Firearms Facts: The 9mm Confusion

welcome back everybody this is Eric here with Iraq veteran 8888 I've got a special guest with me here today is mr. ray up here at Moss hanging out you know he's does a lot of our gunsmiths and videos with us here and he's also been a longtime kind of behind-the-scenes member of the channel for a long time and we love having ray on the channel today we're going to be taking on a firearms fact for you we've touched on this subject a little bit but today we're going to be talking about the nine-millimeter confusion if you guys haven't seen our previous videos make sure you check out the 22 confusion and the 308 confusion we go over this whole kind of smorgasbord of different bullet diameters and odd things that go on when people you know call a 22 a 22 or 308 a 308 in today's case we're going to talk about 9 millimeters not all 9 millimeters are created equal there's so much confusion about 9 millimeter as a cartridge that's very true I mean we get it a lot here in the store people will come in and say hey I need some 9 millimeter and okay you want 9 or liter Luger you will 9-millimeter Makarov what are you looking for so we're gonna try to get rid of some of the myths out there and show you the differences between the different 9-millimeter calibers we're gonna segue into some of the rifle stuff talk about mostly the handgun stuff and then talk about projectiles themselves and the differences between them 9 millimeters very old cartridge guys in terms of when most people think 9-millimeter they think nine millimetre parabellum or nine millimeter Luger Luger was one of the first widely adopted service pistols to use or you know the 9 millimeter cartridge there are some Mauser broom handles that were later converted to accept 9 millimeter but the Luger is probably one of the most Sonam honest pistols with the 9 millimeter as a cartridge it's a reasonably powerful cartridge even in its original form you know you have a 355 diameter projectile moving it's some pretty respectable speeds it does have a mild taper to it and it gets when people say para bellum para bellum literally translates to for war or war ok so originally you know nine millimetre parabellum for war and then it kind of I sort of bastardized into 9-millimeter Luger it did because mainly it was chambered in the Luger pistols although not necessarily originally for that gun they also developed it with along with some other calibers that they were working on just to work towards the military acceptance of some of their stuff there were other oddities out there like the nine-millimeter Mars and there was some of the early beds and such like that but the nine millimetre parabellum is the one that caught on because it picked up the military contract that's right and you look at guns like the bro shard and stuff like the style Roth and some of those really oddball transitional pistols that were coming out the Mauser broom-handle obviously had a lot of success with the 30 Mauser this is not really intended to be a history lesson but it's important to really know where the nine-millimeter came from and it was really one of the first widely adopted small bore automatic pistol cartridges to ever take on not only in military use but in civilian use so nine-millimeter as we know today has had a long and storied history and it's been chambered in numerous machine guns pistols rifles carbines it is a it's still a extremely widely used cartridge and probably the most common pistol cartridge to find a pistol chambered in today I would say I would say pretty much the most popular caliber in the world handgun wise other than possibly 22 long-rifle yeah I would say that's definitely the case so when people come in and they're saying hey I want to box a 9-millimeter you're generally going to say okay well that's probably what somebody wants as a box of nine millimeter Luger for the myriad of random nine millimetre parabellum slash Luger pistols that are out there okay and there's a little bit of confusion okay so when you start talking about 380 well 380 as we know here you know in a lot of other places in the world they call it nine-millimeter curves your question yeah as you're a shortened 9-millimeter 380 is still a 9-millimeter it's just a shorter nine millimeter so it you start getting into a little bit of confusion now you start getting into reloading in things and you're getting into all of these different bullet diameters which we're going to go over in a moment there are some varying bullet diameters for them all you know but the 380 generally uses a lighter projectile than the nine-millimeter but it's not to say that you can't use 380 projectiles and load light 9-millimeter if you want to so that gives you a couple of options there but again bullet diameters are the same yeah but that's where the confusion comes along as it says 380 on the box but it's not truly a 380 diameter correct yeah there's a lot of confusion that goes on there people say you know think 380 is sort of this different animal and it is it is a physically different chambering but it is still a 9 millimeter diameter projectile so it basically just think of it as a shortened 9 millimeter no the two are not interchangeable okay and then you start getting into revolver cartridges and we're just kind of gonna go down the line here in no particular order but we've got some 357 Magnum well when you start getting into 357 Magnum well in a 9-millimeter you have 355 diameter projectiles right and 357 you have 358 and 357 you've got some reloading projectiles down there got a couple boxes here these are just some Hornet is I grabbed off the shelf over there but these are the 355 diameter that you normally load in your 9-millimeter Luger and these are the 357 s that you load and 38 special 357 Magnum Rickett seven maximum and you can even load them in a 350 a rifle which we'll get into another time probably and then we actually have truly 358 diameter which are for most of your 35 caliber common rifles yep so it can get confusing very people say 38 caliber you know your reel is nine millimeter and it's sort of it's you know it's one of those weird things falls under that category so you translate the diameter of nine-millimeter to you know the standard measurements and you come up with about 355 that's right so you know it's sort of this thing that gets lost in translation okay so that's one thing we want to discuss and then you know we have a couple of different things you hear I mean one here obviously being 357 sig so again now you're taking what is essentially revolver projectile and putting it in a neck down pistol cartridge so you would think but it actually uses nine-millimeter handgun projectiles well they did not change the bore diameter they just kept it the same as 9-millimeter and took a fancy name yeah a fancy name sig wanted to make their own brand and they took a 40 caliber casing originally necked it down to nine millimeter and you got the 357 sig they had to make other concessions for making it down so the cases actually are a little bit longer than the 40 but you got a nine millimeter projectile with more confusion calling it 357 which is not okay so I guess it would be boring to call it 355 sig that was writing all 357 because in people's minds they think Oh 357 that sounds powerful they think of 357 Magnum I see what they did there alright a little bit of marketing hype okay it is and it's naming the nomenclature because some things just don't sound right if you were to call a four 44 Magnum which is truly a 429 who wants to say 429 magnum or 430 Magnum that sounds like crap 44 mag very good it's got a ring to it just sounds better and so sometimes when you're getting ready to market something just because it doesn't sound right people won't buy it you know and that that's part of it so adding to the confusion alright we're gonna get into the Makarov okay 9-millimeter Makarov I can't tell you how many people have come in and bought the wrong ammo and and usually the common problem is not that they buy a 9-millimeter Makarov to try to put in a regular nine-millimeter pistol they generally will try to fire standard 9-millimeter Luger in a 9-millimeter Makarov handgun this uses a completely different diameter projectile these are 365 diameter projectiles that are used in the Makarov pistol completely different bore diameter than 357 Magnum 38 special completely different more diameter than the nine-millimeter and when you look at a lot of European rifles this isn't necessarily a rifle video but I will mention you look at the nine point three by fifty seven nine point three bus 62 they have 366 365 diameters just like the Makarov so you can actually make gallery ammunition using 365 diameter Makarov projectiles that weigh 90 grains and you can use a reduced low to make yourself some gallery lows for your 9.3 it's kind of the same thing using say 380 projectiles in a 357 lever gun you get away with it it might not be the most accurate but it's safe can do it and same thing with 357 diameter projectiles in your 358 rifles you make a lighter gallery load or just you know a little fox and coyote load something that doesn't kick is hard if you want to train somebody on that particular gun something that that may a lot of people may not understand is the way that bore diameter is measured and that's where sometimes they come up with this being 9 millimeter and this also being 9 millimeter so the inside diameter of a barrel you've got the bore which is drilled and it's smooth and round and then you come back through and you either drag a button through it or cutter of some form to form the rifling lands and grooves so you're cutting the groove in it over the size of the bore so some of the your pins measure the land or the groove depth and not the land which is the actual bore of the gun so you add the number of thousands that they decide to cut the groove on the barrel on each side and that's where they come up with say the 365 diameter projectile versus the 355 5,000 so on the other side you add that together you get 10 and you get 365 and that's where some of those measurements come from another reason for the confusion that's right and there's a lot of that that tends to float around I mean if you hear people you've heard probably heard some people say nine-millimeter mauser what's that but there's a lot of old-school rifle cartridges that in many cases would be simply referred to as nine-millimeter mauser such as 9.3 by 57 is what we know today is being eight millimeter mauser next up to the 365 but when it first came out people just simply refer to it as nine-millimeter mauser because it's a nine millimeter projectile technically a 9.3 so see even more of the confusion so this would technically be not 9 millimeter it's 9.3 millimeter Makarov but that sounds weird right that's just hard to package you know so just make it 9-millimeter Makarov again adding to the confusion does and then we got some flow birds here yeah so this is something that's totally different these flow brutes are specifically a shot cartridge and they're nine-millimeter they fit a flow burped chamber they don't fit anything else most of these were made for little pest control garden guns they were real popular in Europe Great Britain back in the you know pre-world War two days mainly but they did make some and still I think make a few here and there's you know boutique type guns but again nine-millimeter and it's going to be on the bore diameter of the particular smoothbores that these are fired from so yeah they come out to be about nine I'm sorry 355 nine-millimeter and if you look at them they're necked Erik's got the calipers on it there and you can see that the diameter is 343 and then where it next down move down the case um there you go so that's point three to four like it's an eight-millimeter so next down from nine to eight right so the bores tight and that's so that they get a little bit of constriction on the shot pattern and they're in fire in the rimfire kind of oddball yeah but again adding to the nine-millimeter confusion you know you see something on box it says nine-millimeter that that terms you kind of sticks around people's head but people don't know what flow boots are and honestly it's not common to find about your yeah you're not gonna find one if you do you probably know what you're buying anyway and it's not gonna be that confusing so next thing we've got our 38 supers which sounds sounds nice enough but it's not what it sounds like it's a 9-millimeter the projectiles on 38 supers what's really interesting is the original 38 supers were 357 diameter and later on they decided might as well make it common with a 9-millimeter which it's you know pretty common now the 355 and they run the same projectiles nine millimeters do in general but if you've you know I got a very early colt it might have a little bit larger bore it might not shoot worth a damn and that's why they got some of the bad reputation that they did for not shooting accurately and they also try to headspace off of the semi rim which is a bad idea yeah and I think that the biggest thing that keeps not the 38 super around is when you look at countries such as Mexico you know they aren't allowed to have pistols chambered in military cartridge okay so the answer to that I suppose as you have Colts that are chambered in 38 super that's a gun that that could have a lot of the Mexicans love their 1911's they love Colts love anything that says Colt on it the 38 supers are super popular no pun intended but super popular to them because they can't have a 44 they're not supposed to have 45 ACP s right so it kind of stays around yeah the same way with the nine-millimeter Luger cartridge since it was used everywhere in the world as a military cartridge they can't illegally elements so this was kind of a easy way for them to have something and the Mexican government just had to look the other way because the way they wrote their laws so 38 super has their you know kind of group of followers you know and then you look at when we did the Astra video I was a astrum I think of the model 400 that we did the video on it's chambered in 9 millimeter Largo which is not the same as 38 super not the same as 9 millimeter steyr for the 9 millimeter steyr on which is a completely different animal so see then you start getting into some of these quirky transitional 9 millimeter cartridges that are kind of their own animal right and we've got one of those here at the very end which is the 9 by 23 Winchester so this path this particular cartridge is quite popular in Europe that was brought about in the 80s I think for the International pistol competition in the ipsy and the Europeans liked it it was a cartridge case that they already had they souped it up a little bit raised the pressures chambered in the 1911 s and it was very popular for quite a long time but mainly it fell out of favour here in the states that had a very small amount of popularity for just a few years and the people that were shooting hips at competition mainly went to the 38 super cop which is a rimless version of the 38 super this particular cartridge is identical in shape and size and length to the 9 millimeter largo it's even a 9 by 23 you put this in a 9 millimeter Largo Astra 400 and you're going to be eating the slide eventually yep it's bad news so that's why the confusion can be not just confusing but dangerous and confusing you don't know what you're putting in your gun or you could be eating parts of the gun that you don't want to it's kind of along the same lines of looking at like say the mouths of broom handles chambered in the original 30 Mauser cartridge some guy goes to a gun show finds some you know 7 62 by 25 Tokarev ammo goes oh wow this will fit in my broom handle it'll chamber it'll fire man maybe a mag in you're gonna blow the gun up yeah you're probably going to be looking just break the bolt retaining retainer yeah but more likely gonna break that and the bolt and possibly even eat the bolt I mean they're the original broom handles are not stupid strong guns but there's definite pressure differences between the Tokarev cartridge and getting into the 30 miles or so there's a lot of those things that go on in the 9mm meter as well and there's a lot of oddball weird transitional nine-millimeter cartridges that you'll only see show up for a little while you know not a lot of people were familiar with nine-millimeter Largo you know we've done a video on the Steyr Han which uses a completely different cartridge it's not a nine-millimeter Largo it's not a 38 super you know it's kind of its own animal the nine-millimeter steyr which is a great cartridge in its own regard and a belief Fifi okie also loves that Fiocchi loads a lot of oddball European cartridges and things you're going to see that kind of popping up here and there let's talk about the last cartridge that we're going to talk about now we don't have it to show you we're going to talk a little bit about the energy of nine about 25 Dillon that is a neat cartridge yeah the Dillon was a brainchild of the mr. Dillon and it's basically a 10 millimeter neck down to nine millimeter bottle necked case and it's really interesting it produces fairly high pressures thirty six thousand psi are better and velocities can be extremely fast so you can take ninety green pills to about 2,000 feet per second in that caliber and energy levels over 800 foot pounds and that's in a 1911 sized format you can get barrels to drop in your Glock that are just a drop-in fit I do recommend heavier recoil springs for it but the gun will run and it's a it's a stout load that's an economic 25 Dillon does not play around for a long time the only projectile that was really recommended for that cartridge was a 90 grain spear Gold dot just because of its robust construction the spear gold dot is an excellent bullet it has really good weight retention and its really robust projectile and the centrifugal force that 9 by 25 Dylan generates is so powerful that projectiles of lesser construction and lesser quality would literally shoot apart in the air because of the high amount of centrifugal force that the board is imparting on that cartridge and the high velocity that thing is leaving the barrel now I'm at 25 Dillon is a ridiculously powerful handgun cartridge and it is considered a 9-millimeter now granted you're basically running a 90 grain 380 pill technically because 90 grains is kind of like medicine for a standard 9 but it's kind of par for the course for a 380 so that's where it gets even more confusing because people think they go to buy 19 grain projectiles like wait a minute 19 grams is a little light for a 9-millimeter but the two are pretty much interchangeable those 90 grains fears are a great projectile and they work exceptionally well and like he said that the pressures are pretty silly but when you compare 10 millimeter to 44 Magnum and then you start looking at 9 but 25 you can clearly see that 9 about 25 Dillon is kind of on the upper echelon of handgun cartridges 9 millimeter it produces more energy than average and 44 Magnum load and the cool part about it is is there's some much better projectiles there out nowadays then the spear goldeye which is still a great bullet but Lehigh's got some of their solids that we're gonna probably visit here shortly and been thinking about building another 9 about 25 so might say some of that on the video in the near future I think they're planning penetrators some of those brass solids getting out of there at some stupid speeds but I would take one of the high points and jerk the barrel out of it and put a 9 by 25 barrel in and see what happens well that might be a little bit outlandish there you know will ever produce that we're known for outlandish that will do that there's the one that's right you know so speaking of like the upper echelon of 9-millimeter right you mentioned earlier briefly 357 maximum um let's tell them a little bit about 357 maximum because a lot of people don't know that it's basically a 357 Magnum Magnum it pretty much is so they what they did is the gun was the court Raju's were probably mainly developed by Lee juris back in the 60s and mainly with Thompson Center single shots in mind but he took brass that he made turned himself and kept extending the length of say the standard 44 Magnum 41 Magnum and 357 Magnum out to approximately 1.6 inches and in doing so you keep pressures roughly the same as a 357 Magnum but you can bump the powder charge up by about 20% so that also increases velocity and allows you to get the same performance almost is 44 Magnum out of a 357 bore and with that same gun so in a revolver or in the TC or whatever it may be you can chamber standard 357 Magnum 38 special and fire those if you need lighter loads or if it in a pinch you don't have 357 maximum brass interesting yeah that is kind of similar to making the 925 Dylan except for you've got a more versatile chambering you can shoot multiple different calibers in it so that was gonna be my question is how the 357 maximum stacks up against 44 Magnum and stacks up against 9.3 but or well not 9 about 50 25 deal I'm sorry I'm getting my calibers mixed oh yeah energy-wise that's gonna be fairly close it's a lot too Magnum but in in working terms it's probably a little less overall certainly don't have the bullet mass that the 44 Magnum does so the penetration is going to be limited compared to the Magnum but we're getting a little off track here but you know it's it's interesting to know there's all kinds of stuff we could talk about for hours on end you know that translate you know closely to the nine-millimeter this just as easily could have been nine-millimeter Smith & Wesson Magnum as it could have been 357 yeah not to mention yeah exactly getting into light 38 Smith & Wesson vs. 38 special and then oh yeah oh gosh there's so many rabbit holes that we could go down in this video this is just scratching the surface but hopefully this gave you some food for thought this gave you something to think about maybe this will merit a little bit of research on your end and you can see just how many different 9 millimeters that really are out there and that really when you think nine millimeter Luger you're really only scratching the surface to what is really out there I would strongly recommend if you guys are into reading you like books pick up the cartridges of the world read my mind works yeah it's gonna mention that I was I was I was on your wavelength the cartridge is the world is great it's got a ton of awesome stuff in it little esoteric at times but if you're looking for knowledge and it's very well-written it's simple generally it's one page per cartridge with a little bit of history a little bit of performance and some loading data so you get a great overview of the cartridge a lot of dimensional drawings in that book as well it's great referenced if you're into guns for any reason at all get one it was good I agree you know because a lot of times too you have to think it's awesome to know the differences between some of these because you never know when you might be at a gun show or you know have a specimen in your hands you're looking at you may not know what caliber it is so a little bit of study will help you Merritt you know have a little bit of knowledge there to allow you to go oh well that's an Astra 400 well then I know because I've studied and I've researched it I know that that's not just a regular nine-millimeter I know it's a nine-millimeter Largo which is a different cartridge so a little bit of study can help go a long way in making you a more well-informed gun owner and making sure that most importantly not only are you well-informed but you don't do something dangerous and accidentally put the wrong cartridge in a gun and hurt you or someone else or damage the firearm in reparable you definitely we definitely want to keep our subscribers so you guys pay attention to what we're talking about all these cartridges here because we don't want to have you guys I've been able to watch this because you blew your face off for Pupkin eye out or lost some fingers and you can't punch the keyboard right so very bad to have yeah all right very very careful right thanks for hanging out today no problem I enjoyed it yeah man guys yeah thanks very much for watching today's video we really appreciate you guys we always love to come and come and deer mouse for a little while and hang out and show off some cool stuff this has been the nine-millimeter confusion maybe you're more confused maybe you're less confused maybe you're not confused but there's some confusion in there somewhere guys thanks so much for watching today's video we hope you enjoyed it we'll have many more on the way we're actually about to film another confusing video but that's for another day the next region are confusing Confucius Confucius okay alright guys have yourselves a great day we'll see you next time many more videos on the way thank you for watching [Music] you

Channel: Iraqveteran8888

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Keywords: iraqveteran8888, iv8888, The 9mm Confusion, Firearms Facts, Firearms Facts: The 9mm Confusion, firearms facts, moss pawn, 9mm ammo, 9mm projectiles, 9mm differences, 9mm all the same?, 9mm the same?, 9mm confusion

Id: VpRmSzYJ27M

Length: 25min 24sec (1524 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 16 2019