Five Reasons The 9 mm Dominates The Handgun Market

Guns & Ammo recently published a piece entitled "Five Reasons the 9mm Dominates the Self-Defense Market," with the five reasons being:

1. FBI Data Shows 9mms with Modern Ammo Are Effective.
2. The 9mm Is Shootable.
3. Ammo Selection Is Unmatched.
4. 9mm Strikes a Balance of Portability, Power, and Capacity.
5. There’s a 9mm for Every Application.

Unfortunately, I'm old enough to remember when FBI data found 9mm to be less effective (thus the reason the FBI went, first, to the 10mm and, later, to the .40 S&W); when ammo selection was ho-hum and, therefore, there really wasn't a 9mm for every application. And yet the 9mm was still dominating the market and rapidly displacing the .45 ACP in the 1970s and '80s. 

    I think the 9mm became popular for a couple of reasons in the 1980s and '90s. First, and this is something I've written about before, was that is provides an almost ideal balance between shootability (i.e., reasonable recoil), power or effectiveness, and capacity versus the size of the weapon. The Browning Hi-Power had long held a capacity advantage with 13-round magazines, but even in the 1970s, weapons featuring what for that day were "high-capacity" magazines holding 15 rounds were appearing. And it could do this in weapons that were the same size as .45 ACPs holding half of much. And I'm sure that most people believed (and still do) that volume would make up for slightly less effectiveness. 

    This is the same reason that .38 Special dominated the police and defensive revolver market through most of the 20th Century. It had the same balance between shootability and power and capacity. But, you say, the .38s only held 6-shots, same as larger revolvers in .357 Magnum, .41 Magnum, .44 Magnum, or .45 Colt. True. But if you handle a S&W Model 10 and compare it to revolvers for those other cartridges, it is a smaller and certainly lighter weapon. Particularly the pencil-barrel versions popular with police and the average civilian. Thus, it offered the same capacity but in a lighter, more compact weapon.

    The second major factor behind the popularity of the 9mm was cost. When I was old enough to own my own handguns and got serious about shooting, 50 rounds of FMJ ammo for the 9mm was typically $8 or $9 per box, and sometime less if it was on sale--about half the cost of .45 ACP and still substantially less expensive than .38 Special which was still much more common at the time. "Plinking" ammo for the 9mm is still much less expensive than centerfire handgun ammo of any other caliber. 

     The better selection of bullets, including bullets that are more effective or bullets for specialized applications, is just the cherry on top of the other benefits offered by the 9mm.