The .38 Special, also commonly known as .38 S&W Special, .38 Smith & Wesson Special, .38 Spl, .38 Spc, or 9x29mmR is a rimmed, centerfire cartridge designed by Smith & Wesson.
The .40 S&W (10.2x22mm) is a rimless pistol cartridge developed jointly by American firearms manufacturers Smith & Wesson and Winchester in 1990. The .40 S&W was developed as a law enforcement cartridge designed to duplicate performance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI) reduced-velocity 10mm Auto cartridge which could be retrofitted into medium-frame semi-automatic handguns. It uses 0.40-inch (10 mm) diameter bullets ranging in weight from 105 to 200 grains.
The .45 ACP, also known as .45 Auto, .45 Automatic, or 11.43×23mm is a rimless straight-walled handgun cartridge designed by John Moses Browning in 1904, for use in his prototype Colt semi-automatic pistol. After successful military trials, it was adopted as the standard chambering for Colt's M1911 pistol. The round was developed due to a lack of stopping power experienced in the Moro Rebellion in places like Sulu. The issued ammunition, .38 Long Colt, had proved inadequate, motivating the search for a better cartridge. This experience and the Thompson–LaGarde Tests of 1904 led the Army and the Cavalry to decide that a minimum of .45 caliber was required in a new handgun cartridge.
The .380 ACP, is a rimless, straight-walled pistol cartridge developed by firearms designer John Moses Browning. The cartridge headspaces on the mouth of the case. It was introduced in 1908 by Colt, for use in its new Colt Model 1908 pocket hammerless semi-automatic, and has been a popular self-defense cartridge ever since, seeing wide use in numerous handguns. Other names for .380 ACP include .380 Auto, 9×17mm, 9mm Browning, 9mm Corto, 9mm Kurz, 9mm Short, and 9mm Browning Court. It should not be confused with .38 ACP. The .380 ACP does not strictly conform to cartridge naming conventions, named after the diameter of the bullet, as the actual bullet diameter of the .380 ACP is .355 inches.
The .357 SIG is a bottlenecked rimless centerfire handgun cartridge developed by the Swiss-German firearms manufacturer SIG Sauer, in cooperation with ammunition manufacturer Federal Premium. The cartridge is used by a number of law enforcement agencies.
The .357 Smith & Wesson Magnum, .357 S&W Magnum, .357 Magnum, or 9×33mmR is a smokeless powder cartridge with a 0.357 in (9.07 mm) bullet diameter. It was created by Elmer Keith, Phillip B. Sharpe, and Douglas B. Wesson of firearm manufacturers Smith & Wesson and Winchester. The .357 Magnum cartridge is notable for its highly effective terminal ballistics.
A rim-fire is a type of metallic cartridge used in firearms, where the primer is located within a hollow circumferential rim protruding from the base of its casing. When fired, the gun's firing pin will strike and crush the rim against the edge of the barrel breech, sparking the primer compound within the rim, and in turn ignite the propellant within the case. Invented in 1845, by Louis-Nicolas Flobert, the first rimfire metallic cartridge was the .22 BB Cap cartridge, which consisted of a percussion cap with a bullet attached to the top. While many other different cartridge priming methods have been tried since the early 19th century, such as teat-fire and pinfire, only small caliber rimfire and centerfire cartridges have survived to the present day with regular use. The .22 Long Rifle rimfire cartridge, introduced in 1887, is by far the most common ammunition found in the world today in terms of units manufactured and sold.
The 9×19mm Parabellum is a rimless, centerfire, tapered firearms cartridge.
.32 ACP is a centerfire pistol cartridge. It is a semi-rimmed, straight-walled cartridge developed by firearms designer John Browning, initially for use in the FN M1900 semi-automatic pistol. It was introduced in 1899 by Fabrique Nationale, and is also known as the 7.65 mm Browning Short.
The .38 Super, also known as .38 Super Auto, .38 Super Automatic, .38 Super Automatic +P , .38 Super +P , or 9×23mmSR, is a pistol cartridge that fires a 0.356-inch-diameter (9.04 mm) bullet. It was introduced in the late 1920s as a higher pressure loading of the .38 ACP, also known as .38 Auto. The older .38 ACP cartridge propels a 130-grain (8.4 g) bullet at 1,050 ft/s (320.0 m/s), whereas the .38 Super pushes the same bullet at 1,280 ft/s (390.1 m/s). The .38 Super has gained distinction as the caliber of choice for many top practical shooting competitors; it remains one of the dominant calibers in IPSC competition.
The .45 Colt (11.43×33mmR), is a rimmed, straight-walled, handgun cartridge dating to 1872. It was originally a black-powder revolver round developed for the Colt Single Action Army revolver. This cartridge was adopted by the U.S. Army in 1873 and served as an official US military handgun cartridge for 19 years, before being replaced by the .38 Long Colt in 1892.
A moon clip is a ring-shaped or star-shaped piece of metal designed to hold multiple cartridges together as a unit, for simultaneous insertion and extraction from a revolver cylinder. Moon clips may either hold an entire cylinder's worth of cartridges together, half a cylinder, or just two neighboring cartridges. The two-cartridge moon clips can be used for those revolvers that have an odd number of loading chambers such as five or seven and also for those revolvers that allow a shooter to mix both rimless and rimmed types of cartridges in one loading of the same cylinder.
Star Bonifacio Echeverria, S.A. was a manufacturer of small arms in the Basque region of Spain from about 1905 until 1997.
The Colt Model 1900 is a short-recoil operated "self-loading", or semi-automatic .38 caliber handgun introduced by Colt's Manufacturing Company at the turn of the 20th century. The M1900 was the first firearm to be chambered in .38 ACP and was the first handgun to utilize short-recoil operation.
Overpressure ammunition, commonly designated as +P or +P+, is small arms ammunition that has been loaded to produce a higher internal pressure when fired than is standard for ammunition of its caliber, but less than the pressures generated by a proof round. This is done typically to produce ammunition with higher muzzle velocity, muzzle energy, and stopping power, such as ammunition used for security, defensive, or hunting purposes. Because of this, +P ammunition is typically found in handgun calibers which might be used for paramilitary forces, armed security, and defensive purposes.
The Colt Model 1903 Pocket Hammer was a short-recoil, semi-automatic pistol, designed by the American arms designer John Browning. It was a compact version of the Colt Model 1902 Sporting Model pistol derived from the original Colt M1900. The Colt M1902 Sporting Model and 1903 Pocket Hammer models differ significantly from the military-inspired Colt 1902 Military Model although they fire the same cartridge. Its design is in no way related to the Colt Model 1903 Pocket Hammerless or the FN Model 1903 pistol.
The .41 Action Express is a pistol cartridge developed in 1986 to reproduce the performance of the .41 Magnum police load in semi-automatic pistols.
The 9×23mm Winchester is a pistol cartridge developed as a joint venture by Winchester Ammunition and Colt's Manufacturing Company. The 9×23mm Winchester has a convoluted development history, but was commercially introduced by Winchester in 1996. Marketed primarily to competition shooters as a replacement for .38 Super for International Practical Shooting Confederation, United States Practical Shooting Association and International Defensive Pistol Association competition, the cartridge failed to find significant market success despite a high-profile introduction.
The .35 Smith & Wesson (S&W) is an obsolete centerfire pistol cartridge developed in 1912 for the newly designed Model 1913 self-loading pocket pistol.
