The stopping power of a .38 Special is, to be honest, unimpressive. Barely better, on the low end, than some .22 LR rounds. Still, it was the standard round for US police depts well into the 90s.
Then there was the revolver vs automatic thing, and automatics were excluded similarly.
So, in a shootout (yeah, they are rare, but the cops should be armed, at least minimally, for one) the bad guys had whatever was available at the Farm and Fleet, plus, while the good guys had six slow, soft-hitting bullets before taking untold seconds to reload. Whyzat?
FTR: As soon as they could the cops around here were packing Glock 17s within seconds of the change in policy. Can’t blame them.
Unlike soldiers, policemen often face fire alone. Because of this, the reliability of their weapons were a first priority. Early automatics were (or were thought to be) less reliable than revolvers. Further, almost all revolvers, but few early automatics, could be operated with either hand.
Finally or course is the fact that police firearms last forever. A policeman can serve for twenty years and never fire his weapon off the range. So a revolver purchased in 1900 could easily last until 1960. Replacing a whole department’s armor was expensive and offered little obvious advantage.
A friend of mine, a fellow gun nut, only one who knew what he was speaking about, at least more than me, pointed out that there were a lot of similarities between 38s and 9mm, and there wasn’t a *real *advantage to a 9er, regarding fps, weight, mass, whatever. Also, semi-autos are prone (I know, I know) to jamming more than revolvers, and there weren’t a lot of 9 revolvers out there. Still don’t think there are many, if any.
I think one of the biggest reasons was the cost. Buying new guns for an entire department, especially a large one, would be extremely expensive.
There was also the issue of retraining everyone, because switching from wheel guns to semi-autos takes a lot of retraining. Glocks really helped with that, since they always fire double-action like a wheel gun.
For most purposes there’s not really a huge amount of difference between .38 Special and 9mm Parabellum. It’s just easier to make an autoloading 9mm handgun.
There are still a few police services carrying .38 revolvers, though- the Victorian Police here in Australia carry Smith & Wesson Model 10s (I beleive loaded with .38 +P rounds), and the (formerly Royal) Hong Kong Police also carry .38 calibre S&W Model 10s as well.
.38 spl wasn’t and isn’t a bad round. When introduced, it was a step up in power over the .38 S&W and similar rounds that were in wide use. One factor that nobody mentioned is that Colt and S&W actively courted the LE market for sales of their .38 spl revos. Glock does the same today. So when a huge dept. buys a particular gun ( often at a big discount) lots of smaller depts will follow along out of wanting to be like the big boys.
It gets to be kind of circular. .38’s were the police gun for so long because .38’s were the police gun for so long. Training, replacement costs, and everybody else was using them all played a role.
And don’t forget that in Europe, the hot police load was a .32 ACP that most folks in the USA would not even consider a self defense round much less a police issue round.
In the films, yes. (And he was issued that to replace his .25 Beretta.)
In the books he was issued a .25 Beretta; but he also used a Colt Police Positive, a Colt Detective Special, a long-barreled Colt .45 New Service Revolver, a Walther PPK (issued later), a S&W Centennial Airweight, and a variety of captured guns.
.38 Special is also easy to shoot. Light recoil, which would supposedly mean greater accuracy on follow-up shots and less flinching on the first.
It also reflects that, until the last 30 years or so, cops haven’t generally needed to be that well armed. It’s only since the rise of the drug gangs that the bad guys have started carrying AKs. Bonnie & Clyde avoided shooting at cops, with good reason. Now, it’s a sport.
Rounds downrange would be my guess. It used to be a fair fight between the bad guys and the cops, but as that shootout in CA some years ago showed, the cops were badly outgunned. A 9mm that holds 14 or 15 rounds can provide covering fire more effectively than a 6-shooter, and changing mags is probably faster than even a speed loader.
I think another factor is simply that the main purpose of an officer’s gun is as a show of authority. Most police officers never discharge their guns in the line of duty. Of those that do, it’s almost never in a ‘firefight’ against a heavily armed opponent.
My guess is that the marginal value of changing guns in terms of police officer lives saved, is extremely low.
Probably a more important factor is just making the police officers themselves feel better about their weaponry. Once the .38 revolver became widely perceived as being underpowered and antiquated, the police wanted a new weapon.
This is an excellent point. More powerful handgun rounds were available during the 38’s tenure. .45 Colt, .44 Special, .357 Magnum, and .41 Magnum were all commercially available revolver rounds. The .45 acp and .38 Super were available in the 1911-pattern pistol, and both Colt and S&W offered .45 acp revolvers (1917 pattern). All of these saw limited LE use, but none approached the .38 in terms of numbers of departments and officers.
Several gun writers have made the case over the years that the .38 fell from use more due to movies and TV shows, especially Miami Vice, than due to any real shortcomings in actual gunfights.
Yes, and Major Boothroyd (“Q” for those only exposed to the cinematic version) described it as “like a bridge through a plate glass window.” Modern users, however, would describe it as being suitable only as a last-ditch backup in something like a Seecamp or Tomcat.
Don’t knock the speedloader; with training, it can actually be as fast as a magazine. However, the speedloader still only caries 5-6 rounds.
A more significant disadvantage of revolvers, and the reason that most ground forces replaced them with autoloading pistols when they first became available in production quantities, is that the revolver has an open mechanism that is prone to becoming contaminated and jamming up or even breaking. On the other hand, you can plunge an M1911 or Browning Hi-Power into mud, pull it back out and clear the muzzle, and pull the trigger with every expectation that it will discharge. A lesson learned from Desert Storm was that the open-slide design of the M9 (Beretta 92F) resulting in contamination-related malfunctions despite the normal high reliability of the weapon, whereas the 1911s still used by some Marine and SpecOps units functioned well in the sandy environment.
As for why police kept using revolvers long after military organizations largely switched to pistols, the point has been made above; police will traditionally retained the same weapon throughout their careers, and having to support both revolvers and autos increases the training and support requirements. For agencies that supply weapons to officers, there is a significant cost in switching to autoloaders, and prior to the 1980s many autoloading pistols demonstrated noted unreliability in feeding some types or weights of rounds, particularly those with hollowpoint bullets. Today nearly all decent quality autoloaders will reliably feed commercial defense ammunition, and the firepower advantages of autoloaders are considered to far outweigh the cost and arguable benefits of wheelguns.
The Colt 1911 has (at least perceived) safety issues. The thumb safety cannot be engaged unless the hammer is cocked. If the thumb safety is accidentally disengaged, and if the grip safety either fails or else is accidentally squeezed, then an accidental discharge may occur. It could be carried safely without a round in the chamber, but then it is not immediately ready for use. A revolver may be carried with the hammer down on a loaded chamber without much chance of an accidental discharge, and it is immediately ready for use.
The S&W 1917 used the .45 ACP with moon- or half-moon clips and could be reloaded very quickly. It could also use the rimmed .45 cartridges, loaded one by one. (There were other calibers available as well.) But it was pretty huge, which could be uncomfortable to carry all day. See this photo. The 1917 is on the upper-left. Compare its size to the Colt 1991 (1911-pattern) on the lower-right and the S&W M&P .38 on the lower-left.
Well, that and a few real-world incidents where peace officers found themselves seriously outgunned by well-prepared criminals (the 1980 Norco shootout, the 1986 Miami FBI shootout, the 1997 Hollywood shootout) have led to police agencies being progressively more focused on armaments and tactics for the general population of officers. Although a few extended combat incidents had occurred in previous decades (such as the Newhall Massacre), they were neither as frequent nor as publicized by the media as the later incidents.
Perhaps more telling, the armament and aggressiveness of criminals increased in qualitative correlation with the degree of violence portrayed by media (especially visual media like television and film, and later, realistic first person shooters). There is an argument to be made that the incidence of armed violence is largely a response of the conditioning to violence from childhood by media influences. In response to this increase in reflexive armed violence, police naturally wanted more effective weaponry and defenses, hence why many agencies now arm officers with not only high capacity autoloading pistols, but assault-class carbines, and why most patrol officers routinely wear body armor.
It is notable, however, that in the 1986 Miami Shootout the shots that actually killed Matix and Platt were .38 spl +p’s fired by Agent Mireles from a revolver. That particular goat-rodeo was a result of underestimation of opponents and poor tactics more than weapons failure.
Does anyone know of a scientific study of the jam or mis-feed rate of 9mm semi-automatic handguns in actual use? I’m just curious; in 26 years of shooting them I have only had perhaps 1 or 2 mis-feeds, and both were due to shooting very dirty guns which should not really have been fired in the first place without cleaning.
These aren’t what I would call really scientific, but they are tests. I don’t have the time to search right now, but I think you can find something like you want by locating the military tests that led to the adoption of the Beretta M9.
