A Better Bullet

There never was much wrong with the venerable .45 ACP, or the 9mm. Both have been around for decades. But the .45 is a big ugly, slow round that limits how much you can put into a handgun, and the 9mm is perceived as weak by law enforcement—simply because some shooters think you need to fire a lot of them to compensate for lazy technique.

Anyway, with regret, we see that the FBI has elected to standardize on the 10mm round, a new cartridge that attempts to balance the worst of the .45 ACP and 9mm. In other words, we found a way to take the trendiness of the 9mm and put too much recoil behind it.

The Czar predicts that despite its better-than-.45 range and greater-than-9mm recoil, this round is a dud. No doubt all the .45 and 9mm manufacturers are retooling their existing stock to 10mm-mogrify them, which historically always results in a crappy weapon, as opposed to designing something from scratch.

Here is a simple suggestion. Why not start over? Take something that can be more easily retrofitted into existing weapons but offers more energy (say a shade over 10mm, like 10.16mm?). Heck, the case head could be the same, making it easier to convert weapons without crippling their utility. And by using a slightly larger caliber, you can reduce the length proportionately and get great performance for a fraction of the recoil. A good manufacturer, like Smith & Wesson, could probably get a round like this in actual weapons within four years. Glock could probably get a competitive version out in the same time or less.

Just a thought.