Watching The Bullet Drop

By James Rummel

It was the 1930’s, and the US military was taking a look at the data from WWI. How effective were handguns in war? Not very!

I can’t find the source, but I remember reading a report many decades ago that had been written in the 1920’s. The author was a high ranking officer of the British army medical corps, and his assessment was stark and realistic. Seems the most wounds were caused by artillery, second most common wounds caused by machine guns, third by rifles. Handguns? If memory serves, Official records told of a total of seven people ended up in field hospitals with a hole in their hide caused by a handgun during the course of the war. Seems they all claimed to have been sleeping, and they rolled over on top of their pistol when it went off!

Did it happen that way, or were they trying to get out of going over the top? No way to tell.

At any rate, the idea of equipping the support troops that needed to do their work close to the enemy lines with a handgun for self protection fell out of favor. Artillery …Read the Rest

Source:: Hell In a Handbasket