A thought on Euro police mouse guns

[HiBC]

Was walking last night,and a thought occured to me.

A bunch of Euoropean Police type hand guns,mostly small cal blowback pocket guns are on the market

Now,don't get me wrong,a mouse gun is still a gun,and if you need one,it is way better than no gun...

But,why are the European police OK with small calibers like a 32ACP?And then the rational MAY come,if its good enough for them,its good enough for me..

My thought is this,those mouse guns are typically used OFFENSIVELY,on an unarmed population.As in,I am the Gestapo or the Iron Curtain Police,we have grabbed you,and you WILL find my .32 ACP quite dangerous.

We want large caliber handguns when we are a polite society that will only use our handgun in a dire Defensive situation,to stop someone who is trying to kill us.

Please,I am not trying to put down anyone's small caliber handgun,or question the reason they carry whatever they carry.It's not about you!

Just a thought about why the police of a culture might choose the 32 ACP or equivalent

 

[drail]

The European police and military have always favored small caliber handguns. It's the reason the 9mm has becone the world standard. I think they believe the criminal will simply give up when they see a cop.

 

[mete]

The Olympics in 1980 [?] and the murder of the Israeli athletes changed things greatly. Development of special units like the German GSG-9 ,better weapons and the change from mouse guns to the 9mm ,brought on by terrorists and their weapons forced the Europeans to see the real world.

 

[MagnumWill]

I've always wondered about this rationale as well.

typically used OFFENSIVELY,on an unarmed population

That's also a good reasoning point. What's the firearm population density in Europe? Certainly MUCH lower than the US. (Anyone may correct me if i'm wrong)

Here's another question. Say .40S&W, .45 Auto and .357 Magnum became common over there, would they trend towards them?

 

[Doyle]

You have to remember that the European police don't think of a handgun in the same way that we do. When they are required to do some "real" police work, they never reach for a handgun. They use those small sub-machine pistols (lots of UZI's over there). To an ordinary beat cop, a handgun is simply a badge of authority. They get very little in the way of a training budget so if you buy one they will have lots of holster wear but nothing in the way of shooting wear. The half-dozen or so that I've had through the years didn't even have their springs and triggers broken in yet.

 

[9mm]

Because in America "Bigger is Better" ?

9mm is just fine, Nato uses it.

Maybe 32acp is cheaper for them, and doesn't get in the way of bogus laws like, citizens can't own "military calibers" over there.

 

[TexasJim]

Military is also restricted to types of ammo, no HP's

 

[drail]

Um, the U.S. military can and does use anything they want for any purpose they want. Why do you think they do not use hollowpoints? Hint: it has nothing to do with the Hague Accords or the Geneva Convention.

 

[TexasJim]

I thought it was the Hague Convention and that it still applied to state sponsored force on force, however I may very well be wrong.

 

[Salmoneye]

What did James Bond use again?

 

[Scouse]

European Police forces universally carry and use service calibers these days, generally double stack, polymer 9mms of several persuasions. .32s are long a thing of the past.

The same dynamic with police service calibers occurred as in the USA. Once upon a time NYPD carried a .32 (admittedly not an ACP) when much more powerful cartridges were available. Sure, not long after that US police generally went to .38 special, eventually .357, 9mm, .45 and .40 etc as we know, it just took a bit longer in Europe generally. The growth of terrorism and events such as Munich '72, as has been pointed out, spurred the trend on in places it hadn't already caught up.

European police thought and think of a handgun as a self defence weapon, not as anything offensive. While European police use far more submachine guns than their American counterparts, as someone pointed out, I would suggest that it is simply an equivalent to the shotgun. US police have historically reached for the shotgun when there is a likelihood of violence, you rarely see shotguns with European police forces, they use submachine guns. (Actually, I think I may have first heard the equivalent thing on this very forum . . .)

I would suggest that this particular trend has gone the other way, these days US police forces are increasingly paramilitary, like European forces historically (with the exception of those in the UK, Republic of Ireland and doubtless some others I am unaware of).

 

[Mrgunsngear]

European Police forces universally carry and use service calibers these days, generally double stack, polymer 9mms of several persuasions. .32s are long a thing of the past.

Bingo. The reason these pistols are flooding the US market is because they're not being used in Europe anymore.

 

[kozak6]

I think the point of such pistols was as an easily carried symbol of authority that also has some function as a defensive weapon more so than as an out and out offensive weapon. Shooting dissidents and detainees in the back of the head likely doesn't figure into the selection of such a firearm.

 

[BlueTrain]

Boy, what a lot of off-the-wall answers in this thread. Apparently some think the police in Europe do nothing but arrest people off the street and throw them in concentration camps. The same people who think the police in Britain are unarmed.

The respondent who said the US police typically carried a .32 revolver when the European carried a .32 auto was correct. But don't generalize about the police. They vary a great deal from country to country and are typically highly respected, which has no bearing on the amount of crime in a country. Likewise, they are typically no more militarized than they are in this country. Probably the most militarized is the Carabinieri in Italy and I hope I spelled that correctly.

I don't like the expression mouse gun in the first place. However, the .380 was the service caliber for a time in a few countries and you all know (and probably have) the 9mm Makarov was the standard in Eastern Bloc countries until recently and is probably still in wide use. All of those countries had plenty of combat experience to base their decision on but they also tended to use more powerful weapons (rifles) now and then. One thing seems certain and that is with the exception of the British, who are always a little different, European police preferred any automatic over any revover.

 

[Mike Irwin]

There's a pretty simple reason why European police favored small handguns...

As with the military, the handgun was primarily a badge of office, NOT a working gun.

European crime rates were always MUCH MUCH lower than crime rates in the United States and incidences of violent crime were also extremely low.

There simply was no reason to uparm to something more powerful until the 1970s, when crime, especially violent crime, began to spike.

The "using them on an unarmed population" is interesting, but it's not accurate.

At the time these guns were adopted for use by European police, there was still a fairly significant private firearms ownership base in Europe, including handguns.

Most of Europe's anti-handgun laws didn't come into being until well after World War II.

 

[Scouse]

BlueTrain - I didn't mean to imply that I thought all American coppers were using .32s at the time, or indeed that all European ones were, if that is what came across.

The police in certain European countries have a decidedly paramilitary heritage, Italian Carabinieri as you point out(that would be my guess on the spelling too!), French Gendarmerie, Spanish Guardia Civil etc, I was trying to say I thought that the US police have been going more that way in recent decades.

Also, the British Police are generally unarmed. Go to an unusual event, a major transport hub, or hang around areas of lots of potential terrorist targets in London and you will see plenty of armed police with their glocks, tasers and MP5s. There are also some housing estates which have unusually high gun crime, armed police can be seen there routinely too.

Get stopped for speeding, call the police because you believe the house next door is being broken into, see the police performing public order work with drunks on a weekend evening, see them policing football matches, see them patrolling neighbourhoods - in other words, most of the time normal people will have contact with the police, they are almost always unarmed.

 

[Jim March]

I think it starts with how the European militaries viewed handguns...as a badge of office for officers. The main purpose of something like a 32ACP or the like was to threaten to shoot deserters with it...or in the case of the Soviets and the like, shoot dissenters in the back of the head .

The Japanese followed that pattern up through WW2 as well, with a mix of swords and handguns for officers. You more or less never saw either on enlisted men.

In the US military, privates with handguns using them as front-line weapons was more common, starting with using the Colt Walker .44 as a *primary* arm against the Comanche in an early field test of the critters way back before the Civil War. From that point forward you were much likely to see a true fighting handgun in the hands of a US private than almost any other army.

That in turn got us out of the mousegun mindset real quick, outside of the occasional .22 backup revolver in the Civil War and that's just because they were the cheapest repeaters available.

The closest we ever skirted with front-line mouseguns was the .38cal revolvers that didn't work out very well in the Phillipines circa 1898ish? We started pulling SAAs in 45LC back out of storage .

I think all this experience transferred over to police circles, as retired .mil folk headed that way after various wars.

As others have stated, the European police forces have now gone almost exclusively to the 9mmPara. I'm told that some of the former Warsaw Pact nations with low budgets in some local departments still use some 9x18Mak but that's not really what I'd call a mousegun...with the right ammo it's not half bad.

 

[RC20]

It was a symbol of authority. I.e. badge like.

Reading far to much into it than that with all the meanderings in the opening.

 

[BlueTrain]

There is some truth in the militarization of the police in the United States, what with their black uniforms and combat boots. When I was still in grade school, the local police wore white shirts. But the trend started a long, long time ago when state police agencies began to be organized. They were even called state troopers in some places and they had barracks. But of course, they weren't the local police. The local police where I live only go back to 1939. Before that, it was the sheriff, an office that does not exist in any other country besides Britain. And yes, one does see heavily armed police in Great Britain.

Another thing is, the police in Germany did often use 9mm pistols well before the 1970s and there was quite a variety in use and not all German made, either. I don't think one could really say that the 9mm because a world standard (and then only in the West) until after 1950. As far as the powerful handguns carried in the US, the US Air Force used only .38 special S&W revolvers with a fairly weak load until the M9 came along. In fact, the army used a large variety of .38 special revolvers both Colt, S&W and even Ruger from during WWII until well into the 1970s, perhaps later. The Rugers came along after I got out. And you all know (and wish you had) that the army issued .32 and .380 automatics as well and in those cases they were clearly symbols of authority. For parade purposes, because officer sabers had long disappeared, army officers carried pistols when the troops carried rifles. The Marines, being even more attuned to symbolism, retained sabers for both officers and senior NCOs.

 

[BlueTrain]

It occurs to me that not only are the .32 automatics for police use in Europe a thing of the past, most of their replacements have been replaced themselves and have hit the surplus market. Remember, this was nearly 40 years ago that 9mm pistols began to replace smaller pistols in Europe.