correct answer and the answers have changed over time). The #3 advantage above is probably considered the main purpose of DA/SA these days, but of the original Wonder Nines remaining today, SIG is the only one that started off that way (Beretta and CZ both started with manual safeties only).

Why did law enforcement (and the general shooting community) stop worrying about “stopping power”?

James Clerk Maxwell is attributed as saying, “There are two theories of the nature of light, the corpuscle theory and the wave theory; we used to believe in the corpuscle theory; now we believe in the wave theory because all those who believed in the corpuscle theory have died.”

Sigfreund: “There are two theories of defensive handgun effectiveness, the projectile energy theory and the ‘All bullets are equally effective, so choose the cartridge that’s cheapest and easiest to shoot fast and accurately’ theory. We used to believe in the projectile energy theory, but now we believe in the ‘All bullets are equally effective’ theory because (almost) all those who believed in the projectile energy theory have died.”

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All great thoughts folks.

quote:

Originally posted by RogueJSK:
Institutional inertia among law enforcement and the shooting population.

You also have to keep in mind that this was pre-internet and information moved much slower and wasn't that widely accessible. Much of the thinking about pistols and pistol calibers was guided by just a few gun writers, as well as (perhaps even more so) by the gun shop/hunting camp/squad bay anectdotes, bluster, and old wives tales that were passed around.

Both of these were huge factors in the slow support that Wonder Nines faced.

The first Wonder Nine was the FN P-35, but it came with a horrible trigger and almost useless thumb safety...you have to remember that this was before there were many/any after-market parts. I remember being in high school (early 70s) and being quite impressed by our local PD Sgt who was carrying a S&W M-59...these were as hard to get, and over priced, as the S&W M-29 during the Dirty Harry days. The Beretta 92 and SIG 226 were on the market, but there wasn't a huge demand for them.(you could get them for retail).

LE was slower than the military to adopt 9mm pistol mostly out of lack of interest and inertia...they had something that worked and to change over would have been very expressive

When I got into LE (late 70s), we were still being issued the S&W M-15 and .38Spl +P ammo. It took a union action to get the department to upgrade to issuing .357Mag ammo and issuing the M13. It was a few years later before we were allowed to purchase our own semi-automatic pistols from a department approved list of "acceptable" pistols (20+ pistols).

It took a change in administrations before our issued duty weapon became a pistol (SIG 225/226/229)...this was well after the Army had adopted the Beretta to replace the 1911

I agree with a lot of what has been said. Until a few years ago, 9mm was generally considered inadequate- dependable defensive ammo choices were few for 9mm up to the early to mid 1980’s, and the 1986 FBI shoot out and subsequent ammo development that birthed the 40 was setting the stage to leave the 9 in the dustbin of history, until 2 things happened:
Much improved bullet design resulting in much better terminal performance for 9mm
The FBI declaring 9mm sufficient - for lots of reasons - which resulted now in a sea change with any agencies carrying anything but a 9 the odd men out.
Without the inertia provided by the FBI I don’t think the huge surge in 9mm popularity would have happened like it did.
Regardless of what you think of 9mm ballistics, advantages include
Lower cost in both training ammo and duty ammo
Less recoil resulting in better hit percentages ( and the tendency for someone to shoot more if they perceive the gun isn’t beating them up)
Slightly higher mag capacity
There will always be 45 fans that will keep it flourishing
The 40 will become something of a niche cartridge for those who have them like it and don’t want or need to change.
I also predict a good possibility that at some point there will be a bad guy who soaks up a bunch of 9 doing mayhem resulting in a pendulum swing back again. In most cases this will be the result of inadequate shot placement rather than caliber but people will jump to blame the caliber like they always do

I would say that the #1 reason was the rumor that they were jammomatics. Can't trust 'em.
"Stick with your revolvers boys!"

I remember when departments switched to 9mm, then after shootouts they dropped the 9's and went to .40, some didnt have confidence so they went to .45, now all these departments went back to 9mm so we could get some great deals on some lightly used L.E. trade ins. Just remember the great advances in 9mm projectile development they've also done in .40 & .45

When I first showed up at my job in the mid 90’s, everything was 45 and 40, with a few old heads still carrying revolvers. The reason was simple. Early 9mm adopters had some pretty spectacular terminal ballistics failures with the 9mm ammo of 30 years ago. My personal belief (which I didn’t know at the time) was that the first 124gr +p gold dot actually solved this in 1995. But a lot of the available 9mm ammo (ie federal hydra shok) actually did suck.

In comparison to this, we several cases where heavy revolver rounds (1 .44 magnum shooting in particular, and one where a 357 magnum was shot at a car) were absolutely 100% effective.

Also, revolver training was simple, nobody shot their walls trying to clean their gun and the lead firearms instructor started in 1960. These all combined to stick with something that worked.