I own a few 45's, but I am hearing good things about the 10mm rd.
From what I am reading, the 10mm typically yields higher velocity and energy, and in most configurations allows for more capacity. I hear some favor this round for self defense at home and in the wilderness.
I just wanted hear some thoughts from any of you that own a 10mm handgun, and about how it really stacks up against the .45acp.
I realize accuracy and recoil will vary from weapon to weapon, but in general, how does the 10mm compare to the .45acp?
Thanks
I had a Delta Elite chambered in 10 mm that I traded away many years ago when I saw the writing on the wall. The weapon was superb, but round never quite lived up to the hype built up around it.
Jeff Cooper is attributed as the primary motivator behind the round, originally as a medium velocity round. Norma of Sweden collaborated with Jeff, but developed a much hotter magnum loading designed to showcase the round in a new CZ75 clone called the Bren 10.
Jeff Cooper conceived of the 10 mm originally as an improvement over .45 ACP with specific goals in mind. Things got out of hand when the marketing firms of both Norma and Dornaus & Dixon got involved and soon the round was touted as the king of all man stoppers, a barrier buster that could pierce car bodies and windshields while still disabling assailants. It was even touted as having a "magic length and width" to reduce jams (this proved to be total hogwash).
The most high profile LEA that took interest early on was the FBI with several LEAs following the FBI's lead (assuming with more resources at their disposal they were likely to get it right). The FBI started looking for a new round in the early 80s, with increased interest after a shootout in Miami involving the FBI led the ballistics folks to believe they were "outgunned" and "underbored." The report indicated several solid hits were scored by FBI agents that should have disabled the heavily armed and unarmored assailants but failed to do so.
The FBI wanted it all: penetrate a windshield or a car door and still penetrate at least 10" into ballistic gelatin, hold more rounds in the magazine then the old .45 did (double stacked .45 ACP pistols were still pretty rare), be flatter shooting then the .45 and at least as good as the 9 mm in this regard, while imparting more disabling energy into an assailant. FBI thinking at the time was a round with at least a .40 caliber diameter and 140-180 grains was needed to achieve all of these goals.
Where things went wrong is now academic. It was assumed all agents would get new (and still quite excellent) S&W .45 ACP sized frame pistols in the new chambering, replacing the lighter 9 mm and revolvers fielded up until that time. Around this same time, there was a push to encourage greater diversity in agents the bureau was looking to hire. To address the diversity requirement, problems were identified by the trainers with the new weapons and the round they fired that was giving them a very hard time overcoming. The FBI relaxed requirements for certain physical attributes in terms of size and strength and in particular for the need to accommodate female agents.
The 10 mm was harder to tame, required more training (a lot of flinching, trigger yanking and scenarios in closed spaces and dark rooms were cited), required larger, heavier framed weapons that were less comfortable to carry and harder to conceal. The size of the grip necessary to accommodate a long round like the 10 mm in particular proved to be a problem for agents with smaller hands and many female agents. While depth of projectile penetration had been an important criterion initially, the bureau began to worry about liability in the event a round overpenetrated and injured or killed someone for whom the shot was not intended for. Lawyers being lawyers, this weighed on the decision for what was to follow, but the writing was already on the wall for all of the other reasons already mentioned.
Where a double tap was fairly easy to master with a 9 mm using standard pressure loadings, the 10 mm even in it's cooler loading relative to the Norma magnum loading still suffered substantial dazzle, blast and recoil compared to 9 mm or .45 ACP. The first attempt to salvage the decision to go with the 10 mm was to reduce the pressure of the loading, resulting in the "FBI loading" or "10mm Lite." Weapons remained of the larger frame necessitated by the longer case even if much of it's original velocity and associated recoil were gone. It also lost some of it's flat trajectory, barrier penetration and soft tissue disruption benefits that drew the bureau to the round in the first place.
S&W's design team saw an opportunity and acted upon the modified list of requirements provided by the bureau. S&W shortened the case, creating the .40 S&W and allowing the FBI planners to save face a bit by phasing out the full sized frame 10 mm S&W for a new procurement for 9 mm size weapons that could provide a bit more ballistic performance then standard pressure 9 mm could in a package that weighed no more than the 9 mm pistols previously favored. Issues with blast, recoil, the size and weight of the weapon were largely solved, though original advocates for full power 10 mm referred to the new round as .40 "Short and Weak." A few agents continued to carry their originally issued large frame weapons as a matter of choice, though increasingly the only loading they could obtain was the lower pressure "lite" loading, making any advantage largely moot. .40 S&W was born and is standard issue for a substantial percentage of police agencies in the US and even in other parts of the world.
The interest in 10 mm waned almost as quickly as it emerged. By the early 90s the rollercoaster ride was largely over. I traded in my Colt Delta in '93 and don't regret it, even though it was a fine weapon.
At this point, relatively few manufacturers still make weapons chambered for the 10 mm round or load ammunition for it. The two loadings available for it have few variations - the original high power loading, still mostly a Norma offering, and the FBI Lite version, made by just a few more. I wouldn't say 10 mm is dead, but the expectations were high and it never really measured up to what were probably unrealistic goals to begin with. Handloaders are keeping 10 mm alive and it's resurgence as a niche semiautomatic hunting round is probably all we can expect.
With the completion of surveys on terminal ballistic performance of several rounds compiled over several decades, it was determined that despite all of the hype, 10 mm didn't perform much if any better than .45 ACP and 9 mm it was trying to displace. 10 mm also failed to meet or exceed the real-world performance of the .357 magnum despite having similar recoil and blast. It also trailed the .41 magnum despite Norma's attempt to duplicate the cooler loadings of that round with the 10 mm. 10 mm is also a more expensive round on to shoot relative to .45 ACP, 9 mm, or .40 S&W due to substantial differences in production quantities. For hunting, there are few choices in heavily built bullets appropriate for larger game animals.
If you wanted to hunt with a handgun, a .357 or .44 magnum would probably be the better choice given variety of factory ammunition available, cost and the ability to use less expensive ammo to practice with the weapon more often. 10 mm semiautos give you more rounds in the magazine, but for hunting use, this shouldn't make any difference - markmanship, shot placement and ammunition suitable for the game your are harvesting is what counts.
I have hunted with friends with Glock 20Cs and while I enjoyed shooting them, my Ruger wheelgun with Hogue grips in .357 mag was more accurate and no less pleasant to shoot (custom shop ported barrel).
If I were dead set on a semi-auto for hunting and target shooting use (I myself am not), I'd go for the .45, but not necessarily limited to .45 ACP. I'd go for one of the few handguns that is available in .45 Super and gain the benefit of chambering the old low pressure .45 ACP as well. .45 Super has a reinforced case and the handguns have a redesigned chamber with more complete support of the case to avoid case rupture that would occur at the pressures .45 Super is designed to operate within (pushing into the realm of +P+ .40 and 9 mm loadings).
There are some excellent handguns in .45 Super (Kimber, HK, SAI, etc.) and all are solid (if expensive) and well put together, accurate weapons. I've shot the HK USP and would like a try on the excellent Kimbers when I get a chance. If you are for want of recoil and blast, .45 Super won't let you done. If .45 ACP is well mannered but slugs a slow bullet with a rainbow trajectory, Super flattens out the trajectory and gives you what 10 mm was supposed to give us, while preserving the old venerable .45 ACP for cheap practice ammo on the same weapon - cannot be beat in my view.
There are a fair number of .45 caliber hunting bullets thanks to the long life of .45 Colt that could be handloaded if you so choose. Being a fairly new semi-auto round, choices for factory loaded .45 Super are few to none, but its more logical in my view than doing the same with 10 mm given the similarities in performance between hot loaded 10 mm and .45 Super, plus the benefit .45 super handguns have by retaining .45 ACP backward compatibility.
In the end even Jeff Cooper, the sage behind the 10 mm effort, went back to the .45 ACP as a general purpose carry round and hardly mentioned the 10 mm again before his death a few years ago. I think there is a lesson to be learned there.
-E
