What is 9mm

This makes choosing ammunition and understanding proper loads a headache. Our customer service team often receives calls from newer shooters. While gun owners can call different cartridges just about anything they want, most people will settle on two or three different nicknames. This is a non-government affiliation of manufacturers that publish industry standards. Those standards include the official names for various cartridges. In Europe, 14 member governments direct the CIP and perform essentially the same task.

Yes, 9mm ammo is the same as ammo designated 9x19mm. However, these calibers and cartridges are not the same and in most cases, you need to avoid using them in your standard 9mm Luger pistol or carbine. The first difference is the casing length which, at The most important difference, however, it the bullet diameter, which is roughly. One tenth of a millimeter might not sound like much, but the larger diameter can cause the bullet to jam in barrels designed for 9mm Luger.

Designed by the famous John Browning, most people will know this cartridge as the. Other names for the cartridge in include the 9mm Short, Corto, Kurz, or 9x17mm. For this reason, the two are not interchangeable. Yesterday I said 9mm and 9mm Luger were slightly different as the later would not feed in several of my guns. This possibly causes the base of the case to bulge. Bulged brass will not cycle even after using a sizing die.

Special dies Bulge Buster must be used to resize this bulged base of the case. Thank you immensely for the complete and thorough explanation. This was incredibly helpful. I have owned several guns, but my Taurus G3c is my first 9mm. I was looking through a Glock catalogue and was surprised there were no 9mm caliber listed. Makes a lot more sense now. Hi I have a 9mm glock 43 would your 9mm Luger be an acceptable choice for ammunition for this gun?

Hi Chris, absolutely. The Glock 43 is ideal for use with 9mm ammo. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

View Larger Image. The answer is yes! But, of course, this all begs another important question. Why Does 9mm Have Multiple Names? June 10th, Ammo Insights. Related Posts. The important feature in the figure is the large difference in feed angle between most of the tapered cartridges and the straight-walled 9mm Automatic when there are four rounds and more in the magazine. The difference in angle can be quite large, up to over seven degrees round 5 with the most tapered brass 0.

The 0. Even a taper as small as 0. The least amount of taper 0. Note the slight improvement in feed angle for some of the more tapered 9mm Luger cartridges with rounds in the magazine. This is an artifact of it being a 10 round capacity magazine, as this improvement was not evident in a 15 round single column magazine that was tested.

Presumably, when the magazine spring is near full compression, the pressure can affect the feed angle of tapered cartridges. Several straight-walled. Thirty-eight Super Comp Starline and. However, they have slight rims that measure about 0. By comparison, the. The 9mm Steyr is another straight-walled case, and Barnes indicates a rim 0. Actual rim width varies somewhat in all examples. Rim width matters because the rim can enhance nosedive.

The rim of the upper round is normally positioned in the extractor groove of the underlying round when they are in the magazine. During feeding, the slide pushes on the upper rim base of the cartridge.

As the round is pushed forward, a rim wider than the case wall will drag on the underlying cartridge once it moves past the extractor groove. The push on the upper part of the rim and drag on the lower part of the rim combined with a nosedive gap encourages the cartridge to nosedive. I tested several of these case designs trimmed to 9mm Luger length to assess the effect of rim width on feed angle. I selected cases with a rim of. Rim diameter measurements indicate rim diameter minus head diameter.

Cases with rims less than. Cases were loaded with the Remington grain bullet as described above. One hundred and twenty rounds 0. The rims were not necessarily concentric with the case body. That is, if the cases with minimal rims. Rotating the case to a different part of the rim eventually produced contact. Even the 9mm Automatic. I had no way to guarantee a consistent amount of rim drag during feeding. Thus, I left to chance the amount of the rim that would contribute to cartridge drag.

Therefore, in some instances with these cases there would be rim drag on the underlying round and sometimes not. The rims on the 0. Test results showed that wider rims produce lower feed angles see slideshow. There was up to an eight-degree difference in feed angle round 5 between the rimless 9mm Automatic and the cartridge with the widest rim 0.

Even cases with a minimal rim 0. Keep in mind that in some instances there was likely no rim drag for these cases because of the reason mentioned above. The fact that there is some evidence of lowered feed angle in this group suggests that even a minimal rim will enhance nosedive. Thus, a true rimless case offers the best feed angle. I experienced no feeding malfunctions with the Remington FMJ round nose bullets during these tests.

But as many shooters know, flat nose bullets can sometimes produce feeding malfunctions in guns that run round nose bullets reliably. I tested two different flat nose bullets with three different cases for feeding reliability. The cases were Remington 9mm Luger tapered , Starline. The bullets were a Winchester 9mm grain JHP seated to 1.

The Speer. The feed angle with the two different bullets was very similar, so the lines are the average of the two bullets. As one would predict from the previous results, the 9mm Automatic had the highest feed angles. The 9mm Luger had the lowest feed angles, and the 0. But more important was their feeding reliability. Some rounds experienced nosedive feed failures where the round stopped dead on the feed ramp.

The feed angles correlated with their feeding reliability. The 9mm Luger brass, with its lower feed angle, had problems feeding both flat nose bullets.

But the 9mm Automatic cartridge, with its higher feed angles, experienced no feeding malfunctions with either bullet. Thus, the lower the feed angle, the greater the likelihood of a feeding malfunction. These results show the clear superiority in feeding reliability with the straight-walled rimless 9mm Automatic. Feeding reliability was also tested with a Diamondback DB9. The nosedive angle of the top round in a fully loaded six round DB9 magazine with a tapered 9mm Luger and a straight-walled 9mm Automatic is shown below.

The 9mm Automatic has a six-degree higher cartridge angle. The Diamondback magazine had the manufacturer's "improved" follower designed to reduce nosedive. The loaded rounds had 0. Both bullet designs fail to feed the top round from a fully loaded 6-round magazine. The bullet nose catches on a ledge in the frame below the barrel's feed ramp.

This also shows the dramatic improvement in feed angle offered by the 9mm Automatic.