Even with some significant headwinds on social media, gun culture influencers have huge audiences, slick media production, and run the gambit from highly technical to meme fueled gif parties.

It's a long way from the old stereotype of an old white Vietnam vet waxing poetic about 1911 .45s.

Something else that has been interesting to watch has been how much video game culture acts as an on ramp to gun culture. The influence that games like modern warfare have on the real life gun community is fascinating. It makes sense since there are way more call of duty players than actual high speed operators, but still...

If you think about it, it makes sense. Unlike a lot of other gear orientated technical fields, it's almost impossible for people to regularly employ their toys outside of a range setting. Everyone and their brother wants short barreled ARs, but how many people are actually clearing rooms. Same goes for recce rifles. How many folks out there on patrol? It's the equivalent of the guy who buys a land cruiser with a roof top tent and hood mounted jack, but just drives it to the mall on the weekends (and yet look how much the overland community has exploded over the past few years).

This is very much an underserved hobby driven by culture and entertainment. It's almost entirely disconnected from actual military needs/requirements/drivers. I think there is a lot of growth in the industry, surprised it doesn't come up more often.

I get the historical aspect that led to this giant mess, but ... at the end of the day, there's not that many parameters to define what a bullet is and does.

In particular, wrt physical dimensions, my - probably naive - take is that (radius x length) seems to go quite a long way in describing a bullet.

Anyone more knowledgeable care to explain why things are so complicated and haven't been normalized / simplified over time?

Movie frames featuring sainted action heroes, gun out-thrust.

Now don't get me wrong, I own a gun. But still.

Also, I hear that birdshot is actually better for home defense because it doesn't go through walls so much.

And can you imagine firing a shotgun inside your house without hearing protection? Goodbye ears.

There are three phases that are important for bullets: what happens inside the barrel, what happens outside the barrel, and what happens when it strikes the target.

There are a lot of parameters effecting that characteristics of all three. (not just 2 dimensions of size)

Shape, muzzle velocity, reliability, ease of manufacture, etc etc. are all quite important.

There is also long history, a gun is a thing that can be around for decades; you can't so easily throw away the past and start over. There is also a strong consideration for the design process. Fulfilling a set of requirements can conflict with the desire for standardization. Also when standardization is an idea, using an existing standard rather than making a new one has been the pragmatic response.

NATO though has done quite a lot in standardizing American rounds. There are many almost-equivalent NATO standard rounds with things like metric measurements instead of the more historical American measurements.

But also, things are just complicated. When talking about an airplane you might as well say that length and wingspan might "go quite a long way" in describing it. I mean, in some sense sure, but a very long way from fully describing one.

There's a book "American Rifle" which goes through quite a bit of the history of the development of guns in the US.

Like look just at naming: old stuff was often named based on caliber and the number of grains of powder back in black powder days. Like the .45-70 is a .45 bullet and had 70 grains of black powder in a standard load. But then this carried over when they named the .30-06, which had a .30 bullet and 6 grains smokeless. Some handgun rounds are "ACP" because they were developed for new (at the time) auto-loaders instead of revolvers. Now cartridges are mostly named by caliber.

Then there's stuff where cartridges were slightly tweaked, like for NATO. .223 is mostly the same as 5.56 and .308 is mostly the same as 7.62, but the latter are both NATO rounds re-named and changed a bit from their predecessors. Oh and by the way, .308 rifles can typically fire .308 or 7.62, it's not safe to fire .308 from a 7.62 rifle though. Oh but for .223/5.56 it's the other way: You can fire .223 from a 5.56 chamber but not vice versa.

Every country developed its own rounds for a long time, just look at the number of 9mm cartridges there are. Different bullets, different nomenclature, etc.

There's a ton of variety in how you make a bullet, even beyond "broad" varieties like hollow point vs jacketed vs semi-jacketed vs wadcutter vs semi-wadcutter... or the actual metal composition of the bullet, jacket, etc.

Different rounds are also loaded differently, you can have some under-pressured for subsonic if you're running suppressed, there's usually some variation in what's "standard" and bodies like SAAMI and CIP are voluntary and typically define max pressure only. Plus there are overpressure (+p) and over-overpressure (+p+) rounds...

Lots of complexity from over 100 years of a lot of people developing their own ideas than merging them only sort of.

Basically how fast some thing shoots (how much accelerant) is just as important as what you are shooting (bullet characteristics).

Each of those variables also have weight and dimension penalties which determine how much you can reasonably carry.

An interesting relatively recent example is the development of small caliber armor piercing rounds. NATO needed something to deal with the rise of body armor. Same requirements, two different solutions to get there in the fn 5.7 and hk 4.6x30 (simplifying enormously here). Basically these are engineering and manufacturing challenges.

There's a surprising amount of parameters that define what a bullet is and does. Consider this article, which describes the difference between secant and tangent ogives.

From an engineering perspective, long range shooting is FASCINATING!

http://bulletin.accurateshooter.com/2011/03/tangent-vs-secan...

that doesn't describe much of a bullet, and nearly nothing about a caliber.

you can take a look at the SAAMI specs and get a sense of what goes into such things.

https://saami.org/technical-information/cartridge-chamber-dr...

the popular name of a caliber is exactly that, a name, and describes the caliber about as well as "John" describes a human being.

For the cartridge as a whole you're also going to be concerned with powder capacity, shape (necked?, rimmed?), and to a lesser extent material.

These are just a few examples and all are significant.

Sure, the nomenclature is weird, with a mix of imperial, metric, and just plain weirdness, but it doesn’t seem to be negatively impacting anything.

In some cases a new round size/weight does actually produce better performance for the desired application. In many cases, IMO, those advantages are academic and achieved in highly controlled environments, i.e. they are nullified by the high variability of other factors, in real world situations. I am just an enthusiast and not any kind of professional though.

> Movie frames featuring sainted action heroes, gun out-thrust.

This is the sort of thing that gives firearm owners a bad rap. Especially those who advocate for self-defense rights. Everyone already thinks firearm owners are gung-ho cowboys with itchy trigger fingers. The majority are not.

And no, birdshot may not stop a big person. Hurt like hell but often won't kill. I personally don't have a shotgun for home defense though, 9mm hollow points in a PCC do the job fine.

Anybody who's not an idiot wears ear protection when shooting but a few shots won't damage your ears much. But yeah a 9mm handgun is significantly less bad for these reasons. Thank the feds though, it's damn hard to get suppressors without tons of paperwork which would otherwise make this less of a problem.

You could use euphemisms or be more technical, but in the end you're comparing a thing made to transfer kinetic force and create a hole, on its ability to do those things.

And yes IMHO, a pump action 12ga birdshot reduced-recoil load w/ a standard slug at the end of the magazine is hard to argue against if we're honestly talking home defense load.