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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   2414 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 19, 2026

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Working my way through a collection of Harlem Detective novels by Chester Himes.

He does a superb job at capturing how the criminal class talks to each other and interacts with each other. The setting is black Harlem, but it could easily be my white and hispanic clients, too. Just endless jabbering that goes nowhere, trying to pull one over each other or the cops with "clever" blather, trying to hype themselves up, etc. Utterly transparent once you see the pattern and usually only works at fooling themselves or other criminals who are stupid/high.

Always interesting to read pre-70s crime fiction and see the guns mentioned (not that the authors are necessarily that accurate or know much about guns). Mostly revolvers like 38 specials or .32s, maybe the occasional .25 auto, but rarely a .45 or 9mm. Whereas now when my clients get caught with guns, 90% of the time it's a 9mm, with a .45 or .40 putting in an occasional appearance.

So far as the guns go, laws were enacted in the sixties and seventies known collectively as Saturday Night Special laws. These made much of the existing stock of cheap shitty self-defense guns for poor people illegal to sell. These were most often small pocket automatics in "mouse" calibers like .32 and .25 as well as snubbie revolvers in .32 and .38. Probably into the eighties, these would have been the most common sort of gun stolen or used by criminals.

The eighties and nineties saw law enforcement coalesce first around the .40, then in the early oughts to the 9mm. Bullet technology brought the 9mm on par with the more powerful, larger cartridges and "won" the handgun caliber wars for the current generation. Today you can buy a gun the size and weight of an old five-shot Saturday Night Special .32 which carries twelve rounds of 9mm.

The downside is that the most commonly stolen guns are now better, smaller, lighter, with higher capacity and more powerful rounds than they were forty years ago. But they are still the cheap, shitty guns mostly. For every real Glock used in a crime, there's probably three Tauruses and two Kel Tecs.

I read Cotton Comes to Harlem about a year ago, lmk what you thought.

Working on it now. It's a step up in writing quality from the first 3 in the anthology, but also an increase in the societal/race commentary.

Mostly revolvers like 38 specials or .32s, maybe the occasional .25 auto, but rarely a .45 or 9mm. Whereas now when my clients get caught with guns, 90% of the time it's a 9mm, with a .45 or .40 putting in an occasional appearance.

The crime wave in the 70s got the gun culture much more serious about self-defense, and that lead to a far more "scientific" approach to the question of acceptable handgun chamberings. The social consensus was that anything less than a 9mm was too little gun, and this had a marked impact on the self-defense market as a whole. Once the idea spread through the police force, I'd imagine criminals largely picked it up as well.

The thing that makes me curious is to why such calibers as 45 acp weren't more popular, specifically due to use by the military. Hell, it's not as if 45 or 9mm are new calibers, even by that point, so why the utilization of 38 specials and other arcane cartridges?

Unless there was the 'cool' factor due to use by the police. Then again, why didn't the 'cool' factor make civilians pick up the military-favoured caliber, nevermind all the veterans prevalent post ww1 and ww2?

All of this reminds me that I've had the urge to track down books/articles on firearm catridge development and the social context surrounding it for the longest time. Years, by this point. I should probably get on that...

I wasn't alive in the 1970s, but I think .45 ACP wasn't more popular because there weren't really smaller handguns made for it. You can carry a .38 revolver in a coat pocket in a way that you can't a 1911.

Additionally, the .38 was specifically in widespread use by police and military, so the 'cool' factor associated with the military/police was absolutely there, and if I am not mistaken plenty of law enforcement agencies were still packing .38s in the 1970s.

Also a 1911 has always been kind of an expensive gun -- if you just need to wave it in somebody's face so they won't make a fuss and hand over their wallet, a little .25 works just fine. (and fits in your pocket)

We're living in the post-Miami world, no doubt about it.

According to the ATF, in years 2022 and 2023:

Among the 770,000 traced pistols (part 3 table CGT-03):

CaliberProportion (%)
9 mm60
.4013
.3808
.457
.224
.251
7.62 mm1
10 mm1
.57 (typo for 5.7 mm?)1
5.56 mm0.8

Among the 25,000 pistols recovered in Mexico (part 7 table SWB-10):

CaliberProportion (%)
9 mm45
.2217
.38012
.457
.406
.254
.383
7.62 mm2
.322
5.7 mm0.4

Was that 7.62 a Tokarev or is there another 7.62 handgun cartridge?

I'd guess it's cut-down AK "pistols".

I've seen people one-hand an RPK-74 when shooting into the air, but 7.62x39 has 1.5 the energy of 5.45x39. I doubt anyone would want to shoot that from a pistol.

1.5x the energy

Recoil is based solely on momentum, not energy; energy is not conserved in explosions. m(bullet) * v(bullet) = m(rifle) * v(rifle).

Accounting for similar impulse (since the bullet spends about the same amount of time in the barrel for each of these), here's what we see:

7.62x39 out of a Draco is 124 grains * 1700 FPS, and a Draco weighs about 7 pounds (or 49000 grains), so if you let the rifle freely recoil it'd hit you at 4.3 FPS. Oh yeah, and that's after the action's done cycling; the peak impulse is only going to be about 6/7ths of that because there's about a pound of mass that takes a while to hit the back of the assembly.

Compare to-spec .357 Magnum out of a typical pistol, which is 158 grains * 1400 FPS, and the gun weighs about 3 pounds (or 21000 grains), so if you let the handgun freely recoil it'd hit you at 10.5 FPS.

This is why Dracos are manageable one-handed from a pistol; but the fact you're holding 7 pounds out in front of you makes them kind of unwieldly.

TIL, thanks

They exist. Tokarev is a niche handgun for collectors in the USA. Handguns chambered in rifle cartridges appeal to gun nuts for some reason, IDK why, but you can easily find both AK caliber and AR-15 caliber handguns.

There are 3 reasons why:

  • it's an end run around the 1989 Federal import ban of "non-sporting" rifles (pistols are not rifles), which in addition to AKs also tends to affect clones of HK products, particularly MP5s
  • it's an end run around SBR laws, especially after the advent of the "pistol brace" (it's a stock with a fig leaf over it); yes, the lack of tax and registration is part of it, but there are a bunch of other rules around SBRs that don't apply to pistols
  • because rifles that short are kind of stupid and impractical, and memes are a great reason to own guns (usually Dracos and TEC-9s, but also applies to AR-18s around St. Patrick's day, Carcanos around President's Day, FALs in certain paint jobs, etc.)

the "pistols" in question are essentially AKSU-style carbines with no stock installed. I'm given to understand they're fairly popular.

New "handguns" (PCCs? SMGs?) currently available for purchase on guns.com:

  • 7.62×39 Soviet: 130

  • 7.62×51 NATO: 6

  • 7.62×25 Tokarev: 2

The document doesn't specify. Table CGT-21 seems to imply that it's actually recorded as just "762" with no decimal point at all.

Rolling up with the siege mortar, I guess.

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