9mm as target pistol: Springfield Armory and STI show us how to do it

American Handgunner, March-April, 2005 by Charles E. Petty

Guilty as charged, that's me. I'm only one of many shooters who firmly believed the 9mm Luger cartridge was a real dog as far as accuracy was concerned. All of us are wrong. This began with an assignment to go to the NRA PPC National Championship in Jackson, Miss. Back when I shot it, PPC was purely a revolver game but the change to autopistols by law enforcement brought change to the match as well. Now the National Champion is the guy who does best with both pistol and revolver.

Revolvers are pretty much the same as they've always been, but in the pistol portion the overwhelming majority of shooters used a 9mm of some description. Walking the firing line and checking holsters revealed a lot of folks were shooting a S&W Performance Center pistol. There were a few duty guns like Glocks or SIGs, but almost everyone else was shooting a Government Model from one of the major companies. An awful lot of those were from Springfield Armory's Custom Shop. Dave Williams, Springfield's ace custom 'smith was also there and we struck up a conversation. He was filling me in on the 9mm guns most shooters were using. I expressed the opinion that 9mm's didn't shoot. He fell for it.

"Let me send you a couple of guns to try," he said. I put up a good fight but finally let him convince me. Don't you just love it was a plan works? In the fullness of time two pistols arrived from Geneseo.

Do They Shoot?

One was a 5" gun suitable to use in Distinguished matches and the other was a longslide 6" for open competition. Both wore Aristocrat rear sights having three position settings for different ranges. These are truly cool because you can preset a zero for the different ranges needed in a PPC match and return to it by using a cam-operating screw on the right side of the sight. Even though the sight also has typical windage and elevation screws they are only used for small adjustments due to range conditions of light or wind. The longslide also had a full length rib we bullseye shooters used to call a heavy slide. The extra weight really helps moderate recoil and it also stiffens the slide a little which almost always helps accuracy.

And, by chance, I also got a Trojan 9mm from ST1. It's not a pure PPC competition pistol but when I shot it for another story it did very well, so I decided to include it here as well.

One of the other important issues is ammo; for we sure do know not all 9mm ammo is created equal. My research included asking shooters at the match what they were using and also talking to gunsmiths. For some time I had been experimenting with handloads for 9mm and had come up with a few that shot extremely well in preliminary testing. There are several factory "match" loads as well and I had had particularly good luck with Federal's 124-gr. Gold Medal but as I watched shooters load magazines I learned something. Quite a few were using stuff from Anderson Munitions, who was one of the match sponsors, but I saw a lot using Federal 124-gr. Hydra-shok and Winchester 147-gr. Silvertip. Both of those are fine defensive loads but it had never crossed my mind they would be capable of great accuracy too.

Charley Learns More

I already had the STI pistol and didn't have to wait too long for the guns from Springfield. Williams had included a surprise for me. The longslide pistol came complete with two fitted barrels. The one in the gun when it arrived was a bull barrel that does not use a standard barrel bushing. The result was a barrel that was .110" larger in diameter. Williams told me this was the hot ticket among PPC shooters right now, but he also included a conventional 6" barrel and bushing fitted to the gun. This falls into the "golden opportunity" category, but since shooting lots of groups at 50 yds. is a major effort I elected to go with the heavy barrel.

Amino selection is always a problem for tests like these and it was important to be sure there was enough from the same lot so all the guns and combinations could be tested with the same stuff. I initially chose Black Hills 125-gr. FMJ, Federal 124-gr. Hydra-shok and Federal 124-gr. FMJ Match. I wanted to use Remington's 147-gr. Match load but did not have enough, so I substituted the Winchester 147-gr. TCMC that had done well in some other shooting.

At the range the fist groups were disappointing and when all the numbers were crunched the heavy slide pistol averaged 2.72" for 15, 10-shot groups at 50 yards. Bear in mind there are lots of pistols that would simply kill to be able to shoot that well at 25 yards. For comparison, the 5" gun averaged 2.2" for the same test.

The next thing that happened was a long phone call to Williams with a full report of the results. One problem emerged immediately. With the exception of the Hydra-shok, we had not tested the gun with the same ammo. Even so both of us thought it should have done better. "Let me send you some of the same amino I used," he said. I agreed to run the test again with his ammo in addition to what I had used, and also to include the spare barrel with the conventional bushing. Williams sent two loads from Anderson Munitions and a couple of boxes of 147-gr. Winchester Silvertips. I did not have enough of the 125gr. Black Hills ammo so I switched to a 124-gr. JHP load of theirs.