Capacity doesn't matter if you miss the first shot

I've been carrying one for forty-seven years. It works. The question of nine versus forty-five in a 1911 frame is the wrong question, and I'll tell you why. You're asking which one lets you carry more rounds. What you should be asking is which one you'll shoot better, because the gun that stays in the holster while you fumble with a safety or manage recoil you didn't train for is the one that fails you. A nine-millimeter 1911 gives you maybe two, three more rounds than a forty-five. Two or three rounds you will never need if your first five are true. The forty-five, by contrast, is what Browning built this platform for. Every line of the frame, the feed ramp, the barrel link, the entire geometry speaks 45 ACP. You can run a nine in the same slide and frame and it will function fine, sure. Thousands do. But you're running a child's bedtime in an engine built for a full day's work. The recoil argument is the weakest I hear. The forty-five in a steel 1911 is not snappy. It's soft. It's controllable. If recoil bothers you, the problem is not the cartridge. The problem is that you haven't fired enough rounds to understand the difference between recoil and flinch. Shoot a thousand rounds of forty-five and your hands will know what's real. The capacity thing dissolves once you understand what a single-action trigger is. That trigger is a gift. It breaks clean and true at exactly the same place every time. You cannot miss with it if you practice, and by practice I mean understanding your sight picture so well that you know before the round goes downrange whether it's going to land. Capacity is for people who shoot three times a week and call themselves ready. The man who knows his forty-five knows that two hits at seven yards will solve every problem that exists in a parking lot or a bedroom at night. Nine millimeter in a 1911 is respectable. I won't argue against it at a dinner table. But it's wearing someone else's shoes. Wear your own and know why you chose them. That matters more than the number on the side of the slide.