Glock... Stick with 9mm or?

[krimmie]

I have rid myself of my 9's in favor of the .40, not because of velocity or energy, but because I enjoy shooting my .40's more than I did the 9's. Ammo availability for the .40 has been much better than that of the 9mm in my neck of the woods.

 

[Johannes_Paulsen]

Here's how I'd approach it. You're buying a backup / deep concealment gun for personal protection. It's not for bragging rights or showing off at the range. Therefore a certain cold-bloodedness is needed when deciding what to buy.

(1) Is 9mm effective as a defensive round? By all accounts, the answer to this one appears to be 'yes'. Do more research if you want, but modern 9mm JHP appears to be effective as a defensive round in a handgun.

(2) You already have a G19 9mm handgun. Glock magazines are interchangeable, so you can use your G19 magazines in the G26.

(3) Money appears to be a consideration for you, because otherwise you'd just buy whatever you wanted without thinking long and hard about it.

With that in mind, I'd set the G26.

Here's why: you already have a 9mm carry piece. The .40 is not replacing it, it's a backup. Having one caliber for carrying purposes means that when you go buy ammunition, you can go to town and replenish your stockpile of 9mm in bulk and never look back. Since you already have a Glock, you can buy a bunch of G17, G18, and G19 'standard capacity' magazines and use them in either of your guns.

The .40, .45, 10mm, etc. all have their good points, and if you were starting from scratch, maybe that would be enough to justify going with one of those. But if this is for serious use and not a range toy, and price is a factor, there's no good reason to switch. Plenty of people have saved their behinds with 'only' a 9mm. And, again, you already have one.

Regarding availability of ammunition, I do not see a shortage right now at all. Plenty of 9mm ammo is available for sale online if your local stores do not have it, and reasonable (ish) prices. It certainly is less expensive than any of the other calibers suggested.

 

[miles1]

Bullfrog,I also have a glock 19 and although 9mm ammo is somewhat tight right now it is IMHO starting to be restocked.I can understand maybe wanting a 40cal for shooting reasons but unless your not happy with your glock 19 I really would think hard about trading it in.I personally have only maybe 300 rounds currently for my 9mm but then again you can not ever have enough ammo for any gun.Good luck with your decision!

 

[hartcreek]

Any time someone says they can not buy ammo and now want to switch because they can buy another caliber sitting on the shelf I want to take out my violin. You know the song they deserve.

.40 soon will be just like 9mm once the tape measure boys decide that they need something larger then their buddies puny 9mm.

If you are not reloading and casting the shortage is on you. .40 cal is just an intermediate caliber for those that do not have the stamina to handle a real magnum.

You can pull up the whys of why .40 cal was introduced. 10 mm is what was adopted first but the officers could not handle it so the case was shortened. In my opinion it is a caliber that was never needed in the first place.

And Yes I load .40 cal. A family member bought one so I load for him....in fact I scored some Nosler 150 grain hp and loaded some up tonight. They came in a box of 250 so he will never need to buy any more of them for me to load SD rounds.

Other posters alluded to it.....there is a window of calibers that work because there is a relationship between the weight of bullet, bore and powder charge within this window comes recoil sensitivity so the various calibers were developed so that a person could pick the most bang that they can handle recoil wise. In the right hands.......caliber makes NO difference.

 

[JTQ]

hartcreek wrote,
You can pull up the whys of why .40 cal was introduced. 10 mm is what was adopted first but the officers could not handle it so the case was shortened. In my opinion it is a caliber that was never needed in the first place.

For what it's worth, the original concept of a "police load" for the .41 Magnum is very similar to the .40S&W. The idea was for an ideal round for law enforcement use.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.41_Remington_Magnum

a milder police loading which was to send a 200-grain (13 g) semiwadcutter downrange at around 900 ft/s.

 

[beatledog7]

I added .40S&W for SD after using .38SPL for a while. I don't feel undergunned with either, but have recently taken to carrying 357Sig or .380ACP. I have never carried a 9mm out of uniform, but I enjoy them at the range.

 

[powder]

Get a Gen 4 27, with the new dual stage RSA you will not believe how smooth of a shooter they are.

No, do not get a 22 or 23, IMO.

Eventually at some point you can get the conversion barrels from .40 to 9mm or .357 SIG. THAT is the advantage the Glock .40 platforms have; barrel conversions going down a caliber or two. You cannot convert Glocks going UP in caliber size unless you are changing slides, etc., and then it's a price wash or waste.

 

[Manny]

I'm not a .40 fan, I had a couple Beretta's in that chambering and just didn't care for them or the round. Sharper recoil than a 9mm or .45 and less accurate IME. That being said, you have a valid point with ammo availability with the .40 and the cost seems to be fairly comparable. Also virtually everything I read about conversions barrels is positive, and the only substantial difference between a 9mm and .40 block once you change the barrel and magazine is the extracter, which you could probably change yourself with help from youtube.

Even allowing for the greater ammo versatility and availability I elected to stay with 9mm when I got my last Glock. The only semi-auto pistols I have are full size Glocks, and all are 9mm, two 17L's and a 34. All share mags, all take the same ammo. No worries about stuffing a magazine of .40 into the 9mm or vice-versa. 9mm is available on line if not locally. I'd vote for spending the money for conversion barrels on ammo instead and not worry about local availability.

Lastly, I carry a Ruger KLCR with CT grips, a virtual twin to your S&W 442. I thought about doing the same change, going to a G26 instead, but happened across an article Massad Ayoob wrote on that very subject while I was mulling it over. He made a strong argument for the snubby revolver and in thinking it over, I found I agreed with him and a year later I'm glad I didn't make the change. The KLCR is just so handy with pants pocket or jacket pocket carry very easy, something I just couldn't do with the Glock, at least nowhere near so easy or unobtrusively. JMHO, YMMV

 

[bocefus78]

If you are comfortable with the 9, stick there. As far as the woods goes, a 9 with a quality projectile will eliminate anything in the woods that a 40 will. Look into reloading for that 9 if you cant find ammo. Start with a small press instead of the progressive you mentioned and take your savings, go to a gun show, and buy up some powder and primers. I use a lee classic turret and easily turn out 100-125 rounds per hour. One can buy a new LCT kit, dies, scale, caliper, a lb of powder and 1k primers for $250ish. Add some range brass and some xtreme plated projectiles and you have 1000 rounds for less than you can buy 400 in the store.

 

[gym]

Don't like the 40, never did, same reasons as above, been carrying longer than 2 career police officers, and owned half a dozen 40's, never shot them as well as a 9 or 45.
Just hit them in the head or two in the chest, that never failed to stop any that I have seen. If you shoot someone in the arm or leg or even stomach, it doesn't matter what caliber you used, chances are they are going to get really pissed off and try to kill you even harder than before, "that SOB shot me". So learn how to hit what you aim at, and you won't have to worry about which one recoils more.
If you can hit a target, you can hit a head. If not, practice more and think less.

 

[coyotehitman]

The difference in effectiveness between a 9mm and .40 (and .45) is a statistical zero

To the boys who agree with this nonsense: have you ever seen a man shot, shot a man, seen an autopsy of a shooting victim, or ever really seen bullet performance on human flesh? I have, hundreds of times over the years, and there is a marked difference depending on the caliber.

 

[Guns&Religion]

I went with a 40 instead of a 9mm, because of the extra stopping power....
....then I ended up carrying a .38 most of the time.

 

[Theohazard]

The difference in effectiveness between a 9mm and .40 (and .45) is a statistical zero

To the boys who agree with this nonsense: have you ever seen a man shot, shot a man, seen an autopsy of a shooting victim, or ever really seen bullet performance on human flesh? I have, hundreds of times over the years, and there is a marked difference depending on the caliber.

You're making the classic logical mistake of expecting personal experience to be an accurate and objective measurement of something as detailed and complicated as this. Using an individual person's unscientific anecdotal evidence to measure different calibers' effectiveness is a logical fallacy and has no actual scientific usefulness.

But what does have scientific usefulness are all the studies done of actual real-life shootings; those studies objectively look at data from thousands of real shootings, and in the process they remove most of the other variables involved. And, in those studies, there is no statistically significant difference between 9mm, .40, and .45 when it comes to the end results of a shooting. Period. All the garbage about your favorite caliber's "stopping-power" is pretty much bunk; bunk that's spread by myth. And in the case of people with personal experience of real shootings, this bunk is perpetuated by their lack of sufficient data, their inability to analyze the data scientifically, and their personal confirmation bias.

Notice that I'm not necessarily saying that the studies show there is actually no difference, I'm simply saying the studies show that the difference isn't big enough to be a measurable factor in the outcomes of real-life shootings. And that means one of two things: It means there either really is zero difference, or it just means that the difference is so small it can't be measured in real life. But, either way it doesn't really matter: Any difference there might be is so tiny that it doesn't make any logical sense to use that difference to pick your caliber. But it does make sense to use the differences that matter a lot more: The cost of ammo, how well you shoot it, and -- to a lesser extent -- capacity.

My point is that it makes zero sense to pick a .40 as a self-defense round solely based on the fact that it's more powerful, because that extra power doesn't make enough difference to be measurable in real-world shootings. There are many more important factors to use when deciding which caliber to use.

 

[gym]

My gunsmith who I stopped in and visited yesterday, "old school", full machine shop on premises, told me he is getting more orders for custom 1911's in 9mm, than in 45.
I was inquiring about having a gun made, and he showed me several, he doesn't talk a lot. But when I asked why he thought they were asking for 9mm instead of 45, he said that the 3 calibers are very close, and 9mm just make more sense now.
Considering he makes mostly compact carry guns, and his 2 friends also had 9's I would say that when you see old timers switching from 45 to 9, "and they both had new Mercedes" it's not a question of a few dollars a box for ammo, but more about having more rounds that do pretty much the same job, in the gun.
He showed me his old carry which was also a sig 229 in 9mm. It looks like 9mm is coming back stronger than ever.
Many new guns stopped offering either 40 or 45, or at least show a much greater demand for 9 than the others, Look at the new Walther, you can find it in 40 easily, but not 9, and they didn't and haven't bothered with 45's for some time.
I am a big fan of the 45, and prefer it to anything else, but not at 75 cents- dollar a round when I decide to drop in and fire a box at the range. I actually bought a box of Tul 45's yesterday in Wal-Mart, it was 1/3 the price of the other 1 box of range ammo, so for 15 bucks I figured why not try it out and see if it runs in a couple of my guns. I have used it in 9 and 223, and it fired fine, just dirty. I had to clean the gun twice as long to get it clean.
It makes no sense to spend 40 bucks to put holes in paper, for 10 minutes, that's as much as my lawyer charges me, $250-300 an hour, it's gotten really expensive if you shoot a lot, and don't reload. I am too old to start now, "65", I don't shoot enough for it to really be a big savings, but you young guys are nuts if you don't start now.
You will pay for it the first year if you shoot a couple hundred rounds a week.
Ammo used to be so cheap when I was in my 20's -30's, that it wasn't even a consideration, you could shoot 2 hours, for 50 bucks.
Especially if you shot lead, for a few bucks a bag of 38 reloads.

 

[coyotehitman]

You're making the classic logical mistake of expecting personal experience to be an accurate and objective measurement of something as detailed and complicated as this.

Correct...there is no substitute for experience. The problem today is that many read something, take it as fact, and spread nonsense. You are entitled to your opinion, and if you don't mind hoping your 9mm will expand and penetrate, carry on. I know my larger calibers aren't going to shrink and will penetrate well enough to do the job. As for shot placement....don't rely on it when the lead is flying back at you. Anyone telling you to just make headshots, on a moving target that is shooting back at you, has never been in a gunfight.

 

[Quentin]

If you're happy with 9mm I wouldn't change. But you bring up a good point about conversion barrels which is why my first Glock (G22) was a 40S&W. I didn't get a 40-9mm conversion barrel for it but did get one for my G23 and use the same Lone Wolf barrel in my G27 as well.

I just use the conversion barrel for range use but it is reliable in both the G23 and G27. It is nice to have access to two calibers and as has been said 40S&W has been plentiful during the ammo shortages.

 

[Theohazard]

there is no substitute for experience

That's not true at all. Personal experience can be a useful tool, but it can also very easily lead to incorrect conclusions. As the psychologist Daniel Schacter once said, "The self is hardly a neutral observer of the world."

It is well established that using personal experience can be a very poor way to objectively evaluate a situation. Even the most highly-trained expert brings personal biases to any attempt to evaluate data. And, in this case, examining the subtle difference that one millimeter makes in the outcome of a shooting requires examining a huge amount of data in an objective way. And no one person has ever been involved in enough shootings to be able to collect enough first-hand data on the subject. And, even if they had, it's very unlikely they would be able analyze the data they personally collected in a completely objective way.

I spent four years in the Marine Corps infantry and my wife is a surgeon. Yet I'm well aware that my personal experience is a very poor tool for scientifically evaluating something as subtle and as complicated as the differences between two calibers' effectiveness, especially when those two calibers are so similar. The only way to accurately (and humanely) evaluate the differences between 9mm and .40 is to study all the existing data we have on shootings that have happened with each caliber, and to do so in the most scientifically objective way possible. And those studies have found no statistically significant difference between the outcomes of shootings involving 9mm and shootings involving .40 S&W.

Now, nobody is saying that they both have the exact same energy or the exact same wounding potential, but what the studies show is that the difference in power and diameter between 9mm and .40 is small enough that it's not a measurable factor in how many shots it takes to put someone down during a gunfight. So, in effect, the calibers are essentially equal for all intents and purposes; at least when it comes to real-life shootings.

 

[Big Shrek]

You almost already have the solution to your problem, as you mention your Glock 20.

If you want something more concealable, G29
Bonus being you can get barrels/mags in other calibers on the cheap...
and it will handle EVERYTHING...in case you want .40S&W, .357SIG, or whatever you wish...

Fun part being you can tinkertoy it with your 19 & 20...do your initial purchasing for the 29,
and whatever don't work the way you want it for concealment, gets to go to the others...