What is wrong with the 40 S&W?
- Thread starter walnutred
- Start date
I was shooting 9mm and .45 out of my autoloaders (Smiths, Sigs and Beretta's) when the 40S&W was introduced........ I had "several" 
D) guns, extra magazines, a nice ammo stash and
good leather........
Read about the .40 ..... thought about it and........while I found nothing 'wrong" with the new round....
I concluded it wasn't something "I" needed. If I wanted more power than a 9mm or more rounds than my 45s......what I probably needed was a long gun not another handgun.
I do have one; a Sig 229 with both .40 and .357Sig barrels and a half dozen magazines in the safe.
D) guns, extra magazines, a nice ammo stash and good leather........
Read about the .40 ..... thought about it and........while I found nothing 'wrong" with the new round....
I concluded it wasn't something "I" needed. If I wanted more power than a 9mm or more rounds than my 45s......what I probably needed was a long gun not another handgun.
I do have one; a Sig 229 with both .40 and .357Sig barrels and a half dozen magazines in the safe.
All the service calibers work the same on the street.
Nobody can prove otherwise. And there's no theoretical reason either.
Big Caliber obsession is an American thing.
The rest of the world thinks nine is fine.
HamHands
Member
.40 S&W is a hellofa caliber and is fantastic for shooting thru windshields and car doors whilst still getting deep into the dirt-bag. Almost any round in .40 caliber is a decent choice for ccw and general shooting, (even ball ammo is viable due to it's bullet profile "truncated cone"/flat tip), thru both aforementioned barriers. I carried the .40 S&W almost every single day for 10 years except for the times when I had the flu or was recovering from 2 serious accidents and rehabbing my body there from! 5 years in a Glock 27, and 5 years in a Smith & Wesson M&P40compact... The Glock was/is a miserable little *** that recoiled just like a
"Loaded-To-Spec" Full-House 10mm with the 155 and 165 grain Gold Dots and most other factory loaded ball and HP loads even... With 180 grain loads the G27 was bearable in both ball and self defense loads. If you could ask anyone that knows me they'd say that I'm NOT recoil shy... being that I love my 3" M24 and M29's loaded with HOT .44Specials and the mags stoked with 305grain equally hot for caliber loads. In my opinion... Glock... being as popular a handgun as it was/is back when the .40cal was introduced and a couple years thereafter... IS the reason that the wonderful .40cal was pretty much hated from the start. Glock, shoehorned the .40caliber into a 9mm sized frame/gun instead of making an appropriate sized handgun from the start in order to be the first rushed to market ahead of it's competitors. The S&W M&P series of full-sized, mid-sized, and Compacts (my favorite M&P's), were developed from the start..., (12-15 years too late of course sadly), appropriately sized framed guns to be .40cal's and .357Sigs from the start unlike Glock. The result of a Smith & Wesson M&P series plastic fantastic was a soft shooting, zero flinch inducing, reliable, hard hitting gun with enough pills on tap in the magazine to be a more than viable handgun for everyday use and police/gov't work. The G27 I had recoiled almost twice as hard and has a muzzle flip that is easily 2 times that of the M&P "Middy" and the "Compact" series semi-auto pistols. This is why the masses initially hated Smith & Wesson's .40Cal in my experience and opinion. Ideas were formed and regurgitated early on. Those that I let shoot my G27 all the years I had it all remarked of how "snappy", "uncomfortable", and how "crappy the grip" was/is." The G22 and G23's I shot, handled, tried to like/get into at the time, (2005 to 2010) all felt, performed, recoiled, carried on the hip almost the same way the G27 does and it put a bad taste in my mouth and most other friends and family (all gun guys and even gun girls) that I know of.
The .40caliber Unfortunately was & is a victim of Glock and it's Popularity in my experience & NOT because it's an ineffective caliber. The .40cal exceeds in performance where a lot of the other popular handgun calibers and a couple of the common "Service Calibers" Do Not! As always, you YMMV...
"Loaded-To-Spec" Full-House 10mm with the 155 and 165 grain Gold Dots and most other factory loaded ball and HP loads even... With 180 grain loads the G27 was bearable in both ball and self defense loads. If you could ask anyone that knows me they'd say that I'm NOT recoil shy... being that I love my 3" M24 and M29's loaded with HOT .44Specials and the mags stoked with 305grain equally hot for caliber loads. In my opinion... Glock... being as popular a handgun as it was/is back when the .40cal was introduced and a couple years thereafter... IS the reason that the wonderful .40cal was pretty much hated from the start. Glock, shoehorned the .40caliber into a 9mm sized frame/gun instead of making an appropriate sized handgun from the start in order to be the first rushed to market ahead of it's competitors. The S&W M&P series of full-sized, mid-sized, and Compacts (my favorite M&P's), were developed from the start..., (12-15 years too late of course sadly), appropriately sized framed guns to be .40cal's and .357Sigs from the start unlike Glock. The result of a Smith & Wesson M&P series plastic fantastic was a soft shooting, zero flinch inducing, reliable, hard hitting gun with enough pills on tap in the magazine to be a more than viable handgun for everyday use and police/gov't work. The G27 I had recoiled almost twice as hard and has a muzzle flip that is easily 2 times that of the M&P "Middy" and the "Compact" series semi-auto pistols. This is why the masses initially hated Smith & Wesson's .40Cal in my experience and opinion. Ideas were formed and regurgitated early on. Those that I let shoot my G27 all the years I had it all remarked of how "snappy", "uncomfortable", and how "crappy the grip" was/is." The G22 and G23's I shot, handled, tried to like/get into at the time, (2005 to 2010) all felt, performed, recoiled, carried on the hip almost the same way the G27 does and it put a bad taste in my mouth and most other friends and family (all gun guys and even gun girls) that I know of.
The .40caliber Unfortunately was & is a victim of Glock and it's Popularity in my experience & NOT because it's an ineffective caliber. The .40cal exceeds in performance where a lot of the other popular handgun calibers and a couple of the common "Service Calibers" Do Not! As always, you YMMV...
sigp220.45
US Veteran
I had a murder warrant for a guy who stabbed another guy to death during some Fourth of July festivities. The tribal cops caught up with him later that night and stopped him with their cars facing each other on a dirt road about 15 feet apart. He had upgraded to a Marlin 30/30 and cut loose first, missing the cop on the passenger side. He had levered in another round when the driver cop, a tough younger female, let fly with her Glock 22. The cars were offset, so that bullet had two angles working against it - side to side and the usual backwards tilt of the windshield. It powered through, took an almost .40 caliber bite out of the steering wheel, ruined a perfectly good XXL Insane Clown Posse t-shirt, then did a farewell tour of a sternum and some ventricles and such stuff, and parked itself neatly against his baby back ribs. No more silliness from him. She let fly a couple more since he stayed propped up in the crack of the door, but that first one did the deed.
Would my beloved .32 ACP have done the same? Nope.
Would a quality bonded 9mm have worked? Maybe. Maybe not.
But that .40 did.
The problem with looking at wound tracks and autopsy reports and not being at the scene while a guy assumes ambient temperature is it ignores what the bullet had to do to get there. The doc could have looked at that poor beat-to-hell .40 and said, Yup - no different than a 9mm.
I remember when the party line was “a 9mm works half the time, a .45 ACP works 19 out of 20 times” thanks to Col Cooper. That wasn’t true even then but people accepted it as fact. Now its “they’re all the same” and people accept that, until they don’t. Which will happen soon enough.
I don’t shoot at people in cars anymore, so my elegant Colt Pocket Hammerless is fine for me.
That’s the Marlin in the picture, next to baby Randy who ran out of gas during bring-your-dog-to-work day, an event wholly unsanctioned by the uppercase FBI. Luckily I was in the lowercase fbi, forgotten on the rez.
Would my beloved .32 ACP have done the same? Nope.
Would a quality bonded 9mm have worked? Maybe. Maybe not.
But that .40 did.
The problem with looking at wound tracks and autopsy reports and not being at the scene while a guy assumes ambient temperature is it ignores what the bullet had to do to get there. The doc could have looked at that poor beat-to-hell .40 and said, Yup - no different than a 9mm.
I remember when the party line was “a 9mm works half the time, a .45 ACP works 19 out of 20 times” thanks to Col Cooper. That wasn’t true even then but people accepted it as fact. Now its “they’re all the same” and people accept that, until they don’t. Which will happen soon enough.
I don’t shoot at people in cars anymore, so my elegant Colt Pocket Hammerless is fine for me.
That’s the Marlin in the picture, next to baby Randy who ran out of gas during bring-your-dog-to-work day, an event wholly unsanctioned by the uppercase FBI. Luckily I was in the lowercase fbi, forgotten on the rez.
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Our experience was different. Experience.
Scott in NCal
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My 32 wont knock around the steel plate on my Dueling Target Tree. Thats important to me.
Funflyer
Member
For the capable shooter there's nothing wrong with the .40 S&W, even in the smallest pistol available. For those not capable, there's 9mm
Something I hear a lot of on threads like these is how the 9mm has had all these wonderful advances in bullet technology and loads.
So you think that the ammo manufacturers decided to improve 9mm and only 9mm ? The same "improvements" in pistol ammo done to the 9mm have also been done to the .40 and .45.
Don't kid yourself, in order to justify your use of the smaller caliber round.
9mm is a decent round, one I've carried myself at times, but all modern technological advances weren't limited to just the 9mm.
25 to 30 % of guys on these type of posts will repeat over and over that the 9mm has been constantly improved the last few decades, well so has everything else.
So you think that the ammo manufacturers decided to improve 9mm and only 9mm ? The same "improvements" in pistol ammo done to the 9mm have also been done to the .40 and .45.
Don't kid yourself, in order to justify your use of the smaller caliber round.
9mm is a decent round, one I've carried myself at times, but all modern technological advances weren't limited to just the 9mm.
25 to 30 % of guys on these type of posts will repeat over and over that the 9mm has been constantly improved the last few decades, well so has everything else.
Groo01
Member
Groo here
I have had a "Few" 40S&W guns .
First off, never saw one that was capable of "good" accuracy
except one [ EAA Gold Team]
There is that Glock thing[K-boom!]
The round is loaded down from original [but what is not]
AS to performance most SD rounds are loaded to "FBI SPEC"
There fore , there is no suprise they tend to work the same.
That is why I don't care if it makes spec, just will it do what "I" want....
The best thing about is ,,, most can be made to shoot 357sig
with just a barrel!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
An all round better round ,much like a 357 mag..
I have had a "Few" 40S&W guns .
First off, never saw one that was capable of "good" accuracy
except one [ EAA Gold Team]
There is that Glock thing[K-boom!]
The round is loaded down from original [but what is not]
AS to performance most SD rounds are loaded to "FBI SPEC"
There fore , there is no suprise they tend to work the same.
That is why I don't care if it makes spec, just will it do what "I" want....
The best thing about is ,,, most can be made to shoot 357sig
with just a barrel!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
An all round better round ,much like a 357 mag..
The 40 came along because the 10 was a little too much for all the FBI people to master.
The new 10 was a heck of a package with full recoil.
The FBI needed a round with a little less recoil so the agents could
hit the targets !!
That was when the 40 came out and passed the FBI's needs.
A good load for LE and it has done well over the years.
Just hard to get a LOT of rounds to fit inside a pistol handle.....
and a light weight frame can be uncomfortable to shoot, to many.
The new 10 was a heck of a package with full recoil.
The FBI needed a round with a little less recoil so the agents could
hit the targets !!
That was when the 40 came out and passed the FBI's needs.
A good load for LE and it has done well over the years.
Just hard to get a LOT of rounds to fit inside a pistol handle.....
and a light weight frame can be uncomfortable to shoot, to many.
sigp220.45
US Veteran
Not true regarding the FBI.
The 10mm was a compromise pick between the FTU guys who advocated the 9mm on one side and .45 ACP on the other.
As much as the internet loves the idea of wimpy accountants and lawyers dropping their 1076s in horror at the fearsome recoil while holding sprained wrists and hopping around on one foot, it just never happened. Agents were never issued full power 10mm.
The ballistic guys determined what they wanted as far as depth of penetration and bullet expansion and started loading rounds and shooting at gel. A 180 grain bullet at 950 fps gave them what they wanted, so they stopped and had Federal make a few million of them.
These guys were street Agents during the “load with .38s, have Magnum rounds available” era, and there was some thought to doing the same with 10mm lite and 10mm full, but the 1076 had been recalled by then. I was in the first class of newbies to get Sig 9mms (piggybacked off DEA’s contract) after the 1076 flamed out. John Hall, who had headed the FTU, was my primary legal instructor by then and I talked to him about it.
Before long some bright boy realized you didn’t need all that case (or gun) for that load, and the .40 S&W was born. We adopted it in the mid 90s.
What a strange arc the .40 has had. It went from “Short & Weak” to a heavy recoiling destroyer of guns and qualification scores.
I’m a semi-retired gentleman of leisure now, but I still shoot every week. Judging by the widely spaced 9mm holes in targets at the five yard line at my local range it is probably a good thing those average Joes aren’t shooting .40s.
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DanRod_LA
Member
I found this while reading an old American Rifleman article on the 1989 FBI Ammo Tests:
“Expansion, when it occurs, is a nice bonus, but you can't depend on it for incapacitation,” Urey Patrick, assistant chief of the FBI's FTU.
And out of the actual FBI report:
It is essential to bear in mind that the single most critical factor remains penetration. While penetration up to 18 inches is preferable, a handgun bullet MUST reliably penetrate 12 inches of soft body tissue at a minimum, regardless of whether it expands or not. If the bullet does not reliably penetrate to these depths, it is not an effective bullet for law enforcement use.36
33 Wound Ballistic Workshop: "9mm vs. .45 Auto", FBI Academy, Quantico, VA, September, 1987. Conclusion of the Workshop.
This was before the 10mm or even the .40 were developed. The results of these tests and their findings have directly effected bullet design for the last 30 years. Since then ammo manufacturers have designed bullets with these tests in mind, and for a greater part of this time the .40S&W met all the criteria set forth while also giving the Officer (shooter) greater capacity. You cannot rely on a single shot to incapacitate a human target. Where one person might faint at the sound of a gun going off others have fought back even after sustaining fatal gunshot wounds.
The .40S&W is no worse than it has ever been. 9mm has just become better. When you consider other factors such as recoil, capacity, wear and tear on guns, you can see why the FBI and other Law Enforcement agencies have moved to the 9mm. I'm sure costs are a factor as well.
I'll leave the links for the pages and tests results here:
http://gundata.org/images/fbi-handgun-ballistics.pdf
American Rifleman | Throwback Thursday: The FBI Ammo Tests
“Expansion, when it occurs, is a nice bonus, but you can't depend on it for incapacitation,” Urey Patrick, assistant chief of the FBI's FTU.
And out of the actual FBI report:
It is essential to bear in mind that the single most critical factor remains penetration. While penetration up to 18 inches is preferable, a handgun bullet MUST reliably penetrate 12 inches of soft body tissue at a minimum, regardless of whether it expands or not. If the bullet does not reliably penetrate to these depths, it is not an effective bullet for law enforcement use.36
33 Wound Ballistic Workshop: "9mm vs. .45 Auto", FBI Academy, Quantico, VA, September, 1987. Conclusion of the Workshop.
This was before the 10mm or even the .40 were developed. The results of these tests and their findings have directly effected bullet design for the last 30 years. Since then ammo manufacturers have designed bullets with these tests in mind, and for a greater part of this time the .40S&W met all the criteria set forth while also giving the Officer (shooter) greater capacity. You cannot rely on a single shot to incapacitate a human target. Where one person might faint at the sound of a gun going off others have fought back even after sustaining fatal gunshot wounds.
The .40S&W is no worse than it has ever been. 9mm has just become better. When you consider other factors such as recoil, capacity, wear and tear on guns, you can see why the FBI and other Law Enforcement agencies have moved to the 9mm. I'm sure costs are a factor as well.
I'll leave the links for the pages and tests results here:
http://gundata.org/images/fbi-handgun-ballistics.pdf
American Rifleman | Throwback Thursday: The FBI Ammo Tests
HamHands
Member
Great first hand account/story! The .40Cal is a viable option that punches nastily thru auto glass and sheet metal and keeps on thumpin'...
Beautiful lil' pup... Is he a Doby or a Rotty? I'm guessing a Rottweiler due to his plump and healthy size. I love both of those breeds as well as GSD's... Mine is almost 2 years old and is really "filling out" in the weight department!
"Ripley"...
sigp220.45
US Veteran
Great first hand account/story! The .40Cal is a viable option that punches nastily thru auto glass and sheet metal and keeps on thumpin'...
Beautiful lil' pup... Is he a Doby or a Rotty? I'm guessing a Rottweiler due to his plump and healthy size. I love both of those breeds as well as GSD's... Mine is almost 2 years old and is really "filling out" in the weight department!
"Ripley"...
He’s a big goofy Rottie. Here he is greeting visitors at the next BYDTWD.
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Its ALL in the ADVERTISING.......When the 40 came out it was touted as fantastic! Everybody wanted one.....Better that the 9 they say(true). Now advertising is pushing the 9(kaiser's round) and the lemmings are running to it as latest and greatest. I have them all and like them all. I am a fan of big holes. Big holes let more air in and more blood out.
Ohhh, nice! I carry a S&W Model 6946, the DAO trigger is not hard to master if you have plenty of experience with DA revolvers.I like ‘em so much, I just bought another this very afternoon. It’s a 4046 DAO. Price was right and I just couldn’t pass it up
mike from st pete
Member
A better phrased question would be 'What is right with the 40S&W'.
