Things you have wondered about guns, but have never asked...

[AlaskanInTexas]

I can pay somebody to mow my lawn. Paying someone to build you th John Moses Browning masterpiece that is the 1911 semiautomatic firearm will be substantially more costly and complex.

I think the proper comparison would be paying someone to manufacture and assemble the parts for your riding lawnmower...In any event, according to my napkin math, a modest Kimber = 1.5 years of paying someone to mow your yard. That sparks an idea...we should just use 1911s as a form of currency, like the gold standard. "How much is that car?" "4 Wilsons, a Kimber, and a Ruger."

[The Walrus]

4. I don't understand why a good 1911 costs more than a riding lawnmower; it seems like the lawnmower requires more in material costs, and I would expect the engine at least to be built with some significant attention to tolerances.

I don't have much use for either thanks to a move out to the country.

[talltex]

Further support for this argument would be the history of cartridge ammunition. Early on, rifles and pistols were both chambers for the same round, such as the 38-40. You can still find some rifles chambered for pistol rounds (.45 LC, 44 Mag, and 357 mag come to mind). Note that these are considered relatively short ranged for rifles, IMO. As we refined weapons and ammunition, it developed into more specialized usage and each separated into their respective areas.

These older cartridges were developed for black powder rather than the newer smokeless propellant so the pressure are very different.

Now you're getting to issue....propellant...even in the modern "smokeless" powders there is a huge difference in the powders used primarily for Rifle and Handgun cartridges, and it is tied in to the size of the firearm and the barrel length. Most high velocity modern rifle rounds use a slow burning (relatively) powder which allows the pressure in the chamber and barrel to build slowly and burn more thoroughly, resulting in much higher velocities. Most handgun cartridges use much faster burning powders because they have to achieve their combustion in only a few inches of barrel. The shorter the barrel the more difficult it is to achieve velocity...an example would be firing the same .357 magnum cartridge in 3 S&W Model 25 revolvers with a snub 2", 4" and 6" barrels...the velocity readings will be much different from each...increasing as the barrel gets longer. The difference in the burn rate for a "handgun powder" makes it unsuitable for a rifle cartridge due to the pressures it would generate in the long barrel. I use a load of 35 grains of slow burning "rifle powder" in a 22-250 cartridge, and it's well within pressure limits...but if I dumped 35 grains of Unique (a very fast burning handgun powder) in the 22-250 case, it would very likely blow the rifle apart because the chamber pressure would far exceed the allowable tolerances. This is also the reason that small caliber pistols such as .22's are sometimes very finicky about what ammo is run in them...a 3" barrel on a Walther P22 doesn't develop near as much backpressure as it would in a rifle barrel so you experience more failure to feed problems because it may not fully cycle the slide.

[WildBill]

Further support for this argument would be the history of cartridge ammunition. Early on, rifles and pistols were both chambers for the same round, such as the 38-40. You can still find some rifles chambered for pistol rounds (.45 LC, 44 Mag, and 357 mag come to mind). Note that these are considered relatively short ranged for rifles, IMO. As we refined weapons and ammunition, it developed into more specialized usage and each separated into their respective areas.

These older cartridges were developed for black powder rather than the newer smokeless propellant so the pressure are very different.

Now you're getting to issue....propellant...

That's only part of it. The .38 Special was originally designed for black powder so the design and materials for the guns were built to withstand these pressures. When the ammunition manufacturers came out with smokeless powder versions of that cartridge, they had to keep the pressures within safe limits so they had to adjust the loads below the maximum capability of the cartridge.

When they wanted to juice up the caliber they developed the .357 Magnum. To make sure that people didn't shoot this ammo in .38 Special handguns, they made the cartridge 0.135" longer, so it couldn't be chambered.

Experimenting with propellants of different burning rates, bullet weights and barrel length can optimize performance for a particular handgun.

Internal ballistics for small calibers [rifles and pistols] are not as intuitive for large caliber guns [cannons, artillery]. The pressure is not a linear function of barrel length or powder charge. Most rifle powders are designed to fill the casing. Pistol powers, like Unique, are double-based powders [containing nitroglycerin] so they are higher energy. As talltex stated, using the same amount of powder would likely blow your gun apart.