LOADING THE .32 ACP

Not Easy, but Worth the Effort

- Terry Wieland

The .32 ACP has the distinction of being one of the most popular and widespread handgun cartridges ever designed and, at the same time, one of the most maligned. Probably 10 million or more have been produced in a dozen different countries by a hundred different companies, and it has been standard issue for both police forces and the military around the world. For more than a century, it has been a favorite pocket pistol on both sides of the Atlantic.

Yet W.H.B. Smith, one of the most respected handgun experts of the twentieth-century, dismissed it as a “thoroughly useless cartridge.” Even its admirers, and there are a few, tout its convenience, not its power or accuracy. In other words, John Browning’s little creation from 1900 is a bundle of contradictions.

The .32 ACP (Automatic Colt Pistol) or, as it’s known in Europe, the 7.65mm Browning, was designed in 1899 and put into production in 1900 by FN in Belgium. The gun was Browning’s small hammerless semiauto, and it proved so popular that by 1912, FN had produced more than a million of them. In the U.S., Colt chambered it in the Browning-designed Model 1903, and from there it was adopted and manufactured almost everywhere. Other famous guns chambered for it include the Walther PP and PPK, various Beretta models, CZ in Czechia and a dozen Spanish companies.

Ammunition has been in continuous production for 120 years, and is made by so many companies in so many countries it’s hopeless to try to list them.