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
Firstly you use low caliber when you mean low energy. For example the 9mm pistol round is almost double the caliber of the 5.56mm caliber rifle rounds used in the M-16. But the later have three times the energy. The shape of the bullet is primarily to make it stable in flight and to reduce drag. In general the tip of the bullet is crushed on impact anyway. And confusingly round tips are better at penetrating hardened steel then pointed tips. The bullets are therefore shaped for the flight, not the impact. And air behaves differently for faster bullets then for slower. So a large slow 9mm is going to behave very different to a fast light 5.56mm bullet. Round noses tends to reduce friction with the air while pointed bullets have less shockwaves.
Another big difference is that the 9x19mm ammunition was designed before we really looked into the aerodynamics of supersonic bullets. Ammunition is updated with new bullet designs but they still needs to fit into the same guns and magazines, and the guns gets designed for the ammunition currently in circulation. With 9x19mm ammunition it is much better to have a heavy round nosed bullet then a lighter pointed nose bullet. If you make a pointed nose bullet with the same weight as the current ones it is not going to fit into the guns. This is however just a partial reason because there are more modern pistol ammunition which is still designed with rounded noses.
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