Smaller but more powerful is better? Only if you discount recoil (check out that muzzle flip) and take accuracy out of the mix. But what do I know? I carry a compact .45. I guess I should be worried about a round going through two houses and hitting someone . . . [h/t @Dtotheug]

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53 COMMENTS

  1. wtf dont cops have AR15 rifles or shotguns in their cars? this is more like statist pigs whining for more gun control because they cant effectively do their jobs

    • Believe it or not, there are many departments out there where the only gun in the car is the one on the officer’s hip. Some departments do not issue ARs or SGs. Officers have to provide their own. My one buddy is a reserve officer for a small town rural police department. They have half a dozen ARs locked up in their department armory but are not allowed to train with them or use them (WTF????!!!!!!). In my town, I know several officers that have their own SCAR-17s in the trunks in addition to the department issued Bushmasters. Depending on the state, city, and department, you might either find an arsenal in the trunk or just the gun carried by the officer.

      It’s pretty f*ck*d up when you think about it.

    • Remember that the General said that .223 are too dangerous and too lethal for civilians to own. Note that civilians is a legal term meaning non-military.

  2. So… are the cops’ bullets meeting the bad guys’ bullet mid air and losing an arm wrestling match? Because that seemed to be what they were saying by “outgunned.” At the risk of going Freudian here, size doesn’t matter. It’s how you use it. I’d rather take a .22 against a poorly aimed bad guy with a Desert Eagle.

  3. Its a like a fan-boy buying the next great gun…less new guns, more ammo and time for training/practice.

  4. They are likely looking at moving from the 9m to the .40 cal. Not surprising but there offerers accuracy will go down since the .40 has a higher recoil. Nothing that can’t be fix by training but cop already hit bystander more then the criminals do.

    Thanks
    Robert

  5. When they can shoot straight maybe they will deserve better guns & yes 357 sig is expensive. I carry a compact 45, nuff said, Randy

  7. It sounds like he was referring to the 357Sig… or the more aptly named “9mm MAGNUM” hehe
    It’s a great round; a pain to reload.

    • The Sig.357 was my guess too. Why not a +P+ 9mm like the Federal?
      That’s what I carry in my G19. It has no more percieved recoil or flash than hardball Speer 115 gr. practice loads, and the ballistics(1300 fps) essentisally turn it into a .357. In Marshall& Sanow’s”Stopping Power” stats (admittedly 13 years old) this round was the top 9mm one-shot stopper w/ a track record of 90%.

  8. Sounds like a classic case of Police Officers needing to spend more time at the range so they can gain better shot placement.

    Anyone gunner with a brain knows that a well placed shot supercedes all caliber discussion. If these cops can’t hit someone with a 9mm, going up in caliber will only decrease their accuracy and further increase innocent people being hit by cross fire and or/ricochets.

    Lastly, the cops want bigger guns to protect themselves from a well armed populace, not to protect said populace.

    Their lives are more valuable than ours, you all know that right? (sarcasm)

  9. The best way to increase the amount of available firepower you have on your side is to increase your numbers. Allies can cover more ground/angles, and they can stay in the fight if you’re incapacitated. The choice of waiting for backup is a luxury often available to police but almost never to civilian self-defenders. How about we dispense with some of those APCs and other gee-whize Drug War gadgetry and increase the amount of backup available?

  10. I’ve never understood the outgunned argument between cops and criminals. Even if a criminal has a semi-auto rifle the cop has (in most cases) way better training. Wouldn’t better gun control (breathing, targeting, muscle memory, weapon familiarity) place a trained officer in a better position over the video referenced street thug with a “gat” who probably has limited experience other than flashing it at other idiots. To me outgunned is when one side physically has more shooters than the other, or a tank rolls up on your position. That said if a one caliber is preferred over another then go with what you are comfortable with.

        • I second the motion. Wonder what the odds of getting those added to the SPAM filter flag words would be?

        • You LOL grabbers are all the same. First it’s the LOLs, then it’s the FOADs, and then it’s little smiley faces like this one đŸ™‚

          You can have my LOLs when you pry them from my cold, dead keyboard.

      • Some do. Some LEO are gun guys. People in their Dept’s know who they are, and that’s where they go when asking about weapons.
        The range I belong to allows LEO to shoot for free.
        The LEO/gun guys see all the cool stuff members are shooting, then look at their Duty stuff and get envious.
        They can’t afford to buy some of the cool stuff, or arn’t allowed to carry their own stuff. So they want Uncle Suger to pay for the cool stuff!
        JMHO.
        Guy22

    • In many departments range time is voluntary personal training and often the ammo costs and range time comes out of pocket. In some departments like NYPD they don’t want officers to “default to gunplay” so they are only required to qualify once a year, with pitiful requirements, and that’s all the training they get. So in order to make sure their officers are using their firearms only as a last resort many departments have adopted the concept that training officers less will force them to exhaust every other option first. What really occurs is innocent bystanders are shot instead of the intended target, which is another reason they use the relatively ineffective 9mm (but they’ll never admit that).

      Make no mistake, the “outgunned” argument means the department accepts and expects low accuracy so every round counts. They’re thinking if they’re lucky one bullet will connect so it better be the hardest-hitting round they can get. That’s not a good message for the innocent bystanders, aka taxpayers, around them, though.

  11. “St. Louis Cops: Criminals Have Us Outgunned”

    Modern society’s definition and celebration of freedom and liberty has resulted in the collapse of the traditional family, once close-knit traditional religious and ethnic groups, and neighborhoods where people don’t care or know each other. I’ve written here before that about 85% of the men in prison for a 2nd violent offense grew up without a father. The underlying problem isn’t the guns. The underlying problem is modern social values and the modern governments that support it ensuring the ever weakening need of the people to depend on more government.

    • +1. For years TV sitcoms and movies have been portraying “family time” as boring and un-cool, with parents shown as out of touch with reality or behind the times. The father’s role has especially been degraded to the point that dads are seen as ignorant, socially awkward control freaks. As dangerous as the anti-gun lobby is, the much quieter anti-father lobby may be more of a root cause.

  12. What a nice way to try to bully the taxpayers into footing the bill for a caliber change! .357sig isn’t going to make much of a difference over a good 9mm load. Of course, this is the agency that dropped the 870 in favor of the Beretta Storm Carbine because officers were having a problem qualifying with the shotgun.

    They need to up their training standards rather than looking for hardware to fix a software problem.

    • Actually they dropped the Storms and replaced them with 870Ps about a year ago if memory serves.

      Supervisors have AR clones if memory serves.

      Regardless, this is all silliness. Even in North STL, there aren’t many shoot-outs. Even fewer of them involve police officers. And ‘outgunned’ by what exactly? The hood rats all carry 9s, with the occasional sawed-off shotty, or AK. This is not the province of Miami-Dade machinegunnery, where there is a remote possibility that someone has the means (and crazy) to break out an MP5 or ma deuce.

  13. If you’ve got access to ARs and some decent bolt guns in .308, I have a hard time thinking you are, as an organization, outgunned. I mean, if you’re restricted to your sidearm, I guess I’d buy it–a bad guy with a rifle and/or body armor would have a huge advantage over you.

    But they’re not restricted to side arms–at least no PD I’ve ever seen was.

  14. Can we see some evidence first?

    Outgunned my a___. This seems to be the standard excuse. I’m all for these guys getting the equipment they need, I am tried of the excuses of why they need bigger and badder.

    I willing to bet that some well placed shots are more important than caliber. Also, many of these guys also carry M4s. Hell, we have a small affluent community here in CT where there are no gangs and the most the PD deals with are burglery and break-in and they all have M4s in their trunks –why? To kill the cat that set off the alarm. Was there not a story last year about some NJ town of less than 1000 people getting their own SWAT team. come on, WTF!

  15. Citizens being able to outgun government employees means we live in a free society. When the government can outgun the citizens it means we live in a tyranny.

      • Well on point; law abiding citizens are being punished for demanding and exercising their constitutionally protected right to bear arms. Gun grabbers want to relegate that right to a hollow useless memory. But the reality is that the 2A protections give support to ALL the other enumerated constitutional rights by providing a means and deterrence for protecting those rights.

        If only there was a way to open the eyes of the often brainless fashionably liberal Democrats who keep putting lefty socialist extremist politicians and gun grabbers into office. With the lefty mainstream media clogging the most prominent popular sources of information with their half truth liberal propaganda, this is a huge challenge.

        These spoiled opportunist SL cops are simply trying to capitalize on the current scare mongering to squeeze more money out of the taxpayers for new bigger and badder toys. They should be making better use of the ones they have by spending more time at the range and in tactics training. THAT’S what will help them stay out of trouble.

  16. Didn’t S&W look into the needs of police and military a while ago, something that would have increased energy delivered but still had high capacity between 9mm and .45? Oh yeah, that’s why they designed .40 S&W in 1990. Oh, and then they created the M&P line of firearms, you know, Military & Police. So why didn’t they update in the ’90s? Probably because 9mm is cheaper, they don’t actually engage in gun battles regularly (they’re there to fill out the paperwork after the incident and pick up the brass), and their officers can more easily qualify on 9mm.

    Guns are a hot topic these days, a year ago that “story” would never have been produced. They’re trying to inflate the perceptions of the intensity of crime to subtly aid in civilian disarmament, trying to get people to think crime is out of control and “we have to do *something*”. This should be a wake-up call for everyone out there; as has always been true, the police can’t protect you, as they keep admitting, so you need to be able to defend yourself. Giving them more money to change the caliber of bullet in their guns isn’t going to get those guns to the scene any faster. If you want to fund something functional the police use on a regular basis fund new pens.

  17. Maybe they figure if they go to a caliber not used by the Military, they will be able to get more ammo.

  18. So a full-capacity 9mm with a good defensive hollow-point bullet just won’t do the job anymore, eh? They must’ve joined the hunt for that crazed cop in California and realized they need some of that “cop-killer” stuff.

  19. They need to show evidence of being outgunned. I doub’t what they have is conclusive, if they have anything. Grante4d I haven’t been a street officer since 99 but most of what I saw was 9mm and below. I hope the STL taxpayers and city council don’t fall for this line of crap. My guess is that their current armory is getting worn out and they are looking to upgrade adn replace all at once, without showing an articulatable need. I love how he says (and I paraphrase), how he needs to protect the officers and the citizens. Yeah, yeah, the citizens, we can’t forget about them. Whatever Chief.

    You know what happens when a broke city like STL gets new guns they are unfamiliar with? They get more in debt from the ND’s and misses. More than before. Lawsuits, cue up to the left. Admin hearings for ND’s on the right.

  20. So than can shoot the wrong truck and the wrong target more efficiently. Instead of hitting it 50 times they need to be able to hit it 100 times. Statistics show that most shootings are over in very few shots. (Except for the ones where the cops hit innocents with multiple rounds from standard capacity magazines.)

    I thought this is what SWAT was supposed to be for. If there is a heavily armed gang of people you call the special police. The ordinary officers shouldn’t need anything more than a K frame revolver just like they used to have.

    No new “toys” for the cops until they learn to shoot without hitting innocent civilians or their property.

  22. Jeff Roorda, at 20 seconds to 30 seconds in the video, is speaking as a member of the St. Louis Police Officers Association ( http://www.slpoa.org ), and is not speaking on behalf of the St. Louis Police Department.

    The Saint Louis Police Officers Association (SLPOA) is a labor organization designed to provide it’s members of the Saint Louis Metropolitan Police Department (SLMPD) with the best possible working conditions.

    For more than 40 years, the SLPOA has been protecting the men and women who protect the citizens and visitors of this great city. The objective of the SLPOA shall be to advance the moral, social, and material standing of the members of the Association by honorable and lawful means.

    As a labor organization, the Association shall endeavor to achieve Collective Bargaining with Binding Arbitration.

  23. At 49 seconds in the video, the talking head says the police are looking for “lighter and more powerful handguns that shoot better ammunition” while panning across a row of Beretta Neos .22 LR pistols.

    Juliet Foxtrot Charlie! These people are idiots.

    This seems like a case of some guns & ammo salesman — probably the guy from Metro Shooting Supplies at 50 seconds in the video — trying to suck off the taxpayer teat by convincing unionized government employees that they need to change the perfectly good equipment they already have.

    • Or a gun shop owner trying to play with the media–that’s something I’d do. “Sure, see these nice high powered *snicker* .22s? That’s what they need!”

  26. 1. this is a load of crap
    2. Regardless, if the cops are outgunned by criminals, well then LAW-ABIDING, NON-CRIMINALS shouldn’t be outgunned by criminals either!! Why doesn’t anyone want to understand this!!

    • Exactamundo! Why nobody has brought this up to Piers Morgan baffles me. Moreover, as Jeff cooper asked after the North Hollywood shootout,”What, nobody went for a headshot when they realied the goblins had body armor?”

      • Jeff Cooper spoke to these circumstances a number of times, my favorite: “You are only outgunned if you miss.”

  28. Correct me if I’m wrong, but firepower is the measure of rounds a weapon can carry. Doesn’t going to .40/.357 decrease fire power? Better training and the most modern 9mm loads should be sufficient. Such as Hornady’s new Critical Duty, designed to overcome barrier penetration issues. And in situations where a handgun isn’t enough, a patrol rifle in .223/5.56 should have you covered.

  29. These spoiled opportunist SL cops are simply trying to capitalize on the current gun control crowd scare mongering to squeeze more money out of the taxpayers for new bigger and badder toys. They should be making better use of the ones they have by spending more time at the range and in tactics training. THAT’S what will help them stay out of trouble.

  30. Those squib loads in St. Louis aren’t just outgunned by the BGs, they’re out-thought. The BGs steal at least as much as the cops, they shoot better than the cops, and they sleep in their cars almost as often as the cops. Okay, the cops have better medical, but with Obamacare they’re losing that advantage too.

  31. The top cops here in South Florida use the same excuse when some gang banger shoots up a heroin den with an AK. They tell the public the bad guys are better armed than the police. They say, we only have this little pea shooter on our hip, and the gangs have military assault weapons. My response to these incompetent bozos is: Its your dam fault your officers are not armed with the best rifles money can buy. How is that 19 year old scumbags have better guns than a city with a 500 million dollar annual budget ? The answer is piss poor management, and piss poor leadership.
    The local Sherriffs dept in Broward County Florida makes their own pay for their own guns–thats right–if a LEO in the Sherriffs dept wants an AR-15 he has to pay for it out of his pocket-not the county general fund. He has to buy his own sidearm too. Its stupid rules like this that get cops killed, and answers the question of how the scumbags are better armed than the police.

  32. I thought the Glock 22 was the most used handgun in US law enforcement (also the gun of the feds, along with the G23)? You go from 17 in the G17(9mm) to 15 rounds in the G22. Not that any of this makes a difference. Follow the money.

  33. “Why is it the progressive liberal that steals guns then go and kill movie goers and children in school has never been an NRA member?”
    Ft. Hood – Registered Democrat – Muslim
    Columbine – Too young to vote – both families were registered democrats and progressive liberals
    VA Tech – Wrote hate mail to Pres. Bush and his staff. Registered Democrat
    Colorado Theater – Registered Democrat, staff worker on the Obama campaign, OWS participant, progressive liberal
    Conn. School shooter – Registered Democrat, hated christians
    Common thread here is that all of these shooters were progressive liberal democrats”.
    Interesting….isn’t it? Let’s ask the 21st century progressive Nazi, George Soros.

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