magine a world where a major American firearms manufacturer could name their new pistol offering the “9mm.” That feels like the equivalent of naming a new pistol “Semiautomatic” or “Magazine-Fed,” right? And yet this is exactly where things were in the early 1950s. Smith & Wesson dropped a new model and named it the “Nine Millimeter,” and they could do it because, well, there hadn’t been an American pistol designed for this Euro cartridge yet, despite 9x19mm being nearly a half century old at this point and widely used in two World Wars. Actually, there was the Colt Commander of 1949, but that was just a Government Model with a smaller hole in the barrel, three quarters of an inch whacked off the
