In a world where good debates still are handled as sport talk, the fact that the FBI reverted to 9mm smacks of engineering memos: do the work, make that work quantifiable.
The mission at the FBI has been less of finding the “best” cartridge than making duty ammunition act predictably across a national fleet of pistols and shooters, at the FBI, Ballistic Research Facility at Quantico. One retired FBI expert called “Scott” who had served 16 years in the facility following duties that incorporated SWAT and sniper courses stated that there was a cultural adjustment towards a more formal and tested testing and procurement criteria, able to endure scale. He said earlier that past rulings usually boiled down to local comfort, to “Hey, this works well with us,” until the modern wound ballistics required more stern responses.
Scott said that what precipitated that demand was the breakdown of a specific 9mm load, and not the wholesale condemnation of 9mm. It lacked the capability to pass through intervening barriers then go into the human target and to penetrate deep enough to cause damage to a vital organ, he said of a 115-grain 9mm hollow point then used. They buried two special agents on account of it. The enduring lesson of the bureau was a rule of procurement: the design of projectiles and performance substantiated is of more account than the headstamp itself.
Those criteria became stiffened in the 1218 inches of calibrated ballistic gelatin yardstick, and barrier incidences that reprimand ammunition that appears fantastic under ideal circumstances. The form of the protocol is deliberatively bland: regulated distances, repetitive obstacles, and a scoring mentality which appreciates finding essential depth once disturbed. The expansion is still favorable, but the system presupposes that it may be transferred to the intermediate materials, such as heavy clothes and more intractable barriers, and therefore the consistency of penetration turns into the point of no return. It is the one that ages well since the designs of ammunition do as well: the test remains the same and the technology of projectiles rotates around it.
At the time the bureau went in search of penetration margin, 10mm Auto provided it in large quantities. It was the issue that scalability created of people and pistols. In another retrospective, the 10mm period by the FBI at the beginning of the 1990s is seen in the context of reliability problems and the internal tensions, such as the Model 1076 contract and the minimal serviceability the agency achieved that exceeded a MUCH larger proposal. Scott gave the same story in a simpler way: “We had big problems with 10 millimeters.” Recoil in a large agency is no longer a matter of choice, but a variable of maintenance, a training variable, a qualification variable, and it was done thousands of times.
40 S&W came as a distillation of the idea service weights of bullets in a shorter case and it ruled the world of law enforcement practically for decades. But even there, systems view had been creeping in. Small .40 handguns, fed full-power duty ammunition, revealed reliability and performance issues that were hard to decouple with the performance of the individual using it. Scott simplified the repeat scenario: The reason is that everybody started with, ‘Hey, what’s wrong with the ammo’, until the inherent action of recoil impact, size of the shooting platform and variability of the shooter reclaimed itself.
FBI testing in the late 2000s demonstrated that modern 9mm duty projectiles did function basically as well as.40 S&W in protocol conditions. Scott attributed the following explanation by Hornady Dave Emery: “Because you give us velocity.” At 9mm, designers now enjoyed a broader range of window to optimize trusted pedaling and consistent influence conduct amid smaller barrels, and achieve penetration anticipations by obstacles. Emery was direct to the point when he said, “There is not a nickel worth the difference between the two.”
It was not only gelatin that gave it the final push. Scott reported in a controlled FBI course that six out of ten shooters were faster and far more accurate with 9mm than with.40 S&W, both novice and elite groups. Similar terminal reliability, high practical hit potential and cleaner in smaller pistols gave the bureau, in a similar way, a commitment to predictable bullets, which became demonstrated the same way each time.
