I routinely encounter people that look at the 38 Special and 9mm Luger cartridges side by side and ignorantly proclaim the 38 Special is “more powerful” because “it has more powder”. Now, anyone with even a passing knowledge of smokeless powder cartridges, reloading and internal ballistics knows this is flawed thinking. I think we've all met those people that make those types of flawed proclaimations.
The 38 Special and the 9mm Luger cartridges were introduced within a few years of each other (1898 and 1901 respectively) but they had different origins and took different paths. The 9mm was a smokeless powder, high pressure cartridge from the beginning. The 38 Special was a lower pressure, lower velocity cartridge and typically loaded with a heavier bullet than the 9mm. However, both cartridges utilized a projectile of nearly the same diameter.
Revolvers don’t have the challenges of feeding and cycling that pistols must cope with but despite this advantage, revolvers were often loaded with round nose bullets that have poor terminal performance. People such as Elmer Keith, handgun hunters and savvy street cops knew that a flat nosed bullet had better stopping power than the round nose bullet but that information seemed to be slow to trickle down to everyone.
The poor reputation of the 9mm wasn’t the result of the cartridge being bad but rather that the cartridge was often loaded with poor performing bullets and lower velocities than the cartridge was designed for. Add to that the dramatic increase in use of the 9mm starting in the 1980’s (at least in North America) and more than just a little bias against those new-fangled semi-auto pistols and the stage was set. The 9mm cartridge received the blame for poor performance.
The introduction of the 357 Magnum, later followed by the advent of the K-frame Magnum revolvers, probably stunted the development of better 38 Special ammunition. If you needed more stopping power, you just selected the 357 magnum.
The real push to develop better 38 Special ammunition came out of law enforcement agencies that prohibited the use of the 357 Magnum. The increase in crime in the 1970’s helped to fuel this (sound familiar?) By the late 1970’s agencies either switched to the 357 Magnum or, if that was politically impractical, they adopted more effective 38 Special ammunition.
