I agree in principle that a 1911A1 in some caliber other than 45 ACP borders on a sacrilege, but it can be made to work. Also note that I don't own any of these ballistic heresies--I just appreciate them second-hand.
In the modern scheme of things the 9 x 19 and 40 Short & Weak offer an advantage that mainstream 1911s cannot--high capacity, totaling 13-16 rounds full-up. How advantageous this 'Fire on the same magazine all afternoon' attribute might be is arguable for most folks, but my case might be a bit extreme--my county dealt with the 1980 Norco Bank Robbery/Chase/Shootout into Lytle Creek, and not quite 17 years later that North Hollywood debacle took place. The round count at Norco was conservatively estimated at 2700 shots fired, mostly by the hairballs. North Hollywood saw 650+ sent forth, again mostly by the clients.
The southern third of California is the epicenter of bank robbery in this country, and has been for 60+ years. That is where they keep the money--to paraphrase Mr. Dillinger. It is so frequent that in the Southern and Central Districts of the Unites States Courts the U.S. Attorneys' Offices have onerous mandatory minimum loss/violence/circumstantial thresholds to meet in order for a bank robbery to be accepted for prosecution at the Federal level. Triage, folks--there are LOTS of these to choose from, and the Feds only take the juicy ones.
The answer to the proliferation of crew/takeover bank and retail robberies soon after North Hollywood was for .gov to make a bunch of surplus A2-series de-fanged M-16s (semi-auto only) available to local and State law enforcement. 'About BLEEPing time!' was my thought at the time; my shop snagged 300 of these, and this was a valid response to the credible threat. Truth to tell, my shop has had Mini-14s in the trunks of our units since the early 1980s. They were thinly scattered over a big county, but they were out there. I know this because I was one of those rifle kids.
But know one thing about Norco--in one of the most stellar examples of combat marksmanship that I am aware of, one of our deputies at the scene of the Norco initial firefight instantly killed one of the five crew members with a head shot at distance from his 38 Special 6-shot crowd pleaser. This was done while under fire from no less than 3 military-pattern self-loading rifles (AR-15s and one HK-91). That is all he had, plus his Rem 870--with #4 Buck loads; he made it work, despite getting wounded and having his patrol unit shot all to hell around him.
On this holiday it seems appropriate that I explain to my friends on this site why my strident advocation of of the self-defense tenets I hammer you guys with are how they are--and why. Thank you for your indulgence over the years, folks.
