I have seen a lot of answers, that are telling that it has more damage area and it fits in auto loaders better. I accept the second one, but not the first. Imagine a 9mm hits a vest and… nothing, probably a couple of broken bones, even though it has a larger damage area. Then the person takes their gun and shoots you. Your shots were probably useless. But if that 9mm was pointy it would, depending on the vest, penetrate it and hit the person, severely damaging the person. You’re now safe. That’s my scenario. So why are low caliber bullets not pointy?
In: Engineering
The short story is that there’s not really much point to trying to make handgun cartridges armor-piercing.
First, just as a point of clarification, “caliber” only refers to the diameter of the bullet, not its power. A 9x19mm cartridge (a very common pistol round) is actually higher caliber than, for example, 5.56x45mm (what a typical AR-type rifle fires), but the 9mm is far, far less powerful than the 5.56.
What we’re talking about here is more of a rifle vs. pistol cartridge comparison. When looking at rifle cartridges, most *do* have pointy bullets, in fact. However, unless it has a penetrator core, a pointy lead bullet isn’t going to be significantly better than a blunt lead bullet.
For pistol cartridges, they’re generally low-power enough that modern body armor doesn’t have any trouble defeating it (with few exceptions, like purpose-made armor-piercing cartridges).
Additionally, handguns are primarily used in non-military settings (police and civilian use, mainly), where facing an armored target is a lot less likely, so handgun cartridges that are designed for defensive use are generally designed for maximum effectiveness against unarmored people, and in that context, expanding hollow-point bullets are a lot more effective than a hardened armor-piercing bullet would be.
Plus, modern body armor can stop the vast majority of small-arms fire – only exceptionally high-powered or purpose-built armor-piercing cartridges can defeat a level IV plate, for example. Certainly nothing that can *reasonably* be fired out of a handgun (although I know there are some wacky exceptions)
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