Right. NATO always had 9mm as the standard, and the US simply adopted it to control NATO and force NATO to conform to the cartridge that the US wasn't using.

Of course.

Tell me about those 1800 military pistol gunfights.

quote:

Originally posted by Sheepdogged:
Remember also that the military switched to 9mm 34 years ago long before these alleged advances took place. I'm sure they had a reason. In my opinion, 9mm (.355") gives the right balance of mass and velocity to lessen the chance of over penetration which is likely why larger calibers often fail despite delivering greater energy. All things being equal, heavier bullets penetrate more and faster bullets build energy quicker than mass.

You won't get much of an argument from me about about general terminal ballistics. The most common military and police loads all generate such similar terminal performance that it all boils down to the same three things, shot placement, shot placement, and shot placement.

quote:

Originally posted by sns3guppy:

quote:

Originally posted by Sheepdogged:

Remember also that the military switched to 9mm 34 years ago long before these alleged advances took place. I'm sure they had a reason.

Yes. NATO.

What the military did isn't very relevant, given the role that the pistol plays in military service.

The military's reason for moving to 9mm was purely political. We needed to placate the Italians, and in the end Beretta won out over Sig purely on price point.

quote:

Originally posted by sns3guppy:
Right. NATO always had 9mm as the standard, and the US simply adopted it to control NATO and force NATO to conform to the cartridge that the US wasn't using.

Of course.

Tell me about those 1800 military pistol gunfights.

Personally, I think it's naive to think the United States had to go along with NATO. Furthermore, your argument is flawed. There is a logical fallacy called "post hoc ergo propter hoc", and the Latin roughly translates in English as "after that therefore because of that." What likely happened was that NATO had adopted the 9mm while the US was still using .45 ACP, but when it came time to choose a new sidearm/caliber, the military saw the advantages of 9mm so it went with that (i.e. it wasn't likely a compliance issue). That's a more plausible explanation in my opinion than the rationalization that likely originated from military personnel who didn't want to give up their .45 caliber 1911's (who didn't understand the physics all that well). I doubt it was a rumor that emanated from the people who were actually in the loop making the decision in the early to mid 1980's.

Yeah, okay.

Not my opinion, but ok.

Call facts whatever you want. Justification is the narcotic of the soul. Some are addicts.

ok

OK
Here's the thing that confuses the fuck outa me:
EVRYBODY worships at the alter of the 10mm
Yet, 10mm 180 grn. is 1200-1250 fps
Is touted as dropping King Kong like a bad habit

.45 ACP 185 grn. @ 1050 fps (200 fps slower) is touted as something you could shoot your dick with and not feel it compared to the 10 mm ?

9 mm is apparently the shit nowadays, GTG for men and women alike (at least 200-250 fps slower than .357 Sig)

.357 Sig boom baby, 125 grn. @ 1500 fps yet compared to 9 mm is no big deal?

10 mm vs. .45 = 10 mm twice on Sunday (says everybody)
.357 Sig vs. 9 mm = 9 mm twice on Monday (says everybody)

What the fuck am I missing ???

(I'm schizophrenic, I carry .45 ACP for quadrapeds AND .375 Sig for bipeds with equal love)

Not everyone "worships" at the alter of the 10mm. I carried a 1076 for a long time, and the G19 is the much better choice unless I am hunting trying to bring down a car by shooting up the engine block.

That's Exhibit A.

Exhibit B is no one in LE "worships" the 10mm. Matter of fact, the 10mm got dropped like a bad habit from the LE scene and hasn't been around in nearly two decades.

10mm is a boutique round these days that has very little "worship" in the grand scheme of sheer numbers. 357 SIG has been on its way out for a long time.

We dropped 10mm as an approved round back in 1995.

We just got new gen4 Glock 31s in January. This will be our last time for 357. If I'm still around in ten years, I am switching us to Glock 45 MOS guns or whatever is out by then. The only reason I didn't switch was they didn't have the 45 MOS version last year when we were looking to switch and I didn't want to give up my source of 357 ammo.

Don't confuse memes about 10mm with 10mm "worship".

Most of the 10mm talk/hype you see online is just facetiousness. It's basically just a long-running joke. "Stops a Mack Truck with one shot." "Blow the soul clean out of a bad guy if you hit him in the thumb." "Handgun equivalent of a nuclear bomb." Etc.

It's a very niche caliber.

quote:

Originally posted by jljones:
Not everyone "worships" at the alter of the 10mm. I carried a 1076 for a long time, and the G19 is the much better choice unless I am hunting trying to bring down a car by shooting up the engine block.

That's Exhibit A.

Exhibit B is no one in LE "worships" the 10mm. Matter of fact, the 10mm got dropped like a bad habit from the LE scene and hasn't been around in nearly two decades.

10mm is a boutique round these days that has very little "worship" in the grand scheme of sheer numbers. 357 SIG has been on its way out for a long time.

Respectfully, I think your missing my point.
This thread alludes to 9 mm supplanting the .357 Sig.
Ok
I was merely making a comparison between 10 mm and .45 ACP

If I understand your argument then the .45 ACP should bury the 10 mm ???
Help me understand.
Please

quote:

Originally posted by Chowser:
We dropped 10mm as an approved round back in 1995.

We just got new gen4 Glock 31s in January. This will be our last time for 357. If I'm still around in ten years, I am switching us to Glock 45 MOS guns or whatever is out by then. The only reason I didn't switch was they didn't have the 45 MOS version last year when we were looking to switch and I didn't want to give up my source of 357 ammo.

You did your people a disservice.

quote:

Originally posted by sigmoid:

quote:

Originally posted by jljones:
Not everyone "worships" at the alter of the 10mm. I carried a 1076 for a long time, and the G19 is the much better choice unless I am hunting trying to bring down a car by shooting up the engine block.

That's Exhibit A.

Exhibit B is no one in LE "worships" the 10mm. Matter of fact, the 10mm got dropped like a bad habit from the LE scene and hasn't been around in nearly two decades.

10mm is a boutique round these days that has very little "worship" in the grand scheme of sheer numbers. 357 SIG has been on its way out for a long time.

Respectfully, I think your missing my point.
This thread alludes to 9 mm supplanting the .357 Sig.
Ok
I was merely making a comparison between 10 mm and .45 ACP

If I understand your argument then the .45 ACP should bury the 10 mm ???
Help me understand.
Please

The point is there is very little difference in the actual performance of various handgun rounds on people. They all suck compared to long guns.

Shot Placement trumps caliber. To quote a mentor of mine talking about his agency’s long serving +p .38 special load, “it worked pretty good if you could shoot.”

Given those factors, a round that is easier and quicker to shoot is the practical choice. Not to mention the higher capacity 9mm affords. In a fight, bullets are opportunities.

LE dropped full power 10mm like a Rock because it was difficult to shoot well at speed. There is a clock in every gunfight in the form of the other guy trying to kill you before you kill him. That lead to downloaded 10mm, which was similar to 185 grain 45 acp. About the same time 40 S&W appeared. Why would I want a bigger heavier gun with 8 or 9 rounds when I could have a smaller, lighter gun with 12-15 rounds which provide the same performance?

.45 acp has performed well in people but due to the low velocity and wider cross section it performs very poorly against intermediate barriers such as vehicles. One of the incidents that prompted TX highway patrol, to switch from SIG P220 45s to the 226 in .357 SIG was an incident where a trooper fired 18 rounds of .45 at a suspect in a tractor trailer and none penetrated the cab.

quote:

Originally posted by HCM:


You did your people a disservice.

nah, don't think so. 95% of us are shooters and we prefer the 357. It's just the new kids we're hiring that don't like it. we train, we have no issues with 357sig.

The Delaware State Police carried the Sig P229 in 357 Sig (I think they were one of the first agencies to select it).

They are going to the 9mm also.

The 9mm cult is getting annoying, and I say that as someone who started carrying a 9mm when most cops still had Model 10’s.
I just got a G22 Gen4 police surplus, and find I shoot it the same as my G17.

Are they going to use a red dot and If so, any idea which one?

quote:

Originally posted by amd6547:
The 9mm cult is getting annoying, and I say that as someone who started carrying a 9mm when most cops still had Model 10’s.
I just got a G22 Gen4 police surplus, and find I shoot it the same as my G17.

I agree. 9mm is great, but so are the other calibers.

quote:

Originally posted by sigmoid:
OK
Here's the thing that confuses the fuck outa me:
EVRYBODY worships at the alter of the 10mm
Yet, 10mm 180 grn. is 1200-1250 fps
Is touted as dropping King Kong like a bad habit

.45 ACP 185 grn. @ 1050 fps (200 fps slower) is touted as something you could shoot your dick with and not feel it compared to the 10 mm ?

9 mm is apparently the shit nowadays, GTG for men and women alike (at least 200-250 fps slower than .357 Sig)

.357 Sig boom baby, 125 grn. @ 1500 fps yet compared to 9 mm is no big deal?

10 mm vs. .45 = 10 mm twice on Sunday (says everybody)
.357 Sig vs. 9 mm = 9 mm twice on Monday (says everybody)

What the fuck am I missing ???

(I'm schizophrenic, I carry .45 ACP for quadrapeds AND .375 Sig for bipeds with equal love)

I think part of the confusion is that, for some strange reason, the gun world likes to speak in terms of velocity which is only a piece of the overall puzzle. Energy is what we're really after, and the primary components as you know are mass and velocity.

The thing is that, stripping it down to the basics, kinetic energy is equal to 1/2 x mass x velocity squared. In other words, adding velocity builds energy more quickly than adding mass as we are literally taking half the value of the mass and multiplying it by the velocity which we are making exponentially larger (by squaring it). So from that we can see why we talk in terms of velocity (since it accounts for more), but we're primarily concerned with the overall energy that a bullet transfers into the body of something or someone we're trying to incapacitate.

That said, it does get a little more complicated than that. For example, there are a few things to note.

1. All things being equal, a heavier bullet will be more accurate (so statistically, though not a huge difference, on average, .45 ACP is more accurate than 9mm or even .40 S&W.

2. All things being equal, a heavier bullet will penetrate more deeply than a lighter round.

3. All things being equal, more velocity will yield greater accuracy, but not as much as adding mass.

4. All things being equal, more velocity will increase a bullets ability to penetrate, but again, not quite as much as mass (though the GAP is probably a little tighter than when comparing mass and penetration).

We're not even getting into ballistic coefficient which roughly translates to how efficient or aerodynamic a bullet flies through the air, or sectional density which is the mass of a projectile compared to its cross-sectional area. Both of these essentially deal with the shape of the bullet which is increasingly important at greater distances and bullets traveling with greater velocity.

Of course, the bullet design, such as various types of hollow points and other designs vs fmj's are also very important. I'm sure I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but my point is that these things all affect a bullet's effectiveness, even among calibers, but as you can see with the difference between mass and velocity, they aren't all equal in their application (yet all of these facets contribute to the performance in some way. So how much velocity you are gaining or losing and how much mass you're gaining or losing is hard to gauge without referring to the total energy which helps bring things into focus.

So for example, I mentioned earlier how I found all the different caliber bullets I could find and averaged out their energy. So according to my calculations a few years ago, the average muzzle energy for a 10mm was about 650 ft. lbs. Meanwhile, the average .45 ACP was 447 tied with .40 S&W. As you can see, 10mm on average is quite a bit more energy because that velocity is accounts for more (it's squared), but speaking in terms of bullet mass and velocity gets a bit tricky without knowing the energy which is why I think the latter is a more important number by far.

So to make things more complicated, we have to consider what is more likely to penetrate enough yet not over penetrate, and there is a lot of confusion here as well. Most people appear to be only concerned with minimum penetration, but over penetration is almost as important, and it has little to do with innocent bystanders. In those statics I provided earlier taken from 1,800 bodies actually shot in gunfights, .44 Magnum failed to incapacitate 13% of the time just like 9mm (and more than half the 9mm's were FMJ!). That's because, as one coroner put it, he never saw a body hit with a .44 magnum where the bullet didn't completely pass through the body. When it does this, half its energy leaves along with it, so even though .44 mag is about twice as powerful as 9mm, you're wasting too much of that energy to help matters. That said, a .44 magnum will be more accurate and, statistically speaking, fewer people hit with that caliber are going to survive compared to most other pistol calibers.

10mm is sort of an unknown performer because it's seldomly seen in gunfights. Like I said, we have a study of 1800 bodies giving us some pretty good information about .25 ACP, .32 ACP, .380 ACP, .38 Special, 9mm, .357 SIG/Magnum, .40 S&W, and .45 ACP, but 10mm is not as clear. What we do know is that, although I said—all things being equal—greater mass usually means greater accuracy, that is only to a point because greater velicity will add accuracy but not as fast as mass which is opposite of building energy (where velocity raises energy more quickly). In other words, .357 SIG tends to more accurate than .40 S&W even though the latter normally has greater mass because the bottleneck design of the .357 cartridge allows us to disproportionately add velocity (which is why all modern self defense rifle cartridges are built that way). 10mm will have more recoil than a .357 SIG because of it's greater mass, but depending on it's loading it can be as accurate or even moreso. Although it won't typically have as much velocity potential, it is still very fast and heavy (and thus can produce even more energy than .357 SIG). Now a lot of the gel tests claim 10mm can meet the FBI's 12-18" penetration requirement, but real world data is even better and we just don't have a lot.

Interestingly enough, the study showed that .357 SIG incapacitated better than all the other calibers by about 4-5% and stopped people as well as centerfire rifles on average (at typical engagement distances anyway). Even though this round is considerably more snappy than 9mm, it is nonetheless more accurate in real world gunfights. And because it is a 9mm bullet with less mass on average than .40 or .45 or 10mm (.40), it has less recoil (though greater muzzle flip, especially with hotter loads). My guess is that 10mm starts to reach a point of diminishing returns when compared to .357 SIG, but that is only conjecture on my part. But if the average .357 SIG is stopping people as well as a centerfire rifle cartridge, I don't see how 10mm is going to do any better, but it might be more uncomfortable to shoot and usually requires a bigger/heavier gun than .357 SIG.

Lastly, that study showed that there was no statistical difference between 9mm, .40S&W, .45 ACP and .44 Magnum as the 1% difference between a 13% and a 14% failure rate is not statistically significant (and the 1% certainly falls within the margin of error). However, .357 SIG has a 5% advantage over .45 ACP, and although that is not a lot, mathematically speaking, it would be considered by most statisticians as being statistically significant. The average energy for a .357 SIG I computed to be 526 ft. lbs. The caveat here is that you can get them significantly more powerful (my Underwood XD bullets are rated at 636 ft. lbs. which is about on par with the average 10mm). In other words, if .357 loads were loaded hotter on average, we might even see better than the 9% failure to incapacitate rate we saw in the study, but it's hard to know. My advice is that once we get the obvious out of the way (hit your target), then the next thing would be to get as much energy into that target which requires the bullet staying in the body. Heavier bullets pass through more easily which is why I believe 9mm, even with fmj rounds, stopped as well as .40 and .45 HP rounds. That might sound counter intuitive, but he I think it was because most gang bangers are probably using the cheap FMJ which are usually 115 grain and not very warm (which might over penetrate less than a .45 ACP hp). But short of lining up and shooting a bunch of people trying to attack me with various calibers and bullet combinations, it's hard to know.

Sheepdogged, is that study available for us to read?