NINE, TEN AND ELEVEN (POINT FIVE)

I’ve fired about 25,000 rounds of various calibers into numerous materials over the past five years, oft en acting as a third party or beta tester. My goal was simple in these tests: to see if I could reliably make bullets fail. What I found, in short, was that it was far harder to make them perform as advertised. The information I came away with regarding 9mm, 10mm and .45 ACP bullet performance might surprise you.

THE SUBJECTIVITY OF BALLISTIC TESTING

The disparities between 9x19mm, 10mm Auto and .45 ACP are actually far less than you might imagine, and the major selling points of each are sometimes based on a single bullet type from a specific barrel length.

Take, for instance, that the 10mm’s reputation is based, almost exclusively, on the penetration ability of a 220- to 240-grain hardcast “bear load,” but 99 percent of 10mm ammo isn’t anywhere close to that, and most of it is inferior to .45 ACP in direct testing. Th at may be hard to swallow, but as I’ll