MILESFORTIS

Any gun you have on hand is better than the one you aren’t carrying

The Case for Mouse Guns:
Is there any use for calibers smaller than 9mm?

Under certain circumstances, I sometimes carry small guns in small calibers, such as .380 ACP or .32 S&W. Upon learning this, people often express surprise and ask me how confident I am in successfully defending myself with a caliber smaller than 9mm. I take them down Memory Lane to 30 to 40 years ago, and tell them a story:

I grew up in a time when everyone “knew” 9mm was weak and the only serious choice for self-defense was a .45 ACP. The gun culture of the ’80s and ’90s treated caliber as gospel: a bigger bullet meant better “stopping power,” and if you weren’t carrying a full-size .45, you weren’t taking self-defense seriously. That conventional wisdom turned out to be … let’s just say not totally true. As our understanding of terminal ballistics has matured, we’ve learned that all service pistol calibers are inherently limited, and effectiveness has more to do with shot placement and penetration than bullet diameter.

I started out as a .45 ACP disciple in my youth (“…because they don’t make a .46”). Like many shooters of my generation, I believed I was better prepared because my pistol held a “serious” caliber. Years of training, experience and study stripped that illusion away. I learned that what matters most is not the size of the hole, but your ability to put that hole in the right place under stress and the ability of the cartridge to propel the bullet deep enough to poke holes in vital structures. This leads to a question: If gun culture was wrong about 9mm back then, perhaps we’re now wrong to dismiss sub-9mm calibers.

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