I am Old School. The U.S. Army chose the .45 ACP in 1911 to stop the raging loonie Moros in the Philippines because the .38 Colt SAA wasn’t up to the job. Nothing beats successful practical application in a stressful situation. That is all that I needed to make my choice.
They also were haveing trouble stopping them with the 30-40 Krag. Drugged up people are just plain tough to stop.
It was the 45 long colt cailber used in the Philippines
Dosen’t mean the 45acp was that much better.
The US Military switched to the Beretta M-9 after extensive testing and that is what they use nowadays, although I believe some special forces use Sigs and maybe the USCG as well.
If you can find the testing results that the US Military did on Google, it’s a long document but an interesting read.
It’s also what finalized my decision to make the M-9 my first firearm purchase around 1990 or so.
Some of the early models had slide failures at about 15,000 rounds due to the open slide/ejection port design on the Beretta M-9, which was a result of using high pressure ammunition that exceeded Beretta recommendations and the average before failure is now at around 35,000 rounds since the slides were redesigned to accommodate +P ammunition and other high pressure rounds.
Also, the Military M-9s must be built in the US according to the bid, which is the main reason Beretta, one of the oldest companies in the world, opened a plant in Maryland to manufacture M-9s and their variants, so the M-9 is not built at the Beretta plant in Italy.
The Beretta family has been building and manufacturing firearms for about 500 years now and I think they are pretty good at what they do and deliver a top product at a reasonable price.
BTW, most of the above is written based on memory, so I may not be 100% correct on some of the numbers, but I’m very close.
I’ll try to find the article on google and post the URL