Like any hobby or pastime that is in any way even vaguely related to machines or technology, firearms attract a (possibly) disproportionate number of “right-brained,” STEM-oriented personalities who like numbers. Some percentage of those really, really like numbers. Like, a lot.
If you’re manning the counter at the local gun store, you don’t even have to worry about trying to pick them out of the crowd, because they will always make themselves known in short order.
You don’t even need to be working at the local gun store to identify the breed, though. If you’ve spent any amount of time in gun forums on the internet or around the counter of your local gun store, you’ve encountered the Numbers-Obsessed Guy.
If you express any interest in or use of a firearm or ammunition chambering that is not absolutely ideal as defined by some mathematical formula, this guy will jump on you and—if you’re unlucky—he’ll also summon his wingmen to deliver you a proper social-media beatdown.
The lowest-common-denominator version of this phenomenon is the dude who has a favorite handgun-carry caliber and has the numbers to back it up. As a fan of the 10 mm cartridge from way back, it pains me to admit that 10 mm enthusiasts are overrepresented in this particular demographic.
The 10 mm numbers guy will explain to you that his favored cartridge fires a bullet that is heavier than your .357 Mag. He’ll tell you that it has more momentum than your 9 mm. He’ll jeer that it has more foot-pounds of energy at 100 yards than your .45 ACP has at the muzzle; never mind that your .45 is bigger at 100 yards than his 10 mm is at the muzzle and, besides, nobody’s ever even seen a foot-pound. Are they even real?
That bit about foot-pounds brings up another kind of numbers guy, come to think of it. This is the dude who’s rabidly loyal to a particular brand of carry ammunition, a loyalty based solely on the numbers printed on the side of the box. He’ll point out to you that the 128-grain Turbopoppers only do 1,120 fps from the muzzle, while his preferred 128-grain Thunderzaps are obviously superior because they are steaming along at 1,190 fps.
Conceding I, too, had once been prone to that sort of picking-fly-poop-out-of-pepper distinction myself, I can tell you that buying a chronograph and doing my own chrono testing was an eye-opener.
For starters, velocity as measured at the box flap from a bullet fired out of a test-barrel fixture by the marketing department in the controlled atmosphere of a test bay can be noticeably different from the velocity as measured from an actual pistol measured at 9 feet from the barrel under real-world outdoor conditions.
Further, you can take 10 rounds from the same manufacturer and the same lot number—heck, from the same box, even—and see a spread of 50 or even 100 fps over a 10-shot string.
It makes a lot more sense to select a round based on whether it shoots to point-of-aim with your sights, cycles reliably in your pistol and has performed well in real-world use and standardized ballistic testing rather than whether it has some sort of hypothetical velocity advantage that falls inside the standard variation, round-to-round, found in all ammunition.
Another ammunition-related fallacy is the obsession with trajectories and bullet drop at various ranges.
I’m saying this as mostly a handgun shooter focused on shooting at defensive ranges, mind you. If you’re shooting precision-rifle competition, hunting at longer ranges or even doing metallic-silhouette handgun shooting, then sure, a flatter-shooting round is going to have some advantages.
But, I have seen people get all wrapped around the axle over this caliber or that one shooting “flatter” in a defensive handgun.
Friend, on a 25-yard indoor range, all chamberings shoot flat. There’s hardly any difference in trajectory at that distance, and at 7 to 15 yards—typical pistol shooting distance—there’s effectively none at all.
As a gunwriter, I suppose I have to own up to being complicit in all this, in that there needs to be some way to differentiate what makes Cartridge A better or more desirable than Cartridge B and numbers are an easy way to do that.
If there’s one place where I really must confess to contributing to this mindset of placing oversize importance on undersize numbers, though, it’s in the realm of concealable carry guns. In the world of the CCW blaster, no two numbers get hyped more than the weight of the personal-protection handgun and/or its width. Hard data, sure, but it ignores the nuances of how the gun interfaces with the shooter.
When a new, lightweight snubbie revolver is released, it’s natural to fawn all over how little it presses down on the scale. “The cylinder of the new Blastomatic is milled from a billet of unobtainium and, combined with the frame made of cast riboflavin, this is the lightest revolver chambered in .357 Mag. by a full ounce and a half!”
There may be caveats in my review about how it’s important to use only jacketed projectiles weighing no more than 125 grains in said new Blastomatic revolver, but we’re unlikely to ask the bigger question: Does an ounce and a half really make that much of a difference? Is that really going to make the difference between carrying in comfort and an un-totable brick?
The same goes for the width of the handgun. Sure, all other things being equal, the thinner gun will be easier to conceal than the thicker one, but at some point, we’re chasing meaninglessly small increments of chunkiness. Further, there are drawbacks and trade-offs to everything.
The bumper sticker may say “You can never be too rich or too thin!” and, while I can’t speak to the part about being too rich because I’m a writer and will never find out if that’s true, I will tell you that you certainly can be too thin, at least if you’re a pistol chambered in any cartridge that recoils with more authority than .22 LR.
Unless the rest of the pistol’s ergonomics are very well thought out (or you have extremely petite hands), exerting good control and managing recoil well in a handgun chambered for a service caliber can get downright tricky when it gets much narrower than, say, a 1911. A wider backstrap distributes felt recoil over a greater surface area of the palm. And even in lighter calibers like .380 ACP, when you put them in a pocket blaster with approximately the same dimensions as a credit card with a trigger, things can get unpleasant, fast. There’s a reason why Ruger actually made the backstrap on the LCP II wider than the one on the original, after all.
Numbers are good, in that they allow us to objectively measure and compare two similar objects in a category, but they provide a starting point of comparison, not a determination. Ergonomics and documented reliability and effectiveness should play an even larger role. It’s important to keep in mind the bigger picture when choosing a chambering, ammunition or gun and not get lost in the sauce of insignificant increments.
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