Right now the rage in concealable handguns is ultra-compact, semi-auto 9 mms. The citizenry is becoming more serious about personal protection and most want an easy-to-conceal, lightweight handgun. This makes sense because if your gun is a nuisance to carry, you'll leave it at home. And, when you consider you can get a handgun like the Diamondback DB9 that weighs only 11 ounces and is only 3/4s of an inch wide, why go big?

As easy as a handgun like the Diamondback DB9 might be to conceal, you need to understand that when handgun barrels get shorter, bullets come out slower. This velocity loss is not significant. On average, you can expect a velocity reduction of about 50 fps or 5 percent for every inch of barrel loss. As minimal as this difference is, it can make a big difference in the terminal performance of the bullet. In other words, a bullet fired from a short-barreled 9 mm handgun may act very different in a real-life scenario.

To understand why this happens, you need to have a basic comprehension of how bullets work. Defensive handgun bullets are, in most cases, made up of a lead or lead alloy core surrounded by a copper or gilding metal jacket. Bullet engineers design these bullets to expand upon impact. This allows the bullet to make a bigger hole. But here's the catch: If the bullet impacts at too slow a velocity, it will not fully expand or it might not expand at all.

The more a bullet expands, the less it penetrates, but it makes a larger diameter hole. The ideal penetration depth for a defensive handgun bullet is a topic few agree on, but it is somewhere between 8 and 16 inches. Hopefully this penetration will be accompanied by expansion equal to between one and a half to two times the bullet's original diameter.

To illustrate how barrel length can influence terminal bullet performance, I tested six different 9 mm Luger defensive handgun loads in a full-size 9 mm--a CZ 75 with a 4.7-inch barrel--and a compact 9 mm--a Diamondback DB9 with a 3-inch barrel. Each load was fired into 10 percent ordnance gelatin at a distance of 10 feet.

A lot of self-proclaimed experts put a lot of emphasis on recovered weight, but in reality it's not that important. It's not like the bullets are made of gold and you are for sure not going to re-use them. What matters is how deep the bullet went and how big it got.

When evaluating defensive handgun ammunition, penetration and expansion are the two things that need to be considered. With regard to the ammunition tested, these numbers were similar between the long- and short-barrel handguns with one exception--Remington's 115 grain JHP load. From the 3-inch barreled DB9, this bullet only increased its frontal diameter by 0.065 of an inch. This resulted in excessive penetration; penetration almost twice as deep as when fired from the longer-barreled handgun.

One thing many assume is that faster impact velocities result in deeper penetration. This is rarely the case with...

Click here for full article...