>I've been told, although without sources to back it up, that the
>original load specs for the 9x19mm Parabellum were somewhat hotter
>than the metallurgy of the time could handle, so they were dialed back
>a bit; unfortunately, this loss of power also made the Luger's
>mechanism somewhat less than reliable. Since the 9x19 was originally
>designed for the Luger, I find this debatable, but plausible.

I would tend to doubt that, if only because the Luger pistol action was originally designed to use a 7.65mm (.30-caliber) cartridge derived from the one used by the earlier Borchardt design, and only subsequently was that cartridge further adapted into the 9mm Para we know today (largely by removing the bottleneck from the case).

Interestingly, DWM made a more powerful version of the 7.65x21mm bottlenecked cartridge for use in Parabellum carbines. It apparently didn't occur to anyone that a dimensionally identical but more powerful version of an already-fairly-high-powered pistol cartridge wasn't really a good idea.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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