Meme not original to the author. It is difficult to overstate John Moses Browning's legacy, not limited to perfecting the automatic rifle concept, inventing both the over-under and semi-automatic shotgun, and his name adorns both the primary platform and actual caliber for the most prolific heavy machine gun in history. While those familiar with the name generally remember him for his military contributions, in the personal defense realm is where most throughout the world have benefitted. The relationship between time and memory being what it is, many may not even be aware of this.
John Moses was just part of a lineage of Brownings in the firearm design business, but his time was just right to shape the world of autoloading pistols. Despite revolvers having finished replacing vintage non-repeating designs by the turn of the 20th century Browning would never develop one. The work of Paul Mauser, Hugo Borchardt and other contemporaries showed there was still much not only for present ideas to mature but new ones to enter. Ties made with Colt in the US and FN in Europe, the pieces were in place for production of the world's most successful family of autoloading pistol cartridges.
"Family" is emphasized because cursory examination of the arms market shows Georg Luger's 9x19mm Parabellum as the most popular pistol round worldwide and that shows no sign of letting up soon. It is, however, the only member of its family to achieve such position with its 7.62x25 Tokarev cousin a distant second. In America for a time 9mm's top billing was threatened by a descendent of the .30 Remington rifle cartridge called .40 Smith & Wesson, earning the place that was slated for its elder sibling 10mm Auto. Success, if even for a time, enables future success: that is the definition of legacy.
Each of these calibers is a product of their time, their continued success a testament to the impact they made back then as there have been many attempts since to improve on and/or replace each of them. All but one carries the nomenclature ACP for Automatic Colt Pistol, owing to the arms company initial pistol designs for each of them were produced for. Not all remained successful and each has their own interesting histories, which will now be covered in chronological order.
.32 ACP/7.62x17mmSR
By the 1890s .32 caliber revolvers, in separate but generally-incompatible loadings developed by Smith & Wesson and Colt for the pistol lines, were highly-popular worldwide for both official service and self-defense. While stopping power is considered questionable in modern terms, favorability stemmed from how easy they were to shoot well. The .32 caliber itself was a legacy of the black powder era in which more rounds could be carried in smaller platforms and had greater load efficiency for which there would be so much more to exploit with smokeless, a fact that achieved fruition in the .32 H&R and .327 Federal Magnums.
The first ACP caliber was at first just 7.65mm made for Europe in the FN M1900, only earning its ACP nomenclature with the Colt M1903 Pocket Hammerless. Being first it had a head start that worked to its advantage, finding home in more pistols than any other single round. Loadings have significant variance though in general its power can be considered ranging between .32 S&W Long and .32 H&R Magnum; it may have been designed, at least in part, to emulate the former. It remains highly-popular outside the United States.
.38 ACP/9x23mmSR
While .32 caliber had its place in service it was (and still is) much more likely to be found as a defensive choice; by contrast .38 caliber is considered a full-size round for service or otherwise. This is no surprise: .38 in the US and Britain is equivalent to 9mm everywhere else. For the Spanish-American War standard US issue was the Colt M1892 in .38 Long (itself slated to be succeeded by the prolific .38 S&W Special) so Browning at Colt developed the first of his most-famed pistol designs to meet what he anticipated would be the future needs of the US military.
How the M1900 became the M1911 will be elaborated in the .45 ACP section. Despite rejection by the military Colt's line of .38 ACP pistols proved a fair success among American civilians. Its greatest legacy came after Browning's death in the form of what is now known as .38 Super. Today .38 ACP is officially-deprecated, the pistols collectible and rounds produced only in private niches, but .38 Super remains a favorite for many who get around the quirk of its semi-rimmed casing that is solely a result of it having been developed from the Browning original.
9x20mmSR
Browning adapted his own designs different ways for different markets, the first revision of the Colt M1903 Pocket Hammer for Europe chambering not .38 ACP but the first of more compact derivatives. The one pistol caliber to his credit that does not carry the ACP nomenclature is so because it never made it to any American-made design. For better or worse, the Browning Long is the only one of his calibers which is fully-obsolete and dead today.
.25 ACP/6.35x16mmSR
While having finished its development after .45 ACP, the .25 is covered next because it is the last with a key trait in common with those discussed previously: semi-rimmed cases. This quirk was not an issue for its time, with double-stack magazines not invented yet and Browning designing his guns to headspace the rounds properly. Yet even he could see the writing on the wall and moved towards rimless, while the only real issues that cropped up with semi-rims was attempting to load them in double-stack and Colt failing to headspace .38 Super properly in its 1911s for several decades.
While not as popular as .32, .25 ACP still achieved favor worldwide as an even lighter alternative. It can be considered that Browning's pistol calibers did not try reinventing the wheel so much as develop what worked well for the time in black powder revolvers adapted to smokeless autoloading: .32 ACP covered .32 caliber, .38 ACP improved on the .38s standard then, but .25 ACP instead offered an equivalent to .22 caliber in centerfire form. Cartridge and pistol technical improvements over the last century leave the choice between .22 and .25 a matter or personal judgment.
.45 ACP/11.43x23mm
First developed for the Colt M1905 (which would evolve into the M1911), .45 ACP owes its existence to the military's rejection of any smaller caliber including the .38 ACP. It, in the 1911 platform or otherwise, remains in service with some US Special Operations units, and is perhaps the one pistol round with the most passionate community of apologists. Unlike .32 or .38, .45 ACP did so phenomenal in displacing its .45 Colt revolver predecessor that more revolvers, starting with the M1917, were made to chamber it than any other autoloading cartridge. This comes with quirks of its own such as stipulating either moon clips or special rimmed-case loadings, but with the highly-popular ACP less costly than most defensive revolver calibers it can be a worthwhile trade.
.380 ACP/9x17mm
While 9mm Browning Long was developed for Europe, what Europeans called the 9mm Short was made in America for the Colt M1908 as a power alternative to the .32. Its success in that endeavor the rest of the century is too easy to understate: it has not only all but replaced .32 as a defensive semi-auto choice in the US but was adopted as a service caliber by so many countries that it goes by more names than any of the other ACP calibers. Its revolver equivalent is often considered the .38 S&W Special in terms of both power and purpose. While often derided in the age of compact 9mm Parabellum pistols due to their lower equivalent power, the fact will always remain that .380 as well as its smaller ACP brethren are proven worldwide and will still get the job done for shooters who do theirs. Happy Thanksgiving! This author is thankful for John Moses Browning.
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