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The tapered 9mm cases also gave feeding problems in the Luger’s sharply-inclined magazine where they tend to tilt and create extra drag in addition to the side drag, resulting in a magazine that has difficulty feeding cartridges to the super-fast toggle action before the bolt rides into the top side of the cartridge instead of the cartridge base because the cartridge hasn’t had time to rise up to full feeding position. The problem was compounded by the Luger’s incredibly light weight of 30 ounces, which lets the muzzle flip up more in recoil as the cartridges in the magazine are simultaneously driven down by that flip – this on a magazine whose angle of feed dictates that it be so precisely positioned that a worn magazine catch or a magazine that hangs too low will cause feeding jams.

Georg Luger had originally designed his gun for the .30 Luger cartridge, which was well balanced to the design. Someone took the case and opened it up to 9mm for a bolt action “garden gun” cartridge, in which role its tapered case was an aid to extraction. About this time, the German police experienced several failures of the 93-grain .30 Luger to stop a determined assailant, so DWM ordered Georg Luger to chamber the Luger for the new 9mm cartridge as this would only require rebarreling. Georg pointed out the aforementioned objections plus the fact that the heavier bullet would have a larger recoil impulse than the lightweight toggle had sufficient mass to resist. Bottom line: business cost-cutting overruled the designer and Georg’s protests fell on deaf ears.