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Well, first of all you'd have to have a clear definition of the line between a rifle cartridge and handgun cartridge; as it currently stands, no clear definition exists. You see, you can't really define it by the platform its found in because both rifles and handguns have been made at one time or another in just about any cartridge you can think of. You can't really define it by power either because some of the more powerful cartridges commonly thought of as handgun cartridges are, from the right barrel length, more powerful than some of the less powerful cartridges commonly thought of as rifle cartridges. For example, a heavy-loaded .44 Magnum from a long-barrel revolver can fairly easily produce more muzzle energy than a run-of-the-mill .223 Remington from a short-barrel rifle.
Even if we just use common conceptions of rifle and handgun cartridges for our definition, we find that the design of rifle cartridge make them very inefficient for what a handgun is typically used for. Most rifle cartridges are designed for 16" or longer barrels. As such, they normally use rather slow-burning powders that will reach their optimum pressure, and thus produce their highest velocity, from a long barrel. When chambered in a handgun, a great deal of that powder will still be burning after the bullet has already left the barrel thus producing rather disappointing velocity unless a relatively long barrel (for a handgun at least) is used. This is why rifle-caliber handguns often have 8" or longer barrels with 10-12" barrels not being uncommon.
Secondly, the vast majority of rifle cartridge which produce significantly more power than handgun cartridges use much longer cases so as to allow for a larger charge of powder. This isn't usually an issue in a rifle because the magazine is usually housed outside the grip and thus less subject to space constraints. In a handgun, however, the length of the cartridge is often constrained to what will fit inside a magazine housed in the gun's grip. A handgun with a grip large enough to house most of the common rifle cartridges would have a grip much too large to fit most people's hands. The way around this is to house the ammunition outside the grip. When this is done with a magazine-fed handgun, the result is almost always a handgun so large that it isn't much more convenient or less cumbersome to carry than a compact rifle. The other option is to make a rifle-caliber revolver, single-shot, or multi-barrel handgun. While this does allow a somewhat more compact and conveniently-carried handgun that a rifle-caliber, magazine-fed handgun, they are still nearly always so large and heavy as to only be useful for target shooting and hunting.
Finally, a rifle has advantages besides raw power over a handgun. Because rifles generally have stocks and handguns typically don't (save for a few historical curiosities and heavily-regulated NFA weapons), rifles are almost always much easier to shoot accurately especially at long range. Simply put, a shoulder stock allows for a much more stable shooting platform than any non-shoulder stock contraption ever devised for a handgun. Even in the relatively few cases in which a handgun has been fitted with a stock, the result is a weapon so large and cumbersome that its advantage over a compact rifle is debatable. Also, due to their longer barrels, rifles typically have longer sight radii which make them much easier to shoot accurately. While optics such as a telescopic or holographic sight take sight radius largely out of the equation, mounting such a device on a handgun typically makes it so large and heavy that its usefulness is restricted to hunting and target shooting.
I think that the main thing you need to understand is what the role of a handgun is generally intended to be. By and large, a handgun is not intended to be a replacement for a rifle because no matter what cartridge you chamber it for, a handgun will always be a poor substitute for a rifle will. Instead, a handgun is, by and large, intended to be a weapon of convenience. Even though it is less powerful and more difficult to shoot well, a handgun's smaller size allows it to be useful in situations when a rifle, for all its virtues, is just to large to be practical. That's the tradeoff: power and ease of use for portability and convenience. With the exception of a few specialized handguns for hunting and/or long-range target shooting, chambering a rifle cartridge in a handgun almost always gives you a weapon which is too large and heavy to be as portable and convenient as a standard handgun but still too small to be as powerful and easy to use as a real rifle: the worst of both worlds and the best of neither.
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March 1, 2014, 04:31 AM
