Around what year(s) did that switch take place?
What change(s) enabled that?
If your answer is “pistols got better” please specify how and what models best exemplified that.
By “civilian” I include law enforcement, private organizations and individuals. If the change occurred at different times and for different reasons, please make the distinction.
I’d say it was when the small-frame, large-caliber semiautos became reliable and reasonably priced. The only good auto until perhaps the 1970s was the 1911A1, which is and was a fine pistol but too large for many carriers. The .32 and .380 popguns were too underpowered. I’d place my bet on the rise of the 9mm compacts.
That’s my recollection as well. Mid 80s or so, when all the “wondernines” started appearing and Jeff Cooper started railing against “crunchentickers.”
And yet they were very popular in the early 20th Century. Colt built more than half a million Model 1903 Pocket Hammerless pistols alone. (And of course Bad, Bad Leroy Brown had a thirty-two gun in his pocket for fun.)
That is my vote too. It was the mid 80’s when models like the Glock 17 and 19 usually in 9mm started to be adopted in huge numbers by police departments around the country and the world. That carried over to the civilian market very rapidly. 9mm Glocks and their competitors aren’t especially powerful (about the equivalent of a .38 revolver) but they are well made, compact, fairly tame to shoot and can have a high capacity.
Before that, common police handguns were .357 magnum revolvers, .38 revolvers and variants on the 1911 .45 semi-auto. All of those have their place as well but you can easily argue that the .45 and .357 magnum are too large and overpowered to be a great daily service weapon. The .38 and 9mm have a very similar ballistic profile but the 9mm has the advantage when it is carried in a well-designed and compact semi-auto frame that can fire more than 6 shots as fast as you can pull the trigger.
The civilian market changed over to semi-autos for the same reasons the law enforcement market did at least among people that just wanted a defensive handgun that was easy to carry, friendly to shoot and could hold more rounds than a revolver. There really aren’t that many people that have a legitimate need for a .357 magnum let alone its big brother, the .44 magnum unless you want to use it for hunting or hike a lot in bear country. They are overkill as daily defensive weapons while many other revolvers like the .380 and .32 calibers aren’t powerful enough. The semi-autos introduced in the 80’s met the sweet spot between utility, power and user-friendliness that a lot of people were looking for.
The US Army XM9 and the Joint Services Small Arms Program spurred manufactuers to develop and tool up for high capacity 9mm double action semi-automatic pistols. While Beretta contraversially won the eventual procurement with the sometimes troubled-but-popular Model 92F (and later modifications to prevent contamination and slide separations experienced in Operation Desert Storm), many other manufacturers offered high capacity pistols of excellent build quality and handling characteristics which were well suited to police service, e.g. Glock (which originally won the Army competition and arguably should have won the JSSAP competition), Sig Sauer, H&K, and the later excellent Smith & Wesson Gen III pistols. While a few high capacity semi-automatic 9mm pistols were available prior to this (the Browning Hi-Power since 1935, and the CZ-75 pattern pistols from Czechoslovakia, available in the West from the early 'Eighties in limited quanties), plus a handful of others, none had gained traction with law enforcement and thus weren’t built in suffiicent quanties to be imported in to the US, nor were in the popular consciousness.
Law enforcement adopted semi-automatic pistols largely in response to perceived increased gang violence (although it can be argued that the quasi-militarization of law enforcement and substantially enhanced drug prohibition led to the organization and armament of urban gangs), and incidentially found that while autoloading pistols are a little more techincally complex, they are also more robust, compact, and more comfortable to carry than comparable revolvers. (A compact, 2" barrel .38 Special revolver is over two inches in width and has an effective aimed range of about 10 meters; a compact 9mmP or .40 S&W autoloader will have a typical width of about 1.4" and an effective aimed range of 25 meters or more.) This also lead to ammunition manufacturers developing more consistent and effective hollowpoint ammunition suitable for law enforcement use. (While hollowpoints–sometimes called ‘dum-dums’ by uneducated critics–are often villified as particlualry dangerous, the truth is that they are more effective at stopping a threatening person with fewer shots and have far less potential to overpenetrate through a target, thereby reducing the hazard to bystanders, and hence are used universally by law enforcement.) Automatics also carry more ammunition and are (for the average non-competition shooter) faster to reload. By the late 'Eighties, nearly all major police departments had moved to issuing autoloaders to new officers and were encouraging or requiring that current officers transition to an autoloading platform, most typically the Beretta or Glock, but also Sigs, S&Ws, and H&Ks. This, and the popularization in films like Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, and various television programs resulted in the viewing public also taking an interest in high capacity autoloaders.
It should be noted that while the ‘wondernines’ were a phenomenon of the 'Eighties, there had long been a contingent of shooters using the 1911 pattern (the standard Army pistol until the adoption of the M9) and to a lesser extent, the Browning Hi-Power and S&W first and second generation automatics. Because autoloading pistols are more sensitive to variations in propellant load and bullet seating than revolvers they were considered less reliable, but the claim that revolvers “can’t jam” is a myth, and a good service grade autoloading pistol is far more robust and reliable than an autoloader.
Stranger
Stranger,
Why the 2.5 fold difference in practical range between revolvers and pistols?
You say that pistols are more robust than revolvers. How so? I often see the word “robust” in engineering discussions so it may have a specific implied meaning which non-engineers like me don’t know.
And still, the only 9mm I own is a Hi-Power. Well, 9X19. If 9X18s count the total goes up a bit. What can I say, Makarovs were cheap there for awhile.
I think another facet of the adoption of semiauto pistols by police was the widespread introduction of DAO models. I remember some of the discussion back in the day about how cops carrying in Condition 1 was a Bad Idea, and carrying Condition 3 was an even worse idea. When Beretta and others started offering double-action semis, cops got interested.
Even though double action only is an abomination of everything a decent, Cooper-fearing pistol holds dear. There is no reason for DAO other than to assuage the fear of police commissioners that their officers can’t be trusted to learn to manipulate simple controls. Nonetheless, the Glock ‘Safe Action’ (which is not DAO and has only the trigger paddle as an external safety) was widely adopted by police departments both because of the lack of external controls and a grip angle that was comfortable to revolver shooters (even though it is not terribly ergonomic), which led to manufacturers of double action/single action pistols offering DAO versions by dint of eliminating the hammer detent.
Stranger
They can survive rough treatment, or mistreatment, better, and when they go bad they are cheaper to fix (or usually pay someone to fix)
A “snub-nosed” compact revolver will have a typical barrel length of about 2"; just enough stabilize the bullet but not nearly enough to get good utilization of the propellant gases. The sight radius on such a gun is from the front blade at the end of the barrel to the notch on the back of the upper frame; about 4". A comparable subcompact pistol like the Glock 26 or the Sig Sauer P239 has a barrel that is about 3.5" in length and a sight radius of 5.5" to 6". Although that may not sound like a lot of additional length, it is enough to make the difference between a punch shooter and a pistol capable of accuracy over more than the distance of a small room.
Revolvers have much of the mechanism–specifically the cylinder, crane, and cylinder rotating cam–exposed to contamination. The cylinder is basically cantilevered off of the crane on the same boss that the extractor rod passes through. I’ve seen revolvers jammed so tight by contamination or impact to the cylinder that they had to be released by a gunsmith with the use of a vice. Most modern service grade pistols, however, have only a few places where contamination can enter, are quite strong against incidential damage (the Glock made its reputation by being able to shoot after being run over by a truck and buried in mud for days). Note that virtually all militaries, and especially special operations units, went exclusively to autoloading pistols by the middle of last century except for policing or secondary duties.
Stranger
Quibble: the G17 and G19 are always 9mm. Glock uses different model numbers for other calibers.
See: Wonder nine.
Any reason why you assume .32 ACP when .32 S&W (Long) and others were popular as well?