The 9mm is being rediscovered by police (it mostly was beaten out by the 40 from the early '90s) because it's cheaper to train with (both ammo cost and mild report/recoil). The 9mm miracle bullet nonsense is intended for marketing.
I have a few boxes of 2022 'LE Only' Hornady Critical Duty #90225. It is pretty much indistinguishable in terminal performance on jackrabbits and coyotes from the Super WhizBang JHPs of the past 30 years, with the cool-looking red ball in the hollow point notwithstanding.
100% agree! I've been handloading all calibers for 50 years and worked up many a 9mm "performance load" along with others, and the magical, miracle load is basically the one being served up to the public who for the most part have no way of knowing one way or the other.
Go on over the Lucky Gunner and you'll quickly see that for every load the flattens to a dime, there are many others that barely deform the hollow nose - clearly not every load is superior. More importantly is that gelatin shots are representative of relative performance, not absolute performance. A closer rendering would be shooting into human torso profiles composed of gelatin with skeleton inserts and simulated organs to to better watch as many 9mm loads go streaking right on through a relatively "flat" human from front to back - expanded or not.
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn't exist....well, an almost as great of a trick is the cartridge industry profiteering off politically motivated government decisions and an eager public shelling out $40/20 for magical ammo versus $15/50 for "completely ineffective, range ammo, totally worthless for self defense!" Yeah? Tell that to all the dead people created by 9mm ball over the last 115 years! I guarantee you it's a lot more than have been "humanely" put down by magic bullets in the post-40S&W era.
The failure of the 9mm was due to poor marksmanship - many more misses than hits, and a transverse impact that had to pass through the upper arm, into the chest, and skidded to a halt against the Pericardium. Had that one, expanded 9mm slug managed to punch through the heart, the miscreant almost certainly would have gone down long before he was finally taken out by a hail of .38 slugs to the face. The problem with the 9mm is it really ISN'T powerful enough to deliver reliable penetration during off-axis hits when using expanding bullets. Non-expanding it's great at penetrating and as I keep trying to remind people, a bullet that goes all the way through went all the way through everything in between! A bullet that doesn't exit you have no idea at what point it decided to call it quits but Murphy's Law reminds us all the time that point is usually the worst one for the shooter!
The bottom line of low-power handgun rounds is that a hit to a non-vital spot with an expanding bullet is no more effective than a hit with a "ball" round. A hit to a vital spot with a ball round is no less effective than a hit with an expanding bullet. I know the general public has been deceived into believing that expanding bullets create magical lacerations that aid bleed out, but that ignores the salient facts of how the human body is structured and WHY it is so structured! It's also based on a false representation that low power expanding bullets perform on par with high velocity, solid, magnum handgun bullets - they do not.
So the .40S&W was one of the few "evidence based" cartridge design decisions in history. It was designed to do exactly what the 9mm HP failed to do - go deep enough to reliably penetrate far enough to ensure damage. Paul Harrel has an excellent video recreating a closely as possible the original 9mm failure strike on a "meat target" followed by the same test using a .40S&W. The results are nothing less than obvious to anyone not blinded by bias. The modern expanding 9mm round stopped just outside the plastic bag (pericardium) surrounding a chicken breast (heart) inside the simulated rib cage. The expanding .40 round punched through the simulated heart - off-axis impact after passing through the "arm", and two stopped just shy of exiting, with one exiting.
I'm sure proponents of the FBI's politically motivated regression to the 9mm will tell you to believe the propaganda, NOT your "lyin' eyes." Clearly many do. If I hadn't shot a great many living creatures over the years to see first-hand what does what, I might believe it too...after all, a 9mm round certainly stops a paper target just as well as a .40.
Bottom line, any way you slice it, the .40S&W is the BETTER cartridge for antipersonnel use, and easily shades the 9mm by as much as 100fpe in certain loads in non-+P loads.
And not every LEA dumped the .40 like a trail of baby elephants following momma. I happen to work for one extremely large State agency that still issues the Glock 22 which gives up just 11% capacity, easily solved by adding a +2 base for those so inclined.
The real "advance" in ballistic performance has been how cops are trained to shoot...as in start shooting and KEEP SHOOTING until the threat is down! With that approach, indeed the 9mm is a solid performer as long as most of those slugs count - same for the .40S&W.
...Ben
