There have been a few assassinations in Europe, where the victim has been shot with a single round of .380” Auto aka 9mm Browning short ammunition. Because European police and judges aren’t always obliged to publicise technical details of evidence, it’s difficult to say just how many times this has happened, but it’s happened more than two or three times and in more than one country. In one case, four Serbia-linked suspects were convicted and then acquitted at appeal, thus muddying the waters to the advantage of more or less everyone except the law-abiding public.
Generally, the recovered bullet has not been engraved by rifling, so it is assumed (especially where that assumption is convenient) that a “low quality” improvised smooth-bore gun “which no professional hitman would ever touch” has been used, such as a blank-firing replica bored out to fire live ammunition. (One snag with that assumption is that most of the replicas of “9mm” guns are carefully designed to fire only 8mm blanks and NONE of the internal components is of a strength or diameter allowing a simple boring-out job to work. Even if not tampered with, 8mm blank-firers tend to break before the user has got through the 50-round tin of blanks which comes with the gun. The metal is very poor and this is not an accident, but a policy on the part of the manufacturer.) That convenient assumption may have compromised more than one investigation leading to at least one miscarriage of justice.
Not infrequently there are indentations around the mouth of the spent cartridge case, for which there are several possible explanations, the convenient one again being a low-quality improvised weapon and home-made ammunition consistent with a “lone lunatic” offender. The trouble with that one is that the ammunition is NOT home-made but commercial and of good quality and the cartridge case, bullet, priming cap and as far as it can be ascertained, the powder charge, have not in fact been altered or swapped. The indentations prove only that the crimp was made tighter at some point: it is impossible to say if the bullet was actually “pulled” and replaced, or if the user simply wanted the crimp to be tighter for some specific technical reason. (Again, inconvenient because it would rule out a lone lunatic offender. If the multiple jurisdictions involved didn’t do that already.)
The reason why it is possible to fire .380” ACP ammunition, also known as 9mm Browning short or 9x17mm in a standard Soviet service pistol chambered for the standard Soviet 9x18mm round (widely known as 9mm Makarov) has to do with the latter being an indirect development of the former, via the Luftwaffe’s wartime “9mm Ultra” project which largely fell into Soviet hands. However, as the video embedded will prove should the reader be patient with it, this mismatch of ammunition works much better than one would expect. It certainly functions and “feeds” a lot better than the video-maker appears to have anticipated!
There are reasons why this sort of stunt might not work for any two slightly dissimilar cartridges and might even be dangerous, but in this instance it DOES work and with quite decent reliability. None of the technical issues pose a significant risk of damage to the gun within the number of rounds fired in the video demonstration, nor any danger to the shooter. The most interesting of the technical issues explains why this mismatch of ammunition is safe enough (but only this way round: if it proved possible to fire a 9mm “Makarov” round in pistol (such as a Colt 1903 pocket model) chambered for the .380” ACP it would be dangerous because not only is the 9mm Makarov loaded with a stronger powder charge than the .380” ACP, it also has a slightly larger diameter bullet, which would cause excessive breech pressures by itself even if the powder charge were identical. But there’s much more to it than that -and this really is important enough to be worth the bother of understanding it! It lies in the reason for the bullet diameter being changed in the first place:
The Bolshevik regime, which brought the Soviet Union into being, inherited not only an archaic system of measurements from Czarist Russia, but also what appeared to be an irrational and inconsistent system of definitions. So, not only were metric designations the new order of the day, there was a relatively simple set of rules about how one defined certain things, including calibre. So, a Soviet “9mm” designation would define a cartridge designed to be fired through a barrel with a bore diameter (measured across the lands rather than between two opposing rifling grooves) of exactly 9mm.
The .380” ACP aka “9mm Browning Short” by contrast was defined by having a bullet of (more or less) exactly 9mm diameter. But in a modern rifled firearm with “inside lubricated” bullets, the bullet has to be made to fit the groove diameter of the barrel and not the bore (or land) diameter. This means that when the bullet is forced into the bore by the ignition of the powder, it really does have to be forced and this “engraves” the rifling into the bullet, which gives it enough grip to make it spin and leaves a permanent record of the rifling on the bullet, as long as it’s not destroyed on impact with tough materials such as metal or brick.
Because the difference in diameters comes about by a swap of what dimension is defining the calibre, a rifled 9mm Makarov barrel is closely equivalent to a smooth-bore barrel actually intended to fire .380” ACP ammunition. Now, no smooth-bore barrel is ever really ideal for a bullet that needs to spin to remain stable in flight, but when the bullet isn’t going to travel very far and accuracy is a moot point, this doesn’t matter all that much.
It does matter to some extent, though, and at the end of the video below the video-creator explains why: the bullet is designed to be effective by hitting nose-on and staying nose-on. Evidence to support what he claims lies in the fact that Greener’s .38” Calibre Humane Killer, designed to be fired (by hitting the back of the firing pin with a separate hammer that came with the gun) with the barrel in hard contact with a horse’s head, actually has about 1&1/2 inches of rifled barrel! There’s no possible accuracy issue with a humane killer, but it had rifling non-the-less.
The one way in which the Makarov barrel differs from a smoothbore barrel of appropriate diameter, is that the bullet does not seal the rifling grooves and enough propellent gas leaks past the .380” ACP bullet to reduce the power of that bullet below what it achieves in a similar gun with a barrel of the same length as the Makarov, but properly rifled and dimensioned for the .380” ACP. Again, this is something which is demonstrated in the video. Along with miserable accuracy at any useful combat range using .380” ACP in a Makarov.
And there is an advantage to that reduction in power, even when using unmodified commercial .380” ACP ammunition, if the .380” ACP round will only be fired in hard contact with the target, like a humane killer. Firing a gun with the muzzle hard up against something solid can cause excess back-pressure, and for this reason Greeners offered, and their customers purchased, special .38” cartridges for its humane killer, even though as a fairly short, rimmed .38” round it might seem that almost any .38” revolver cartridge that was short enough to fit would do.
If a hitman’s plot to take his victim by surprise and dispatch them with a single shot in hard contact (to suppress noise, flash etc. and to make sure the victim died) went wrong, a Makarov pistol loaded with .380” ACP bullets that were hopelessly unstable at a distance, wouldn’t win him any gunfights with police or unexpected bodyguards. But a completely unmodified, standard Makarov service pistols with a magazine of eight standard 9mm Makarov rounds would be a powerful asset in expert hands, and all the hitman would need to do is ensure that the first round fired would be a .380” ACP.
By yet another fortunate turn of events, the majority of 9mm Makarov cartridges have a lacquered steel cartridge case, whilst there are no known sources of steel-cased .380” ACP rounds, most of which have traditional brass or perhaps cupro-nickel cartridge case, both quite different in appearance to lacquered steel. The hitman would single-load a (shiny) .380” ACP round into the chamber, either directly or by putting in a magazine with just one round in, into the gun and working the slide. He would then “decock” the gun and on the Makarov this is accomplished simply by applying the safety catch. All he need do then is put in a full magazine of (dull, off-grey) 9mm Makarov rounds and it’s good to go.
The Makarov pistol has a double/single-action trigger where, if the gun is not already cocked by working the slide or a previous round being fired, pulling the trigger over a fairly long distance against quite heavy resistance cocks the hammer and fires whatever round is in the chamber. Subsequent shots require only a shorter pull against less resistance, which makes for best accuracy and allows a marksman to maintain a comfortable hold on the gun.
The downside is that the first shot, if fired by the double-action trigger, is inherently less accurate. That’s not an issue if the first shot is fired in hard contact with the victim’s head, of course. If all goes to plan, the follow-up shots will not be needed and since the gun decocks itself when the safety catch is used, there’s no need to unload the weapon before pocketing it, but letting the fumes clear from the barrel for a moment or two might stop the gun giving itself away by the smell. Witnesses might well see a man leave the scene with something still in his hand, this would go into a pocket or a bum-bag once it had time to stop smoking.
If things do go wrong, then the hitman has eight very effective shots with which to solve any immediate problems and there’s nothing to stop him reloading if he has a spare magazine.
Now, one of the things which might worry a hitman who spends a lot of time listening to received wisdom, is that by firing a cartridge in a barrel which offers little initial resistance to the bullet’s travel, he’d be taking a risk on the bullet moving so easily that the pressure necessary to fully-ignite the gunpowder is not achieved and the bullet then barely clears the muzzle, followed by a cloud of unburnt powder grains. This is known as a “blooper” and it is another “obvious problem” which conspicuously fails to occur in the video demonstration. But a perfectionist with time on his hands might just try to tighten up the crimp on a few .380” ACP rounds just to be sure. That’s not the only possible explanation for the indentations around the fired cartridge case mouth and Medawar has toyed with several of them over the years, but it’s as good as any and, unlike all the others, it’s really quite specific to the .380” ACP ammunition being used in a completely unmodified Makarov service pistol which would be an asset to an expert in any unplanned fight following a carefully-planned hit.
Since there is a quantifiable advantage to using this methodology, and the means to implement it as widespread as a standard service pistol made by the million, there is no actual necessity for different crimes committed by such a method to have anything in common other than the method. Even any perceived link to Serbia might be purely logistical, in that both standard Makarov-type pistols and ammunition were made there, with commercial .380” ACP ammunition being widely available throughout Western Europe as it works in an even larger number of both service and commercial pistols which have been in production, which still continues, since 1903. Any belief that the exact same gun, or even the exact same hitman, might be involved in multiple crimes may prove to be unfounded, unless the evidence is personalised in some way, such the probably-unnecessary indentations around the mouth of the spent cartridge.
Here is the embedded video, by “8mm Mauser Guy” and it’s followed by a few of Medawar’s observations on what’s going on. The strength of this video, incidentally, is that it was meant just as a homage to the popular firearms expert Paul Harrell, who went before us a little while after the video was published. This means that whilst it echoes all of Mr Harrell’s quirks and mannerisms, it also echoes his determination to find out what actually happens rather than attempting to prove or disprove any particular theory, or any particular legal case.
The (non-live) link:
https://youtu.be/9_wJsE0rwlk?si=dMb61BgVxpxVKUPd
Observations on what the video's findings
.380 ACP in 9mm Makarov pistol: this WORKS (surprisingly well, really); velocities are lower than one might expect from a proper .380" ACP barrel the same length, as the bullet does not seal the rifling grooves though it pretty much seals the bore. The velocities are already subsonic and the .380" aka 9mx17mm ammunition would need no modification to achieve this, but that doesn't mean that it wouldn't be modified, either superfluously or for some technical reason known only to the person who did it.
Nor does it engage the rifling, so bullets may tumble after only a few feet and will NOT be engraved with rifling marks.
The ejected cartridge cases bulge only SOME of the time: this may depend on how they sit in the 0.8mm longer and 0.2mm wider chamber at the moment of firing. The above video shows two such cases being picked out out of approximately thirty fired.
(The true length of the .380" ACP cartridge case is 17.3mm and that of the 9mm Makarov 18.1mm)
Postscript
Medawar is confident that the Home Office would greatly prefer it if Michelle Diskin and/or her lawyers would refrain from reading this article or watching the video.
A follow-up article, coming soon, will explain how hitmen use human engineering, just like hackers do, in order to find out things "which a professional hitman (backed up an organised crime gang) could not possibly have known about the target's habits and whereabouts." That may discommode a national broadcaster more than the Home Office, should Ms Diskin or her lawyers be so perverse as to take an interest.
The article after that may ruffle feathers quite widely.
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