9 mm Major in L10

[Nik Habicht]

Roughly speaking -- and odds are I'll get some of the details wrong.....

In the stone age, when I was a little kid, just after Columbia Conference, the game was played with singlestacks, and occasionally by the adventurous with Browning High Powers.....

There were power factors for major and minor, because everyone thought the .45 was king. 9mm may have been minor by rule back then.....

Comply became common even for .45s. Then someone figured out that one could load .38 Super to major, and get more BBs in the SS and the great arms races were off. Doublestacks and optics eventually followed, and if I can believe one friend, once upon a time in the late eighties and early 90s people were building new guns every year to take advantage of the latest developments.

At some point it was decided to spin off iron-sighted, non-comped guns into a division of their own and it was called Limited. By that time the .40S&W and the 10 mm were around and the powers that be decreed that in order to make major, the caliber would need to start with .4.......

At the same time, people were kabooming 9mm guns loaded to major, and the Board decided to only allow 9mm to be loaded to/declared as major if it was loaded long, to 1.250 inches. Some more time went by -- and after adding Revo, L10, and Production, and dropping the major power factor from 175 to 165, the board was convinced by people who had collected load data that with the new lower power factor and modern powders, it was possible to safely load 9mm to major at normal OAL for the cartridge. But, since the great arms race had settled down, the board decided to lift that restriction for open (where most were loading the .38 Super or its derivatives to get more gas to work the comp than they could with a .40 or larger cartridge firing a heavier bullet) only.

And that's a crude timeline of how we got here -- though I'm sure people with more time in the game will be along to fill in the gaps, correct me on the details....

[Southpaw]

Thanks for the history lesson Nik. So basically what you're saying is there really never was any logic to the decision to exclude .38 Super from Limited Major

[Nik Habicht]

Thanks for the history lesson Nik. So basically what you're saying is there really never was any logic to the decision to exclude .38 Super from Limited Major

At the time that Limited was created, there were a lot of really high pressure reloads being used in the sport -- so kaboom was a very real concern at least for the 9mm. By the same token, Open was pretty much dominated by 38 Supers/9x23/the other derivatives -- so the decision may have included .40 for major in an effort to differentiate the divisions.....

I wouldn't go so far as to consider it logicless, but then I wasn't around in that time....

I joined USPSA in May 2001, the same month that I discovered the Enos forums.....

[Sarge]

Also, when 40 came out didn't it pretty much make major right off the shelf? May have played a part in the process?

[Ultimo-Hombre]

I think 9 major in limited would bring in more new shooters so........

[motosapiens]

I think 9 major in limited would bring in more new shooters so........

and we would need some new shooters to replace all the glock shooters that would blow up their faces.

[9x45]

blow their faces off..... It's over rated, you blow up a Glock, it just pukes out the bottom, no big deal.

[mpolans]

Thanks for the history lesson Nik. So basically what you're saying is there really never was any logic to the decision to exclude .38 Super from Limited Major

Remember, at one point our shooting discipline was actually based on "defensive" shooting and was founded by Jeff Cooper, a guy who believed bigger diameter bullets were better at stopping bad guys than smaller diameter bullets. IIRC,this and the incidences of "super face," especially prior to fully supported chambers, might have influenced the .40 minimum diameter.

[theWacoKid]

I this maybe a misprint ? L10 9mm major was in Frontsight Magazine. In the USPSA Rules app D3 on page 78, the min cal for major is .40. So I don't understand how that's legal?

Don't they just ask you what caliber you are shooting? I'm betting some people just described what they're shooting as "9 major". Just because you call it that doesn't mean you'll be scored that way. Cause if so I shoot a "9 don't bother scoring it they're all alphas major".