AP handgun ammo....

Yes, PMC and Federal are (or were when I was around the stuff) the big suppliers of it. A buddy of mine scored a bunch of it out of a trash dump outside a camp used by Navy Seals in Kuwait right after Desert Storm. It was all loaded in MP-5 mags found in a thigh pouch that had blown out leg straps. I guess some guy just trashed it all and called it a "combat loss".

Anyway, the ammo looked a lot like the PMC bronze "cookie cutter" hollowpoints that used to be on the market, but we never figured out what kind of metal they were really made of. The bronze hollow cylinder ammo from PMC was the "civilian' loads but they were pulled off the market when it was discovered their AP ability was about as good as the military load.

The round is like a cylinder, with a plastic filler in the center, and some sort of base that apparently can detach once the round hits anything while the plastic core will also detach. What then penetrates is the "cookie cutter" that apparently has some nasty wound characteristics.

There is also the infamous Czech 7.62X25 steel core subgun ammo. It can kaboom a Tokarev and warp the recievers on a PPSH-41 or PPS-43, but it can work in a CZ-52 or their Uzi-like gun it was originally made for. In theory, it can work in a customized 1911, but such guns are rare. There was one guy doing that work in the US and basing it on some of the Viet Cong "jungle workshop" reworks and his guns are high quality, but I think he was starting at around $2000.

Others are just going with variations on the .224 BOZ, or a necked down 10mm wildcat. The guys who came up with the .224 BOZ threaten to sue "copycats" but there had been some very similar wildcats made in the 1970s well before the .224 BOZ was developed. IE, it is a pistol round that takes what are essentially SS109 bullets.

There have also been lots of variations of super hot .357 loads using lightweight bullets at hyper velocities. Not to mention some unexplored potential with the .357 Sig and a slightly larger variant (I think called 9X23 dillon) that is based on a bottlenecked longer case and requires the host gun in 10mm instead of just .40.

You also run into engineering issues on all of these rounds on what kind of "armor" you are looking to penetrate. The western standard is oddly enough, engineered around penetrating western kevlar, while the old East Block standard they still use is all about penetrating a steel helmet at various distances (look how they discuss AP rounds on Russian websites). That is why the western AP handgun rounds are set up to cut their way through, while eastern rounds will punch through with a penetrator spike of some sort. The spike embedded in lead can still lose velocity and penetrating power in Kevlar while the cutters in western handgun AP ammo can just mush on steel. Think of it this way, you ram a sharp cooke cutter on cloth real hard, and it will cut an imprint, especially if it is up against something that has just a little bit of give. You ram a knife in its sheath up against that, and it just mushes on the sheath, but does not penetrate. You hammer a Ka-bar in its sheath up against a steel drum, and it will push through the sheath and nick, and maybe even penetrate the drum if you put enough force behind it. The cookie cutter would just crush against the drum if you rammed it up really hard.

.44 magnum; who cares about penetration when the blunt trauma is like getting stepped on by a horse?

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