9mm Is The Best Round For The 1911
BY Herschel Smith
8 years, 8 months ago
Via Uncle, 9mm is the best round for the 1911.
The 1911 is probably the most iconic handgun design ever. No pistol in history has done more – from battlefield to CCW to every single flavor of competition, there are 1911s. It’s just a great gun. It’s also at its finest when it’s chambered in a cartridge it wasn’t originally designed for: 9mm. Now, before you come burn my house down, hear me out because there’s a method to my madness. Yes, I know that it’s harder to make a 9mm 1911 run right than a .45. Yes, I know that the 1911 was originally designed for the .45 ACP cartridge, and that saying it’s better when chambered in 9mm is tantamount to heresy. But it’s heresy like Galileo’s heresy, because I’m actually right.
Let’s look at defensive uses first: we know for a fact that there’s no difference in terminal performance between .45 ACP and 9mm (cue the ballistards), so there’s no point in giving up 2-3 rounds of ammunition capacity, right?
We know that for a fact, do we? So I didn’t preserve the original title of the post, which was 9mm is the best caliber for the 1911, since the definition of caliber is in units of inches (i.e., it’s English, not SI). I corrected it for the author.
So wait, I hear the phone ringing. Hello, [talky talk …]. Thank you sir. Hey, that was John Moses Browning. He said … ring, um, hold on. Hello, [talky talk]. Thank you sir. That was John Basilone. Both Browning and Basilone said you’re wrong.
So there.
On February 23, 2016 at 1:39 am, Daniel Barger said:
If you want to ‘make a 9mm run in a 1911’ GET A BROWNING HIGH POWER.
The 1911 was designed for 45 ACP. The High Power was built for 9mm originally.
It IS possible to force one design to run the other caliber. You can do pretty much
anything if you try hard enough. But why try. Both guns are great at what they were
designed for. And I prefer to trust my life to ‘tried and true’ not ‘I wonder if this thing
is reliable’.
On February 23, 2016 at 10:16 am, Blake said:
Yeah, but I can see coupling the 1911 trigger with the 9mm. No one ever argues against the trigger design of the 1911. Well, no one with any sense.
On February 25, 2016 at 2:27 pm, cerberus65 said:
how’s that old saw go? a 9mm will expand to the diameter of an unexpanded .45
On March 2, 2016 at 7:47 pm, TSA_TheSexualAssault said:
but a .45 rarely contracts to the diameter of an unexpanded 9mm.