When I first heard that American soldiers had gone on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, I assumed that the shooters were using American M16 assault rifles — or their smaller cousins, M4 carbines.
When I heard that it was one shooter using a handgun, I assumed he was using the standard-issue M9 pistol.
Later it came out that the shooter had two handguns: a Smith & Wesson revolver, chambered in .357 Magnum, and a mildly exotic semi-auto, the FN Five-SeveN.
The .357 Magnum is a famously powerful round, developed in the 1930s to penetrate car doors and the primitive body armor of the time — the kind of cover bootleggers and gangsters could be expected to use. But it does not look like Hasan fired his revolver in the attack.
The FN Five-SeveN gets its name from its 5.7 mm round and its odd capitalization from its manufacturer, FN Herstal, of Belgium. Its 5.7x28mm round is, in effect, a high-velocity .22, like the M16′s 5.56x45mm round, but much shorter and much less powerful than the assault rifle round, which is itself much less powerful than the rifle rounds used in WWI or WWII — or out in the woods each year during deer season.
The Five-SeveN’s 5.7 mm round wasn’t originally designed for a pistol, but for a “personal defense weapon” — an exotic submachine gun — called the FN P90. Submachine guns use pistol ammunition, but conventional pistol rounds — even fired out of a longer barrel and thus at a higher velocity — have a terrible time penetrating body armor. The small, high-velocity 5.7 mm round — with a steel/aluminium penetrator — could penetrate 48 layers of Kevlar:
With low-impulse recoil significantly less than that of the 9mm, the new cartridge pushed a roughly 30-gr. projectile at around 2,300 feet per second out of a 10-inch barrel and featured a nearly flat trajectory out to 100 yards.
From the Five-SeveN, with its shorter barrel, the armor-piercing bullet reaches 2,100 feet per second — but such armor-piercing handgun bullets are illegal in the US.
Nonetheless, the Brady Campaign declared the Five-SeveN a cop killer handgun — which is especially odd since no police officers have been killed with the Five-SeveN. In fact, Sergeant Kimberly Munley survived three shots from Hasan’s Five-SeveN: twice through the left leg, and once in her right wrist. It’s not clear that the non-armor piercing rounds would have penetrated her armor even if they’d hit it.
Even with its 20-round magazine, the Five-SeveN definitely does not qualify as “an assault rifle that fits in your pocket” — another phrase being bandied about by the Brady Campaign. Without armor-piercing ammo, it’s really just a gun that shoots a light bullet without too much recoil, perfectly dangerous, like any good gun in the “right” hands, but not especially dangerous.