It’s been around forever, its popularity has drastically waxed and waned over the decades, and today, it’s the most common pistol cartridge in the world. Hardly any other round has attracted as much controversy as the 9mm pistol cartridge. Known by various monikers, such as 9mm Luger, 9mm Parabellum, 9mm NATO, 9x19mm, or simply “nine,” this cartridge is so widely used for good reason. With a nice balance of capacity and kinetic energy, the combat-proven 9mm pistol has been in use since before World War I.
Militaries, police, and civilians were using it when the .45 ACP was brand-new. Granted, thanks to modern materials and manufacturing techniques, both 9mm ammo and 9mm pistols are capable of much more than they were in the early 1900s, and modern high-capacity, ultra-compact nines are the preferred choice for concealed carry in the U.S.
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The Early 9mm Pistol: Made for War
Austria, 1901. Semi-automatic pistols were still in their infancy, having only recently become widespread. While pistols were considered simply defensive weapons for officers, .30-caliber rounds were the more popular choices, including the 7.65x21mm, which offered acceptable kinetic energy for the time, they were seen as underpowered compared to revolvers.
Responding to a German military request for a higher-power cartridge in their newly adopted Luger pistol, the Austrian designer Georg Luger engineered a whole new cartridge. (It’s worth noting that Luger himself created that gun, which was originally called the Parabellum Automatic Pistol and later the Model 1900 Parabellum.)
That’s Latin for “prepare for war,” from the phrase, “Si vis pacem, para bellum,” which translates to “If you want peace, prepare for war.”
Going in the opposite order that John M. Browning took with the .45 ACP and the 1911, Luger set out to make a better round for his pistol, which was first chambered in 7.65x21mm.
He removed the sharp, tapered neck of the 7.65×21 to create a new one that tapered from the base of the casing to the case mouth.
Luger named the cartridge after himself, calling it the 9mm Luger. But it ironically picked up another name: 9mm Parabellum.
The 9mm Parabellum balanced kinetic energy, capacity, and manageable recoil in a trifecta of features, leading to the Imperial German Navy and Army adopting it as their primary pistol caliber in 1904 and 1908, respectively.
Ten years after its first adoption, the 9mm Parabellum would live up to its name. In World War I, the cartridge proved its mettle as a combat-ready cartridge when it was used in the pistols, and submachine guns German soldiers carried when attacking Allied trenches.
Germany ultimately lost the war, but other countries took note of the cartridge. By the Second World War, the U.K., Italy, Australia, and several other countries adopted it as a pistol or submachine gun caliber. The British, in particular, used it to great effect in the Browning Hi-Power pistol, Sterling submachine gun, and Sten submachine gun. The latter was one of the most mass-produced firearms of the war.
Interestingly, the Hi-Power 9mm pistol was one of the few arms used by both the Allied and Axis powers in WWII. It was produced for Germany by FN Herstal, which had been producing the gun under license from John Browning before the war — the company simply kept making the pistol after the Nazis occupied the FN factory in Belgium.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the Canadians were producing the Hi-Power for the Allies from plans and tooling shipped out of Belgium before it was occupied.
Nazi Germany’s military made heavy use of the cartridge during the war. The infamous MP 40 submachine gun was chambered in 9mm, as was, of course, the Luger P08 and the Walther P38 that replaced it, along with the aforementioned Belgian-made Hi-Powers.
To call the rise of the 9mm pistol cartridge after the end of WWII meteoric would be an understatement. The round quickly became the dominant pistol cartridge for many applications.
Its recoil was forgiving, magazine capacities were high (the early Hi-Power pistols held 10 rounds, then 13, and eventually 15 in a double-stack magazine), and there were plenty of surplus pistols and ammo available for low prices after the war, along with new models and imports.
The Browning Hi-Power, a veteran of both sides of World War II, saw heavy use during the Cold War in the U.K. and Commonwealth countries, outshining its contemporaries with their 6-, 7-, and 8-round magazines. The capacity advantage of Browning’s pistol eventually kick-started a wave of double-stack 9mm handguns, dubbed “wonder nines.”
These early double-action pistols included the Warsaw Pact CZ 75 and the soon-to-be-legendary Beretta 92, first developed in the 1970s, and the Glock 17, which came along in the early 1980s, eventually inspiring another wave of wonder nines with polymer frames and striker-fired actions.
The ammo industry followed suit, developing ever more potent high-pressure loads and innovative expanding bullet designs to take advantage of the 9 mm’s ballistics.
Let’s break that down a little more.
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The 9mm Through the 20th Century
The first truly legendary 9mm post-war weapon was the Israeli Uzi, introduced in 1954. This open-bolt, blowback-operated submachine gun quickly gained popularity with armies and militias the world over due to its compact size, affordability, reliability, and controllable full-auto rate of fire. Of course, a 9mm machine pistol variant was eventually produced in the 1980s.
In 1966, Heckler and Koch introduced the revolutionary MP5 submachine gun, which was an accurate, reliable, and durable weapon platform that stood head and shoulders above its less accurate peers and is still in use today. The closed-bolt, roller-delayed blowback action set the MP5 apart from the crowd by improving the recoil impulse over straight blowback weapons — it has always had a rep for being extremely accurate and easy to shoot.
The cold-hammer-forged barrel not only made it accurate but also extremely durable, enabling the MP5 to maintain its point of aim even under significant abuse. This made the firearm a natural choice for SWAT teams and special operations groups who needed a precise weapon for close-range engagements, including hostage rescue.
In 1982, an Austrian curtain rod and knife manufacturer released an inexpensive, reliable, and accurate plastic-framed pistol in 9mm Parabellum, known simply as the Glock 17. The defensive pistols were brutishly simple, with only five major parts.
The G17 and its subsequent variants were aggressively marketed to law enforcement and military organizations as the optimal duty handgun. Glock appealed to the masses by advertising their pistols as simple, reliable, and extremely affordable. The company also offered significant discounts for law enforcement officers, which was a novel idea at the time.
In 1985, the U.S. military adopted a variant of the Beretta 92 as the M9 Pistol, replacing its aging fleet of .45 ACP M1911A1s. The replacement meant that one of the largest militaries on earth had officially thrown its support behind this cartridge, and so had NATO.
The M9 was more accurate than the 1911, partly because the new pistols replaced models that had been in service for decades. The M9 also used a pivoting locking block rather than a tilting barrel. Topping off the new pistol’s features was its 15-round standard magazine capacity — eight more rounds than the M1911A1.
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The 9mm Pistol’s Role in the War on Terror
With the dawn of the new millennium came the outbreak of the Global War on Terror and some of the largest combat deployments the U.S. had seen since Vietnam. Over two decades of operations, 9mm handguns from Beretta, Glock, and SIG Sauer saw heavy use in the hands of American service members. As a consequence of this use, ammunition development accelerated at a tremendous rate.
The 9mm Parabellum was not without controversy, however. Early combat use by U.S. forces led many members of Special Operations Forces, the people most likely to use their pistols, to revert back to .45-caliber 1911s and H&K Mark 23 pistols due to concerns about the inadequate lethality of non-expanding full-metal-jacket rounds (hollow points, which give the 9mm most of its potency, are banned from military use by the Geneva Convention).
Additionally, many 9mm pistols weren’t designed to handle NATO spec ammo. More powerful than commercial loads, NATO spec loads caused cracked slides from overpressure and questionable metallurgy in early M9 and SIG P226 firearms.
Many companies witnessing end-user angst responded by developing high-pressure handgun cartridges, such as 10mm Auto and .357 SIG, to address perceived shortcomings in armor penetration, trajectory, and kinetic energy.
Cartridges like the .40 S&W achieved some popularity in the early 2000s, mostly thanks to the FBI and other law enforcement agencies that followed suit, and die-hards held on to the .45 ACP as a more powerful cartridge, citing “stopping power” as their justification. Since then, the .40 S&W has pretty much gone extinct.
In 2014, America’s premium law enforcement agency, the FBI, reversed three decades of flip-flopping caliber choices. Although the agency had concerns about the 9 mm’s insufficient lethality for 30 years, modern ammo had improved the cartridge’s performance, making it as effective as comparable loads in .40 S&W and .45 ACP while offering significantly higher magazine capacity.
The realization that any shooter could have the same terminal ballistic effect with more ammo on board, lower cost per round, and lower recoil meant that, 113 years later, the 9mm still reigns supreme as a handgun cartridge.
The 9mm Parabellum is showing no signs of slowing down in popularity. In 2013, the firearms website Lucky Gunner surveyed sales of all types of ammunition and found that 9mm accounted for 21.4% of all ammunition sales. In comparison, the AR-15’s most popular cartridges, .223 Remington and 5.56×45 NATO, had only 15.7% combined.
In 2017, SIG Sauer and its P320 pistol won the XM17 Modular Handgun System competition to replace the M9 as the U.S. Army 9mm service pistol. The custom model was adopted as the M17 9mm pistol and as the more compact M18 pistol. The pistol was later adopted by the U.S. Navy, Marines, Air Force, and Space Force. It has also become a popular option for police departments.
In the past decades, ultra-compact, high-capacity 9mm pistols like the SIG P365 and Springfield Hellcat have come to dominate the self-defense, concealed-carry market. That high ammo capacity wouldn’t be possible with any round other than the 9mm.
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The 9mm Pistol in Entertainment
Cinema, video games, and music played a significant role in the popularity of the 9mm pistol in the U.S. as a whole. For a long time after WWII, it was still seen as a European cartridge by many, but that started to change in the ’80s.
The Beretta 92 and its variants became extremely popular in Hollywood for a couple of reasons: They were the new hotness, having been adopted by the U.S. military in 1985 and by the LAPD soon after, and the buddy cop movie wave was just beginning. Plus, with their fixed barrel, they were more forgiving when shooting blanks than tilting-barrel designs.
Because of all that, the Beretta 92 9mm pistol got some big roles in blockbuster action films of the era, such as Lethal Weapon (1987) and Die Hard (1988), and countless other films and TV shows of varying quality. The Beretta/M9 pistol was everywhere on the big and small screen. And so were other 9mm pistol models, such as the “exotic” H&Ks of the time, the Uzi pistols mentioned earlier, and the infamous Tec-9.
For the first time, the .45 ACP 1911 had become officially old school, along with large-frame revolvers. I mean, just watch the parking garage scene in Lethal Weapon when the younger Riggs (Mel Gibson) is comparing his Beretta to the more senior Murtaugh’s (Danny Glover) “4-inch Smith” revolver.
The MP5 was regularly used in cinema by SWAT officers and military special operations, due to its undeniable close-quarters pedigree, and 9mm submachine guns like the Uzi and TEC-9 made regular appearances in the hands of their enemies.
In video games, 9mm pistols featured heavily in military-focused first-person shooter games, such as in Rainbow Six, and in less realistic entries like the Samurai Edge in the survival horror title Resident Evil 2.
In various genres of music, “Glock” became synonymous with “semi-automatic pistol,” as did “nine,” oftentimes completely disregarding the actual make and caliber of the weapon in question.
The 9mm pistol remains extremely popular, despite constant efforts to unseat them. And Georg Luger’s brainchild will continue to reign in sport shooting, self-defense, and combat for the foreseeable future.
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