Ammunition First: Cartridges and the Guns Built Around Them

Georg Luger designed this round in 1901 for his semi-automatic pistol. It is widely considered the most popular handgun and submachine gun cartridge in the world, and a 2007 United States survey found that about sixty percent of firearms then in police use were chambered for it.

Gaston Glock's pistol entered Austrian military and police service in 1982 and was the first commercially successful pistol line built around a polymer frame. It is chambered for the 9x19mm round among others, and its Safe Action trigger combines a trigger safety, a firing pin safety and a drop safety instead of a manual thumb safety.

Townsend Whelen and G. L. Wotkyns developed this round from experiments begun in the 1920s at Springfield Armory, and Winchester introduced it commercially in 1930. It saw military use in the Second World War in aircrew survival rifles.

First developed in the 1940s, this rifle cartridge entered United States service in 1954 for the M14 rifle and the M60 machine gun. The lighter 5.56x45mm round later displaced it as the standard infantry cartridge, but it remains in use in marksman and sniper rifles and in general-purpose machine guns.

Built on the lengthened .44 Special case and loaded to higher pressures for more velocity and energy, this large-bore cartridge was designed for revolvers and later adopted for carbines and rifles as well. Its production dates from January 1956.

Smith and Wesson began producing this six-shot, double-action revolver in .44 Magnum in 1955 and applied the Model 29 name in 1957. It was the most powerful production handgun available at its introduction, and the 1971 film Dirty Harry made it famous.

Developed in the late 1970s in Belgium by FN Herstal, this round was standardized under STANAG 4172 on 28 October 1980 as the second standard service rifle cartridge for NATO. It derives from the .223 Remington, but firing 5.56mm NATO ammunition in a rifle chambered only for .223 can produce unsafe pressures.

FN Herstal created this small, high-velocity round in response to a NATO call for a replacement for the 9x19mm Parabellum. The original SS90 load appeared in 1990, it is used in the FN P90 and the FN Five-seven, and NATO formally adopted it as STANAG 4509 in 2021.

Used in the Russian VKS bullpup sniper rifle, the ShAK-12 battle rifle and the RSh-12 revolver, this cartridge is mainly used for heavy subsonic loads. The ShAK-12 and RSh-12 cannot use VKS rounds because of differences in bullet length, so each needs its own shorter loads.