Hell in a Handbasket

What Browning came up with was a handgun that looked to be of rather standard design, but which fed from a box magazine holding thirteen rounds. That means one could have the same firepower as an off duty cop with two revolvers, but it would only take a fraction of the time to reload.

The name of this revolutionary handgun was the Browning Hi Power.

Browning had sold the design to the Belgian gun firm of FN Herstal in 1927, but they sat on it until 1935. The stocks of arms left over from World War I meant that there was not a market for new designs, but they decided to take a chance when the Belgian army was looking to replace their handguns. What resulted was the most popular military pistol design of the 20th Century.

Keep in mind that this gun was introduced at a time when the majority of the armed forces of the world still used revolvers. Thirteen shots and then one or two second reloads by a trained pistolero. Science fiction had arrived.

The name "Hi Power" is obviously in reference to the number of rounds carried in the magazine, but there wasn't anything particularly powerful about the caliber chosen for the gun. It was the 9mm Parabellum cartridge, which was the standard German military pistol caliber at the time. It soon became a huge hit in Europe, with both military and police forces equipping their men with the revolutionary weapon. Even today, it is not uncommon that you will find a Hi Power in the holster of a cop or MP in a foreign country.

Here in the United States, large caliber handguns were viewed with reverence while smaller calibers were dismissed with contempt. 9mm handguns were pretty much ignored.

This began to change in the 1960's. The incidents of mass civil unrest caused many police officers to realize that they were most often seriously outnumbered during a violent confrontation. Increasing their firepower became a priority, and a fair number of them started to purchase autoloaders as off duty and backup weapons.

The first time I became aware of the Hi Power was when I viewed the movie Serpico, which was released in 1973. The protagonist buys one when he realizes that the corrupt cops he works with might mean to do him harm, and he wants to be able to fend off multiple attackers.

There is a scene in the film where a gun store owner has an interesting rant as Serpico signs the paperwork, obviously horrified by the 13 round capacity of the handgun. I suppose he wasn't as contemptuous of the 9mm round as most of his colleagues were at the time.

There were a few other handguns with large capacity magazines available, but the interest really wasn't there. In Europe the Browning dominated, and in America we tended to stick with the larger calibers as our choice for self defense.

This started to change in the 1980's. That was when Glock first started to market an amazing new handgun design.

The Glock Model 17 had a magazine with 17 rounds, four more than the Hi Power. It also was built on a polymer frame, which meant that it was extremely light and not all that uncomfortable to carry concealed. (No handgun is really comfortable to carry hidden away, it is just that some are more annoying than others.) Concerns about reliability and the strength of the gun proved to be unfounded, and it was soon accepted as a major advance in handgun design.

Another thing that helped with the acceptance of wondernines was that the US armed forces adopted one as their standard sidearm in 1985. This was the Beretta 92F, and the decision to switch from a .45 caliber round to the smaller 9mm is still an extremely volatile one even after more than 20 years. This is why most of the writers for gun magazines use the word "wondernine" in a disparaging or insulting way.

If you are going to be correct, then a wondernine has to be a handgun that has a magazine capacity of more than 10 rounds while also being chambered for the 9mm Parabellum cartridge. I actually use the term to mean any 9mm with a high capacity magazine even if they hold 10 rounds or less.

Let me give you an example. My choice for a defensive carry arm is a little gun made by Taurus called the PT111.

It is extremely small and easy to carry. It holds 10 rounds in the magazine, which isn't any great shakes when compared to the guns that can fire off 13 or 17 round without reloading. But since the gun is about 1/2 the size of those larger cousins, I think it is amazing that the engineers managed to pack that many cartridges into such a small space.

Of course, Taurus also manufactures a version that is chambered for the .45 ACP cartridge that also holds 10 rounds per magazine. But it is rather larger and heavier.