Expert: Dean Speir - 12/11/2006

Question
Dear Mr. Speir,

I discovered TGZ a few days ago and it has consumed me.  It is such a wealth of information.  Thank you.

My question today is this: which semi-auto will handle 9x19, .357 Sig, and or .40 S&W with only a change of barrel and recoil spring?  I recently read that some pistol's extractor is such that it will handle all the above rounds.  Unfortunately I do not remember the pistol or the site.

Answer
Thank you for the generous words, Clyde… glad you're getting some value from The Gun Zone.

As to the specifics of your question, I'm afraid that I'm not going to be of much help in that 9 x 19mm/357 SIG/.40 S&W department. I'm of the "panty-hose" school of thinking… as almost any female of your acquaintance will confirm, one size definitely does not "fit all."

Putting aside the barrel and recoil spring (to control the slide velocities of the different pressure rounds) aspects you raised, there are other issues to consider.

While the breechface for the .40 S&W and 357 SIG rounds would be the same, one cut for the 9 X 19mm, or parabellum/Luger, cartridge would be smaller, wouldn't it?!

But for me the biggest issue would be that of the magazines, the heart of any self-loading firearm… any gunsmith worth his bluing salts will tell you that the first place to look in any sort of reliability problem, would be the magazine! Sometimes it's hard to make one's garden variety semi-auto pistol behave properly, let alone one where the barrel and recoil spring is continually swapped back and forth.

So, that's my two cents, and worth no more than you paid for it, but I don't particularly like "multi-caliber-capable pistols," and now you know why.

One other thing. Note that there is no decimal point in the 357 SIG designation… it's a 0.355-inch projectile, and the naming of the round and the handgun was a cynical attempt by SIGArms to trade on the near-mythic one-shot stopping power indices in the Marshall-Sanow volumes.

Fortunately for SIG, my opinion (and that of some other gun professionals) doesn't count for anything, #1, and, #2, about ten years back Speer did some tweaking of the round developed for SIG by Federal, and got the exterior ballistics up past the nominal velocities originally advertised. It's actually been quite successful for the company despite our predictions to the contrary.