Although most handgun shootings occur at close range, most bullets fired, even by trained law enforcement officers, miss their targets. For example, FBI agents are reported to have fired at least 70 rounds at two assailants in a fierce 1986 firefight in Miami, but only 18 rounds hit the criminals. The ratio of hits to rounds fired was not much better in the fatal shooting of an unarmed West African immigrant, Amadou Diallo, by New York City police in February 1999. Two officers emptied their 16-round capacity semiautomatic pistols, one fired five times and one fired four times. Therefore, the more rounds a gun can fire quickly, the more likely it is that a given shooting will result in multiple wounds.
More wounds increase the likelihood of death or serious injury in a given incident.
This fact is reflected in, among other practical applications, the military's specifications for handguns to be used by special operations forces. 21 American gun manufacturers have exploited these three deadly C's in gun design over the last 20 years as a general means of sparking consumer interest in saturated markets, thereby boosting sales. So is the killing potential as guns shrink in size and concealibility. The manufacturers of pocket rockets in particular which include virtually all of the major handgun manufacturers and many smaller companies have deliberately combined all three of the deadly C's into a single palm-sized package. But none of these firms came near to creating anything like the mini-powerhouses we have today.