The whole point of this discussion, It seems to me, is being overlooked. The skill of marksmanship, is being phased out of our police, and our military's firearms training.
It used to be that a revolver was useful because the automatics of the day either (a) sucked, (b) weren't reliable out of the box, or (c) fired crappy ammunition.
The answer to A and B was to issue revolvers until automatics sucked slightly less. The answer to C was, ostensibly, the .357 and later the .41 Magnum--but there were some valid objections to both cartridges. Once expanding ammunition and the reliability of it (feeding, in other words) improved, there was no longer much of a need to carry a Magnum. And with the advent of S&W DA/SA and DAO automatics, holdouts could no longer claim that automatics were any less safe than a DA revolver (a hogwash argument anyway).
So on the one hand, you've a K-frame .38 that holds six shots. On the other, a DA wundernine that holds 15+1, and could be reloaded in a fraction of the time with less skill. And eventually, you'd have striker-fired plastic pistols that not only held a whole mess of cartridges, but also had no external moving parts. You could make an argument that these are
more reliable than a revolver.
Marksmanship has nothing to do with it. The advantages revolvers had over automatics have been minimized.
If you want to claim today's cops can't shoot--and really, a great many were just as miserable 60 years ago, you just heard less about it--then blame training and demographics. Training because the move has been away from precision shooting at longer distances on bullseye targets, and towards action-pistol speed and larger silhouette targets.
Demographics because of statistics. More shootings are going to occur where there are more people, because there's more people and also more crime. In the places where there are more people, less people shoot, because gun laws are incredibly restrictive in those municipalities and because urban dwellers are less likely to be gun owners, statistically. And it's hard as hell to find a place go and practice in the city.
So yeah, funny, ha-ha, some poor cop fired eight shots and only hit the guy once. But let's be glad said cop was out there to begin with, and managed to prevail on our behalf
despite being saddled with the idiots we elected to oversee him.
As to the military, well, the pistol doesn't qualify as a weapon. For the people that do things, it ranks just above knives. For everybody else, it's a miserable compromise. Some folks who drive trucks and get shot at would be better off with a PDW, and instead have something that's not useful. The folks that decided a big ol' handgun was best would really be better off with a little plastic .32ACP--for them, the pistol is merely a mark of rank--and instead have to lug around a fullsize auto.
So basically, when it comes to handguns, don't get the DoD involved. They cover the tanks and planes and (sometimes) the rifles pretty well, everything else is more or less an afterthought.
---
As to the triggers, I almost feel bad. Whoever's in charge of that can't un-do the 12-pound trigger decision. The first time some dingbat tags a citizen with a stray shot, or some other blessed soul shoots himself in the foot, it's gonna be because that negligent and reckless maniac said 12-pound triggers were unnecessary!
