GunsVirginia Beach shooting reflects trend toward more powerful handguns
Like most mass shooters, the Virginia Beach gunman used a handgun. And like a growing number of American gun-buyers, he had a preference for some of the most powerful weapons available on the market. The use of semiautomatic handguns since 1990 has outpaced an already growing gun market.
Like most mass shooters, the Virginia Beach gunman used a handgun. And like a growing number of American gun-buyers, he had a preference for some of the most powerful weapons available on the market.
According to police, the man who killed 12 municipal employees in the Virginia city on May 31 was armed with two handguns equipped with extended magazines and a suppressor. The pistols were chambered in .45 caliber. A gun’s caliber refers to a round’s diameter, and simple physics shows that the amount of energy a bullet carries is determined by its speed and mass. As a result, bullets get more destructive as they increase in size and velocity. That makes a .45 deadlier than a tiny .22 when aimed at the same target.
The .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun has been a mainstay in American gun culture for generations. For most of the 20th century, it was the favored sidearm of the American military. But civilians typically stuck with revolvers and small, cheap semiautomatic handguns like the .22, .25, and .32. Only in the late 1980s and 1990s did production of medium- and high-caliber handguns ranging from the .380 to the .45 outstrip that of revolvers and smaller semiautomatics.
While the gun market as a whole has markedly expanded since 1990 — including the production of traditional revolvers and some lower-caliber semiautomatics — medium- and high-caliber semiautomatics have grown at a faster rate.
A Trace analysis of manufacturing data compiled by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives shows that production of medium-caliber .380 and 9mm semiautomatic handguns increased nearly five times between 1990 and 2017. Over the same period, production of high-caliber .40-, .45-, and .50-caliber semiautomatic handguns more than tripled (The production of high-caliber revolvers also increased during that time period, though not as much as semiautomatics.) In comparison, the gun industry made just 16 percent more .22 pistols.
