If weight is such an issue with pistols having higher capacities, nothing says you have to load the magazine to the hilt. You have the option of having more bullets for self-defense or less bullets if you think having more of them makes the gun too heavy to carry comfortably. You have options with, say, the Smith Plus variant: from one to thirteen choices.
Why all the hubub over the newer higher capacity subcompact 9mm pistols?
- Thread starter KyJim
- Start date
- Status
If weight is such an issue with pistols having higher capacities, nothing says you have to load the magazine to the hilt. You have the option of having more bullets for self-defense or less bullets if you think having more of them makes the gun too heavy to carry comfortably. You have options with, say, the Smith Plus variant: from one to thirteen choices.
Forte S+W said:
And each of those rounds is another shot. That's the tradeoff. As was mentioned, you don't have to load to capacity if the weight of those additional rounds was really that prohibitive, but you at least have the option.
Forte S+W said:
I agree completely. That's why capacity is so important imo. It's another opportunity to make that critical shot. I also don't subscribe to the notion that more capacity means a person will waste the rounds he/she has (not saying you personally believe that, just heading off the inevitable comment that usually comes up in relation to capacity).
Forte S+W said:
First I'd point out that there are numerous examples of single assailants that have taken multiple rounds before being disabled as the person defending himself/herself has tried to make that critical shot. While I agree overcoming multiple assailants is a tall order, it has been done. Even if the odds are against me I'd like to still have the possibility of prevailing rather than just preemptively ruling that out.
Last edited:
Carl the Floor Walker
Moderator
Not sure how many multiple shots are needed for a assailant, maybe some would need two, three, four, five, and on up.
But you comment that holds the most water for those that want a larger capacity is what you alluded to with your comment. "Even if the odds are against me I'd like to still have the possibility of prevailing rather than just preemptively ruling that out.
Which IMO is just peace of mind. If that makes you feel safe, then get a larger capacity gun. Same holds true with bigger caliber and even bigger guns like Duty firearms. If I truly believed more rounds was necessary for practical EDC, would carry my Compact SR9c with a 17+1 rd magazine and a spare mag.
I personally do not subscribe to the same logic as yourself, but then do you care? I do not care what others carry as well.
I think we are making more of what is carried than is necessary. Carry what gun you shoot the best with and gives you the peace the mind that makes you feel comfortable with your personal EDC.
It is my opinion, that what ever gun you do carry, is be quick to the draw. I believe the first round fired is the most crucial. You might not get a chance to fire the first round. And with any luck, you might be the guy that fired the second round and lived.
Last edited:
Carl the Floor Walker said:
That's a fair point. In my head I was adding to the total round count any potential misses.
Carl the Floor Walker said:
I don’t know that I care per se, but I try not to disregard. What I am doing is discussing my thought process in this forum setting with other gun owners, something I don't get to do much otherwise. In this case I'm trying to walk through the potential thought process of prospective buyers of new pistols and how capacity might or might not influence their decision, as it relates to the OP. I do like to try to keep my mind open to other points of view and discussion helps me with that. Sometimes people do make points I never considered and I try to incorporate it into my thought process going forward.
Last edited:
jetinteriorguy
New member
Then it would just be the normal process of how good it feels in my hand and whether the trigger felt good. But as always the final decision to keep it or not depends on how well I shoot it and how comfortable it is to carry. If it doesn’t pass these tests it’s gone, which is why I’m happy enough with the LC9s and it’s a keeper. I tried a few that at first felt great but failed when the rubber meets the road, so I sold them. But, I’m going to take a look at the Max-9 when I get a chance and may give it a try.But if you didn't have the LC9s and were out looking with an Max-9 were in front of you, why would you buy the LC9s?
It has no size advantage and better everything else.
Last edited:
There you go. Every time I see this thread, I wonder where this "hubub" is.
My daughter and I shoot matches regularly with fairly large groups. We hang out and chat. Was USPSA, now rifle. The subject of personal carry has never come up.
Reminds me of the guy that signed up here and instantly had a list of modifications the G26 he didn't yet have needed. He read it all somewhere.
Statistically speaking, most gunfights are settled within 3 shots being fired and in most cases in which more shots were fired, they were superfluous shots motivated purely by panic.
Granted that statistics can be skewed by uneven sample sizes such as the majority of the data collected coming from decades past when law enforcement was still carrying 6-shot Revolvers, but if the fights were actually settled within 3 shots as the statistics suggest, then it's irrelevant either way because obviously if 3 wasn't enough then an attacker would be all the more motivated to continue their assault with the knowledge that whoever was shooting at them only had a maximum of 2 shots left in the cylinder before they needed to reload.
Now I'm certain that someone will attempt to counter this statement by bombarding me with articles involving freak occurrences in which somebody who had just snorted bath salts took 2-3 dozen shots before he finally collapsed, but those articles were written because such is not a common occurrence hence why it was worth writing an article about in the first place, and if you should ever find yourself in such an outlandish situation, then congratulations, your Shield PLUS would be no more effective at stopping the attacker than my Shield 1.0, so it's completely irrelevant.
If folks want to carry more rounds and it makes them feel more confident doing so, then more power to them, but spare me your ridiculous assertions of superiority based on the flawed, unilateral reasoning that more is always better which evidently not even you actually believe, otherwise you'd probably be carrying a FN Five-seveN or Ruger-57 right now and trying to convince everyone that the larger size of the gun was more than compensated for by the sheer number of rounds in the magazine as well as the incredible stopping power of the 5.7x28 FN cartridge.
Granted that statistics can be skewed by uneven sample sizes such as the majority of the data collected coming from decades past when law enforcement was still carrying 6-shot Revolvers, but if the fights were actually settled within 3 shots as the statistics suggest, then it's irrelevant either way because obviously if 3 wasn't enough then an attacker would be all the more motivated to continue their assault with the knowledge that whoever was shooting at them only had a maximum of 2 shots left in the cylinder before they needed to reload.
Now I'm certain that someone will attempt to counter this statement by bombarding me with articles involving freak occurrences in which somebody who had just snorted bath salts took 2-3 dozen shots before he finally collapsed, but those articles were written because such is not a common occurrence hence why it was worth writing an article about in the first place, and if you should ever find yourself in such an outlandish situation, then congratulations, your Shield PLUS would be no more effective at stopping the attacker than my Shield 1.0, so it's completely irrelevant.
If folks want to carry more rounds and it makes them feel more confident doing so, then more power to them, but spare me your ridiculous assertions of superiority based on the flawed, unilateral reasoning that more is always better which evidently not even you actually believe, otherwise you'd probably be carrying a FN Five-seveN or Ruger-57 right now and trying to convince everyone that the larger size of the gun was more than compensated for by the sheer number of rounds in the magazine as well as the incredible stopping power of the 5.7x28 FN cartridge.
One note I’d make is while I see that 3 shot statistic repeated often and it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me, I can never find the source of that statistic.
Not all people who take more than 3 shots to be disabled did so because they were on bath salts. Michael Platt in the 1986 Miami shootout was shot 12 times and kept fighting while he was bleeding out internally and had a collapsed lung. Despite sustaining this injury at the beginning of the fight he eventually killed two FBI agents. The autopsy showed no drugs in his system. He was former military as an Army infantryman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_FBI_Miami_shootout
Then there’s this story of an officer involved shooting where the suspect was shot 14 times with a 45 ACP, 6 of those shots in fatal locations. There was no evidence of drugs or alcohol in his system. https://www.police1.com/officer-sho...5-rounds-of-ammo-on-the-job-clGBbLYpnqqHxwMq/
In this officer involved shooting the suspect was shot 7 times with a 40SW (in addition to 7 misses) before being disabled and the officer was shot 7 times with a 45ACP (in addition to 6 misses), including a shot to his mouth that knocked out his teeth, a shot to his arm, two shots to his legs/buttocks, and 3 shots to his chest that were stopped by his body armor. The officer continued to fight and survived. https://www.policemag.com/340305/shots-fired-jacksonville-florida-01-26-2008.
Now am I suggesting we all need to carry 145 rounds? No, and frankly I don’t come close to that (nor do I think I have at any point claimed to be “superior” for carrying more ammunition than anyone else, as was suggested above). My point is there certainly are examples of single suspects that aren’t under the influence of drugs taking many rounds and they’re not entirely uncommon. Now a fair critique is, “But what percentage of all shootings are made up of such cases?”, and my answer is I don’t know. I’ve never seen what seems like a great database of shootings that encompasses all such information.
Carry a firearm is always at some level a matter of measuring the odds. There’s the decision to carry the firearm in the first place, and then the decision about which caliber, what capacity, etc. And those decisions are at some level based on the number of rounds we assume it will take to stop an assailant and the number of assailants we might encounter. There are no doubt people that look at my own choices and consider them inadequate.
What I think is important here is to keep in perspective the actual topic. Given the size and weight differences between a traditional single stack, one of the newer micro-compacts, and a subcompact, into which camp does a person fall? At what point does a person decide what weight and size is too much for a given capacity? And the answer seems to be (from our limited sample here) that that specific point varies quite a lot. I think the variability we see in the responses here in part explains the number of options out there currently and the recent trend of higher capacities in smaller and lighter pistols as compared to traditional double stacks, even if those size and weight differences might not seem relevant to some of us or worth it to some of us.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Not all people who take more than 3 shots to be disabled did so because they were on bath salts. Michael Platt in the 1986 Miami shootout was shot 12 times and kept fighting while he was bleeding out internally and had a collapsed lung. Despite sustaining this injury at the beginning of the fight he eventually killed two FBI agents. The autopsy showed no drugs in his system. He was former military as an Army infantryman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_FBI_Miami_shootout
Then there’s this story of an officer involved shooting where the suspect was shot 14 times with a 45 ACP, 6 of those shots in fatal locations. There was no evidence of drugs or alcohol in his system. https://www.police1.com/officer-sho...5-rounds-of-ammo-on-the-job-clGBbLYpnqqHxwMq/
In this officer involved shooting the suspect was shot 7 times with a 40SW (in addition to 7 misses) before being disabled and the officer was shot 7 times with a 45ACP (in addition to 6 misses), including a shot to his mouth that knocked out his teeth, a shot to his arm, two shots to his legs/buttocks, and 3 shots to his chest that were stopped by his body armor. The officer continued to fight and survived. https://www.policemag.com/340305/shots-fired-jacksonville-florida-01-26-2008.
Now am I suggesting we all need to carry 145 rounds? No, and frankly I don’t come close to that (nor do I think I have at any point claimed to be “superior” for carrying more ammunition than anyone else, as was suggested above). My point is there certainly are examples of single suspects that aren’t under the influence of drugs taking many rounds and they’re not entirely uncommon. Now a fair critique is, “But what percentage of all shootings are made up of such cases?”, and my answer is I don’t know. I’ve never seen what seems like a great database of shootings that encompasses all such information.
Carry a firearm is always at some level a matter of measuring the odds. There’s the decision to carry the firearm in the first place, and then the decision about which caliber, what capacity, etc. And those decisions are at some level based on the number of rounds we assume it will take to stop an assailant and the number of assailants we might encounter. There are no doubt people that look at my own choices and consider them inadequate.
What I think is important here is to keep in perspective the actual topic. Given the size and weight differences between a traditional single stack, one of the newer micro-compacts, and a subcompact, into which camp does a person fall? At what point does a person decide what weight and size is too much for a given capacity? And the answer seems to be (from our limited sample here) that that specific point varies quite a lot. I think the variability we see in the responses here in part explains the number of options out there currently and the recent trend of higher capacities in smaller and lighter pistols as compared to traditional double stacks, even if those size and weight differences might not seem relevant to some of us or worth it to some of us.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Last edited:
wild cat mccane
New member
Statistically speaking, a person doesn't need to carry any gun....ever.
jetinteriorguy
New member
All this talk made me give my LC9s a range day yesterday, so I ran a hundred rounds through it. Yup, it’s still a keeper.
This is where I'm at, though with a Glock 19 or similar
The small slim doublestacks don't shoot as well as a true compact in my hands, don't conceal any better in any practical sense on my belt, and are too big for my pockets. If I desperately need something smaller than a Glock 19 (or equivalent) I'd prefer a fatter doublestacks compact for performance reasons (Glock 26, M&P, HK Sk, etc).
Then again that also goes for the true single stacks like the shield or LC9.
If it's a 10 round state or whatever, I'd rather go up in caliber or take a bigger gripped Glock 48, again for performance reasons.
So they are pointless for me, but I'm glad they are options for other folks.
i want to say this the right way. There are people on this forum with a LOT more experience than I have.
I'm not a cop but I've been dealing with crackheads for over a decade and it's been an even split between having to deal with one or two in any given encounter.
I'm not comfortable with less than 10 rounds. I carry a Glock 43 (7 rounds) when I absolutely can't conceal anything larger but I don't like it.
I suppose if I were carrying a gun for the cool factor I'd be more concerned with convenience than practicality but since I have actually had to defend myself I'm not.
Last edited:
- Status