Heck, up until the 1970s or thereabouts you rarely saw an automatic pistol being used by either police or the killers in police shows. It's hard for me to think of an original 1968-78 episode of Columbo wherein the murderer uses a handgun to commit the crime and it's not a revolver. Yet automatic pistols, submachine guns and fully automatic assault weapons existed by the millions both in America and worldwide during that time. It's just that police often wielded service revolvers and not what military personnel would carry and criminals often had to rely on the cheapest, most common firearms they could find.