No, it doesn’t, and any department which did have such a policy would find itself being sued. They shoot to ‘stop’ - whether the person dies afterwards is immaterial.
The 9mm verses .45acp debate has raged on for years. Most people involved in the argument can show you ballistic tables and videos of bullets entering ballistic gel. Often they make reference to law enforcement and their inability to knock down some perpetrator who, as it turned out, was so cranked up on PCP that nothing phased would have phased them short of running them over with a patrol car.
The true answer here is: Shot Placement. If you can hit what you are shooting at, virtually any pistol round is effective.
In a local incident, there was a guy who held up a Wendy’s. The police arrived on the scene before the perpetrator had left the building. Three police officers entered the restaurant. The perpetrator aimed at the officers with what turned out to be a realistic air soft pistol. The officers fired 32 rounds off. Two of these ended up going through the window of a tanning salon a block away. The perpetrator was hit as well as the sound engineer for the TV show “Cops.”
The perpetrator and the sound guy died later in the hospital.
Back to shot placement: 9mm, .45acp, .22LR are all moot points if you do not hit what you are shooting at
On the one hand my first thought was to suggest that we look into armoring driver side doors of police cars. OTOH, that’s a lot of expense for how rarely people shoot back at police cars.
My friend had her car parked in a bad neighborhood one day where there was a shooting. There were three bullet holes in the rear passenger door. One bullet was laying on the back seat, one on the dash board (that you could see had ricocheted around) and one was stuck inside the door and ruined the window motor or gear. The window only went down about an inch). At least that finally got her to stop dating that guy we all told her was no good.
Mythbusters did an episode testing the effectiveness of a car door as a bullet shield. They ended up by putting a couple of layers of phone books in the door panel to actually stop the bullets
Nitpick, I believe the myth was that phone books would make a car bulletproof, not that a car door wasn’t and it took phone books to stop a bullet.
If 9 mm is good enough for the FBI, it’s good enough for the police (link).
You are correct. I misremembered the myth they were testing. The end result still shows that a car door, in and of itself, is not an effective shield against gun fire
The NPS went semi-auto years ago. Prior to that, standard issue was the .38 J-frame. You could carry a .357 if you wanted to, but you had to buy it yourself. Very few commissioned Rangers opted to do so. When I worked in Sequoia in 1989, I only knew one. LE jobs that pay $1.00/hr. above minimum wage don’t allow much leeway for expensive purchases. Used to be that it was like pulling teeth to get the backcountry Rangers to even carry their guns in the first place.
That sounds right. I now seem to remember that they requested the ability to carry a .357 if they wanted to.
Another side note… My Wife used to work animal control for our small mountain county. This was 20 years ago. At one point, they considered arming the animal control officers (note, my wife was not Division of Wildlife, County Animal Control. Think stray dogs). My wife felt that in no way did she get paid enough to have to carry a gun. I think the thought was not so much to protect herself or others from animals, but from the nutjobs that think it’s just fine to have their dangerous dog uncontrolled. Nope. That’s when you call the LEOs.
Police forces around the world increasingly settle upon 9mm. Nobody seems interested in anything much else. Quite likely the fact that everyone else is doing the same convinces them. Anything special would mean ‘expensive’ or at any rate ‘more expensive’.
Yeah, I’m one of them. It’s an old habit I guess but it’s my preference.
Recently someone showed me how to shoot double taps for the first time. My local indoor range doesn’t allow them and I was shooting somewhere else. Putting two in the black center mass that way is a lot of fun. I’m still somewhat amazed that it works so well and so reliably. I need to find a nearby place that allows double taps. (I’m closer to San Jose than to San Francisco - does anyone know a place?)
As a few have already said, 9mm ammo is less expensive than .45ACP. Also, there’s this Handgun Cartridge Power Chart by Chuck Hawks that compares calibers, loads and bullets.
When I came on the job in '82 we were issued .357 magnums and carried 158 grain hollow points. Almost every agency I can think of carried .357’s but some would load .38 specials instead of the .357 rounds.
By the mid-90’s almost every agency I can think of carried 9mm. Now almost every agency around here issues .40 cal. I retired but took a part-time patrol gig. I’m allowed to carry anything I can qualify with. I’ve carried 40’s, 45’s, and for a year I carried a .357 Sig caliber.
But I really like the 9mm. The extra capacity along with the light recoil make it a pleasure to shoot. If you go on You Tube and look at gel tests you’ll see that a 9mm hollow point causes about the same damage as a 40 or 45. Proper ammo makes the 9 an excellent threat stopper.
The 9mm Parabellum round is the most common caliber in duty-grade sidearms and is therefore logistically the most widely available; hence, why it is so widely adopted by law enforcement and military organizations regardless of comparative effectiveness with more expensive or less available calibers.
In statistically analysis of real-world effectiveness (the so-called “one shot stop” to the human torso) the 9mm Para, .40 S&W, and .45 ACP jacketed hollowpoint (JHP) rounds are all essentially equivalent (85-88% effective). The .357 Magnum (125 grain JHP) is slightly superior (~92%) and the 10mm Auto is somewhere in between but the statistical database is much smaller. The .38 Spl is significantly lower (in the upper seventy or lower eighty percentage for one shot stops) which is expected as the round, except in an overpressure (the so called “+P”) configuration does not have enough speed to expand. I personally prefer the .40 S&W over the 9mmP because I’ve found that the higher sectional density and small cavity in a JHP in the latter creates a tendency to not expand and pass through, posing a greater hazard to the background versus the .40 S&W, which expands more reliably. I don’t personally find the .40 S&W significantly more difficult to handle than the 9mmP even in a compact pistol, but opinions obviously differ. Both rounds have less felt recoil than the .45 ACP in a comparable handgun.
It should be understood that all pistol calibers are marginal at best and the effectiveness of shot placement and ability for well-placed follow-on shots should be a greater consideration than muzzle energy or momentum. That being said, any round that does not reliably penetrate though a human torso (<30 cm) is not a reliable defensive round. A pistol is a weapon used for defense because it can be conveniently carried, not because it is the best choice, and a 12 or 20 gauge shotgun or 5.56mm NATO/6.8mm SPC carbine is a more effective weapon for personal defense.
Stranger
With modern expanding ammunition, 9mm essentially equals .40 S&W, equals .45ACP, equals .357 SiG. They all go about 12-15 inches in tissue simulant, and will all expand to around .6-.8 inch diameter. Some have been shown to go 1-1.2 inch in diameter with that penetration. Doubt the bad guy is going to notice the difference. Since all of the calibers do about the same damage, use the one that’s cheaper, easier to shoot, and allows the officer to carry more rounds per magazine. That means 9mm.
Bullets don’t start disrupting tissue beyond the permanent crush cavity until they are going faster. I’ve read 2200 fps-2500 fps as the figure where cavitation from temporary cavity formation starts helping with tissue destruction, and that only in the context of the bullet fragmenting. I am curious whether something like 9 x 25mm (10mm Auto necked down to 9mm), with a light fast bullet, would benefit from that sort of effect.
There are more exotic, higher-velocity rounds used—e.g. 5.7 x 28mm, 4.6 x 30mm—and their effectiveness is mixed to poor, even with expanding ammo. Evidently Houston SWAT was the first police org in the U.S. to try the FN P90 with 5.7 x 28mm, and they no longer do. The rounds sure do zip through body armor though, given the right bullet.
I am reliably informed that the National Park Rangers use Sig Sauer 9mm and have for quite some time. They also come equipped with a 12 gauge shotgun and an AR-15 type weapon, brands unknown. A close family member is such an officer and has let me shoot the weapons.
Yeesh. After reading this thread I was reminded of the Great Handgun War of the 1980’s. There was a period when I spend a lot of time killing time waiting in a grocery store that had a magazine rack that carried Guns & Ammo and other monthly mags of that ilk.
A brief (for an admittedly given level of “brief”) description of the highlights, in something close to chronological order, might be appropriate now:
- Law Enforcement (hereafter LE) is predominately carrying .38 (special or plus) revolvers. The Criminal Element (hereafter CE) is carrying 9mm autos. LE is outgunned.
B. “Frank and honest discussions” about upgunning LE. The sides are Wheelguns (.357) vs Autos. These take place at shooting ranges and in letters to the editor columns of popular gun magazines.
III. Autos win, and then the battle between Firepower (hereafter Fp) (double action 9mm 13 round) vs Stopping power (hereafter Sp)(single action .45 acp 7 round) begins. Many arguments by Spers comparing the advantages of their very modified Colt .45 autos to out of the box double action large capacity 9mms (aka Wonder 9s).
4th. In spite of the introduction of 10mm and .41 cal rounds, the US Army decides to replace the 7 round m-1911a1 .45 acp gov’t model with a 13 round Beretta 9mm pistol. LE starts replacing their .38 revolvers with 9mm autos.
- Famous incident in LE and gun magazine reader circles where CE, hopped up on a virtual pharmacy of illicit drugs, in a shoot out with LE absorbs a huge amount of 9mm bullets before he finally goes down.
[del]||||[/del]|. The FBI decides to get involved in the war and goes about it in a scientific matter. The goal is a round that will cause the most damage YET least likely to overpenetrate, hopefully a “one-shot stop”. Pathologists are called in to decide what is the most lethal wound and how to simulate that with blocks of ballistic gelatin. Terms like “Temporary wound channel”, “Permanent wound channel”, along with penetration depth enter the vocabulary.
- Many bullets of different calibers are shot from a vast assortment of pistols at many blocks of ballistic gelatin. Closest to the ideal is the somewhat overpowered 10mm.
H. Someone with reloading equipment, a 10mm pistol, and many blocks of ballistic gelatin creates a 10mm round using less powder than a standard 10mm load. After some experimentation, he comes up with a 10mm Lite round that is acclaimed as being ideal for LE purposes.
IX. Someone looks at this 10mm Lite and decides with all that empty space where powder used to be, you could use a shorter case and it’d be about the same length as a 9mm and that you could call it a .40 caliber.
- Someone from the FBI called someone at Smith & Wesson and asked if S&W would be interested in coming up with a .40 cal autopistol based on their “new generation” large capacity double action 9mm pistols. S&W said they weren’t interested and the FBI said “That’s too bad. We wanted 15,000 or so of the pistols and enough ammunition and magazines for all of our Special Agents. Do you have the phone number for Colt?” and then S&W said “We must have a bad connection. There’s nothing we’d like to do more than come up with a .40 cal pistol for you. You said 15,000 of them?”
So, anyway, most LE is now carrying 9s or .40s and everyone that makes a 9 makes a .40 also.
IIRC, it’s a Ruger of some sort. The NPS’ SWAT team has used them for over 30 years now. I can find out about the 12-guage.
WAG: Remington 870 or Mossberg 500 series based, as the vast majority of defense pump shotguns are these days. Maaaybe Ithaca 37.
Semi-Automatic Handguns
Subject to conditions and requirements included herein, commissioned
employees are authorized to personally choose from among the following
double-action semi-automatic pistols for standard service use:
Sig-Sauer Model P226 (9mm or .40), Model P228 (9mm), Model P229
(9mm or .40 S&W), and Model P220 (.45 ACP)
Sig-Sauer Model P225 (9mm) and Sig-Sauer Model P239 (9mm or .40).
Models P225 and P239 firearms, when openly worn in uniform, are restricted
for use by those who are precluded by hand size from handling other firearms
of greater capacity or larger caliber.
Sig-Sauer Model P230 and P232 (.380 ACP) and Model P245 (.45 ACP).
Use of these models (not full size) is restricted to concealed applications.
Any other Sig-Sauer Model approved by the NPS armorer at FLETC and
authorized by the Law Enforcement Administrator, WASO-LEES.