We’re not sure if you’ve noticed, but those clickbait posts asking, Which is better, 9mm or .45? are no more. They’re a thing of the past. That’s because 1) 9mm long ago won the battle for the title of most-carried personal defense caliber, and 2) the improvements in 9mm personal defense ammunition over the last decade or so have all but eliminated any shortcomings the smaller round may have had in terms of effectiveness.
Just as we’re living in a golden age of handguns with a dizzying array of reliable, affordable, and effective pistols to choose from now, this is also a golden age of personal defense ammunition. Pick your favorite brand. Whether it’s from Hornady, SIG SAUER, Federal, Speer, Remington, Winchester, or any of a dozen others, there are plenty of excellent options to choose from in JHP ammo.
All you have to do then is ensure that the ammo you’ve chosen works with your personal defense handgun(s). You do that, don’t you? Because it would be kind-a crazy to stake your life on a gun/ammo combination that you haven’t determined runs well together.
Sure, we know, personal defense ammo isn’t cheap. It starts at about 35 cents a round these days and goes up fast from there. That makes running at least a couple of hundred rounds through your EDC gun to ensure reliability an investment. But it’s an investment you’d be well advised to make.
As good and reliable as today’s guns and ammo are, they don’t always play well together. We’ve fed some excellent guns JHP ammo from some of the very best manufacturers and found that, for whatever reason, the two didn’t work well together. Then, running the same pistol with a different brand of equally good ammunition yielded perfect reliability.
That’s not a negative reflection on either the gun or the gun food. That’s just a fact of life.
And that’s why you really need to test the ammo you’ve chosen as your personal defense round in your everyday carry gun. Be sure it cycles reliably, first time, every time. So with that said, what’s your pick? What JHP ammo have you settled on as your personal defense round of choice?
I’m willing to bet that standard 9mm ammo has taken out more people than all the self defense rounds ever fired in self defense.
Was about to post how we may have surpassed military fmj related 9mm kills then I remembered stolen handguns and their users. Yeah you are very likely correct by well more than half of total numbers.
Hmmmmm…….not sure how to determine my favorite self-defense ammo….whichever has an attractive price-point, I guess. Never had to and hope never have to put any of them to the test in a defensive situation.
I can say I’ve mixed multiple brands in the same magazine and never had a failure of any ki s in either my Glocks or my S&W 9.
All good.
My friend, Garish, fills one gallon plastic water bottles with Jello chocolate pudding. He tests his defensive ammo by shooting the bottles. If the bullet comes out the other side, no good. If it stays in the bottle, good.
Garish is crazy, but, he has his standards. Besides, he says, “that pudding is good for nothing else, anyway. You can’t eat it.”
All of my guns are have 4-inch barrels, so standard pressure 147grn Federal HST.
I don’t often carry a handgun chambered in 9mm Luger. If I do, I will probably load it with Hornady Critical Duty 135 grain jacketed hollowpoints (complete with polymer ball in the cavity to ensure that clothing will not clog the cavity and therefore ensure expansion). My second choice would be Hornady Critical Defense 115 grain hollowpoints.
Whatever you are thinking of carrying, ensure that your hollowpoints have enough velocity out of your particular gun to expand reliably. Several years ago a person tested several different 9mm hollowpoint offerings in handguns with barrels less than 4-inches long and a LOT of them (MOST of them I believe) did not have enough velocity to expand reliably.
I imagine a starting point for a test that most people can do themselves (to test their particular combination of handgun and 9mm ammunition for reliable expansion) is to line up three water jugs (each with one gallon volume) and shoot into them. If their bullet expands and stops in the second or third jug, they are probably good to go. If the bullet zips through all three, their bullet probably failed to expand.
I reload. Can get HST and Gold-Dot de-mils. Cloned them for practice ammo. The G22 and G27 (.40) and G17 all like HST. A friend runs 9mm Glock compact and subcompact, which likes Gold Dot… after I cleaned up his aiming pathologies.
If you’re having trouble making a small pattern, consider fixing the nut behind the trigger.
… and I approve the experiment offered by Uncommon Sense.
Staccato 9mm match
FEDERAL HST in any & all calibers!!!
I have shot those too. Good round.
It seems to be the best for a combination of consistent expansion and penetration.
Hornady Personal Defense, 9 mm.
My favorite 9MM is 45ACP Ranger T
The picture that comes to mind whenever I’m shooting the 45 (especially the Super, as noted by SAFE below), is of a guy getting 3 strikes in side by side lanes with one throw of the bowling ball. Wasn’t that in a move?
Dumb quex from a certified old guy. If *they* have made such super magical scientific whoop-de-doo improvements to the 9mm that now make it wunnerful wunnerful, could not those same voodoo witchcraft improvements be applied to .45 ACP ammo, and thus provide that caliber with the same better better results???
Don’t bother to lecture me about magazine capacity. I am of medium build, wear size medium gloves (some brands size small) and have no trouble shooting either ParaOrd, Fn FNX Tactical or Remington RP45, all in double stack 45 ACP. Also no problem with carrying spare mags. As for .45 control/recoil etc, my (now adult) daughter is 5’3″ and weighs about 110 pounds but she has been shooting .45 since she was 12 years old, now has her own Kimber.
Up to a point sure but then it becomes a question of how do you balance options for what you buy. 45 can be made to do some cool stuff but between more material and less economy of scale the price goes up and availability can be online order/reloading only (45 super is popular in my group). Similar issues with 10mm. If you are dedicated to 45 you can find better stuff than 10 years ago let alone 20+ but the amount of improvement is probably less dramatic than what has been seen with 9mm and by extension 380.
Translation: Improved ammo now makes 9mm good enough while being much less expensive, easier to make follow up shots, and having better capacity than .40, .45, etc.
My favorite 9mm defensive ammo is 10mm. Should be obvious from the name, but yeah.
To Paratrooper’s point: yes, these improvements are magical, they’ve made 9mm an acceptable choice suitable for self defense (I don’t care about war or NATO ammo, I’m talking personal self defense). Lots of people forget that 9mm was pretty much despised by LEOs, and when forced to use it, departments went sor as to demand manufacturers invent +P+ just to get acceptable results from the caliber. Today’s super magical scientific whoop-de-doo improvements have indeed made 9mm an acceptable choice, whereas .45 and 10mm and .40 S&W were always acceptable choices. 9mm has become ultra popular because it combines acceptable performance with the highest magazine capacity and the lowest cost and the lowest recoil. It is unquestionably the weakest of the major calibers, but it’s now crossed the threshold from questionable to acceptable.
10mm, .45, and even .40 S&W didn’t need super-magical improvements, but they got them anyway, same as 9mm did. So today’s 10mm, .45, and .40 are better than the tried, tested and true 10mm, .45, and .40 of decades ago.
I prefer 10mm for very many reasons, but there are times I carry a small 9mm. In those cases, I use 124 grain Federal HST. 14 rounds of HST (13+1) is nothing to sneeze at, and I don’t feel overly undergunned. But the 9mm is limited, obviously; it’s about as powerful as .38 special. 10mm is as powerful as .357 magnum, and .45 is simply massive bullets, advantages 9mm can’t touch. I don’t think anyone on here would dispute that if you were going to get shot, you’d rather it be from a .38 Special than a .357 Magnum, right? In my mind, 12 rounds of 10mm beats 14 rounds of 9mm, in a comparably-sized compact firearm.
I love love love .45, the original all-American round with the biggest nastiest bullet of them all. 230-grain HSTs are serious bullets. But it does impair mag capacity. In subcompact carry pistols, my G30 is 9+1, my XDM 10mm is 11+1, and my XDSC 9mm is 13+1. So the 9mm, at 14 rounds, holds 40% more ammo than the .45. That’s a HUGE difference. The 10mm splits that difference, and is much more powerful than either, that’s why it’s my choice. When you compare it to .357 magnum, which typically only holds six shots, I’ve basically got the equivalent of two loaded .357 revolvers in one subcompact pistol. Hellacious recoil, of course. The 9mm is a breeze to shoot compared to the 10mm, in the subcompact size. I very well understand why 9mm has become the go-to caliber for so many people, especially in a pocket gun. In a full-size gun or, especially, in a pistol-caliber carbine, I think 9mm is kind of absurd, I’d much rather have a full-size round in one of those. For full-size handguns I’ve got the G21 .45 and XDM 10mm, for a PCC I’d go with something like the LC Carbine in .45 or 10mm. A full-size gun should have a full-size round in it, the smallest acceptable caliber is (IMO) best suited for the smallest acceptable firearm, the subcompact pistol.
10mmForLife,
Your commentary is accurate and excellent.
I will add one additional consideration that you did not address. If one or two lazy violent criminals attack you, then your thoughts are spot on and calibers larger than 9mm Luger are potentially advantageous. There is one type of attack, however, where you want the maximum amount of ammunition with minimally acceptable incapacitation potential: when multiple attackers–who do not prioritize their well-being–ambush you. In that scenario you want as many rounds of ammunition possible for both suppression and incapacitation.
Consider two potential self-defense firearm platforms in such an attack. Would you rather have a single-stack pistol with a 8+1 round capacity in .45 ACP or a double-stack pistol with 17+1 round capacity in 9mm Luger? If I am facing multiple attackers who are extremely motivated, I would rather have the 9mm Luger platform in that case even though the best 9mm bullets have less incapacitation potential than the best .45 ACP bullets.
Of course a decision is not so clear-cut when you compare calibers/platforms where both have double-stack magazines. Is a carbine chambered in 9mm Luger with a 30-round double-stack magazine superior to the same carbine chambered in .40 S&W or 10mm Auto and a 27-round magazine? It is hard to say when both have the best available bullets.
The consideration which may break any “ties” could be ability to practice since excellent shot placement is always more important than bullet performance. (In a righteous self-defense situation, a small caliber bullet severing your attacker’s spinal cord is far superior to a large bullet grazing your attacker’s thigh.) In that regard 9mm Luger gets the nod because practice ammunition is roughly 2/3rds the cost of .40 S&W, 10mm Auto, and .45 ACP. Of course, if you are an excellent marksman/woman, and only need minimal practice to keep your skills razor-sharp, then go with the larger calibers.
For reference my “everyday carry handgun” is chambered in .40 S&W because I like the versatility of that cartridge. And my “woods defense” platform is a large revolver chambered in .44 Magnum. Nevertheless, I feel comfortable with a “home defense” carbine chambered in 9mm Luger and loaded with 147 grain hollowpoints.
Uncommon_sense, thanks for the nice words, and I agree with everything you said. For example: for subcompacts, I have an XD-S in .45 and an XDSC in 9mm. They’re pretty much the same size, the XDSC is barely thicker, but they’re comparable. The .45 holds 5 rounds+1, the 9mm holds 13+1. Guess which one I take when I’m going to the shopping mall, for example? No doubt, that amount of capacity outweighs the impact any single bullet has. Haven’t carried the XD-S since getting the XDSC.
Even so, I think 10mm is best. It’s a bigger and much heavier bullet than 9mm, it carries about twice the energy of a 9mm, and a hit from a 10mm will expand larger than a hit from a 9mm would, giving it more potential to turn a near-miss into a hit on a fightstopping organ. Example, a smaller bullet may hit the chest but miss the aorta, whereas a larger bullet at the same point of impact may actually nick that aorta, causing rapid exsanguination and bringing hostilities to a rapid conclusion.
So yes, I’m a big fan of capacity. I just don’t think that capacity is the end-all; I mean, I have a CP33 that holds 50 rounds in the magazine with extension, but I wouldn’t choose to carry it over, for example, a G17. Even though 50 rounds is practically 3x as many rounds in a mag vs 17, it’s still only .22LR, and a hit from a 9mm using quality self-defense ammo is going to be much more destructive than a hit from any .22LR pistol.
By that same token, I wouldn’t carry a 17-round G17 when I have a 15-round 10mm available in the same size. I think the consequences of getting hit with a 10mm vs a 9mm justify the very slight capacity decrease. Same with my subcompact XDSC 9mm vs my XDM-E 10mm, they’re almost exactly the same size (10mm has a half inch longer barrel, but otherwise they’re the same). So it’s down to 13 rounds of 9mm in the mag, vs 11 rounds of 10mm; for that difference, I think the additional smack of the 10mm is worth it. But the additional smack of a .45 over a 9mm, as said before, I don’t think it’s worth the 13-round 9mm mag vs the 5-round .45 mag.
Same reason why, even though I freaking love revolvers, I don’t carry one anymore. A 5-round 4-inch .357 is about the same size, and the same power level, as a 16-round 10mm semi-auto. Same velocity, same smacking power, but 10mm gives you over 3x as many cartridges and a larger diameter bullet.
In the home, however, I don’t go for the 9mm PCC, even though you do, and I have no doubts it would be effective. I think that with a PCC the firearm is so big already that a full-size magazine is no problem, so a .45 with 26 or 30 rounds in it, or a 10mm with 30 rounds, makes more sense to me, and I don’t see why I would want a smaller round. But as you said, the practice costs are definitely in favor of the 9mm. 9mm Blazer is around 21 cents and .45 Blazer or 10mm is around 36 cents each. That’s nearly 70% more expensive, and that can add up quickly! And that can be a major factor in someone’s decision, for sure.
In any case, I do appreciate your commentary, both here and at TTAG, you do indeed have “uncommon sense”.
https://www.luckygunner.com/labs/
For those who’ve never seen these charts, here’s some good info. They’re a few years old now, and they shot gel blocks instead of goats or similar, but there’s a wealth of interesting data in their charts.