Thread: So I was gonna buy a Livi but I got this instead...

New toy for work...
oooh.... and tax deductible

I know, I know... 9mm sucks.
Florida only allows .380, 9mm and 38 spl for security work.
Now for the jet funnel kit

http://www.gunbroker.com/Auction/Vie...?Item=66124373


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler_%26_Koch_USP

It came with 3 mags and night sights too!!

Good choice. I had a 1st gen USP40 that I loved. Mine had the land-and-groove rifling; they only made a few thousand before they switched to polygonal rifling. Great pistol, reliable as heck and accurate. The recoil reduction system really worked, my .40 kicked about like a 9mm, so a 9mm should just lay there like a sorority girl.

...............




...... aaahhhhh.....sorority girls........

Hell, with calibers like those you might as well throw the bullets at them with your hands!

I am not a gun expert but why are 9mm considered sissy bullets?
From what little I know, 9mm can kill as well as eg. a .44.

I know that .44 bullets carry a lot more energy, but does that really matter?
Ok the visual aspect will not be as explicit, but dead is dead, no?

Cops in Belgium (and those in lots of other european countries as well) use 9mm, and they seem to get by well enough.
Carrying anything else is frowned upon, or so I've heard.

That's partly a matter of history, and partly a matter of experience. 9mm parabellum is seen as a great SMG round but a mediocre pistol round because of our experiences on the receiving end in the two world wars. The 44's and 45's have been popular here since the days of the old west so it's partly a legacy thing. We've tried 9mm cartridges before, the venerable 38 Special was used by the military in the early 1900's and the combat failure of this cartridge led directly to the development of the 45 ACP. The 38 special was the mainstay police revolver round for 40 years before being supplanted by the 357 magnum, which was also a 9mm round though a really high power one. So the 9mm parabellum was considered a weeny cartridge both because of its smaller diameter compared to the combat-proven 44's and 45's, and because of its middling ballistics compared to the police-proven 357 magnum, so both the the kinetic energy fans and the momentum fans pissed all over it.

The 9mm did go through a boom in the 80's after the US military adopted it, but interest waned considerably after congress passed a law restricting magazines to 10 rounds - if you're restricted to 10 rounds they may as well be big ones. After the magazine limit expired interest stayed low due to the bad experiences of the servicemen that actually used the pistol in combat - there have been a lot of reports of GI's in the middle east buying their own 45's to use because the enemy tends to be drugged out when they attack, and with the 9mm they don't even notice they've been hit. And many of the police departments that switched to the 9mm parabellum in the 80's have since switched to bigger cartridges, either to the 45 ACP or to the 357 SIG (which is an autoloader cartridge that duplicates the lower end of 357 loadings). Some switched to the 40 S&W which is kind of halfway between the 9mm parabellum and the 45ACP, and because of this it suffers from the same image problems as the 9mm parabellum, it has a smaller diameter than the 45 and lower velocity compared to the 357 SIG.

Yes in a police situation when the adrenal starts to flow you can hit some one numerous times and they may be dead in 30 seconds but in that time they can fire off some rounds at you so you want the best round you can get that will put someone down as fast as possible. The 9mm has little instant killing power. The 45 or 357 sig is far better. But ask any LEA and he'll tell you the best tool is a 12 gauge slug. When it talks everyone listens. One hit and thats the end.

For all their faults, that's at least one thing the video games get right. When the going gets tough, the tough grab a shotgun. Unless they've got the rocket launcher in their inventory :-)

A pistol round is a pistol round for all intent and purposes. You'll start noticing a difference in "effectiveness" when you move to rifle, or depending on the range, a shotgun. Shoot the biggest caliber you can reliably hit what you're shooting at. You want to be as precise as possible as you'll be 50% worse under stress (generally).

Hm. but in a confused / dynamic situation where you might only get 1 shot in, the more oomph, the better.
I suppose SAS soldiers don't need much oomph because they are trained to be accurate and efficient in stress situations.

I wonder why noone bothered to turn a 12 gauge into a pistol.