Reader Question: Best Ammo for Practice
We got a question from Jeff: “What is the best ammo for target practice? Looking for reasonably priced ammo that won’t cause jams.“
After much deliberation, I’d have to say: Considering the current market, whatever you can get.
Seriously, though, I’m going to try and answer every interpretation of this question possible.
There are some that say you should practice using the same ammo that you load in your gun for defense. As much as I would love to shoot thousands of rounds of Hornady Critical Defense at the range, my wallet just doesn’t like the idea. Besides, while there is a slight difference between defensive ammo and practice ammo (in terms of accuracy and such), I’ve never found it to be enough to lose sleep over. All in all, I’d still recommend shooting at least one or two boxes of the good stuff so you know how it reacts in your gun.
Which brings me to this: Guns are like cats; Some guns just aren’t going to eat certain brands. The Kimber Solo is a good example. There’s only a small range of ammo brands that it will shoot reliably. That’s why range practice with a variety of brands is important. It’s far better to find out your gun’s taste preferences on the range than when you really need your gun to work.
So as far as practice ammo itself, Full Metal Jacket is always going to be the cheapest. There are great prices online all the time for bulk FMJ ammo. Keep in mind, the cheaper the ammo, the more likely you are to run into some quality issues. That’s why I keep my practice ammo and my defense ammo separate. Frankly, I don’t really mind the occasional ammo issues at the range. It gives me a real world opportunity to practice failure drills.
If you’re wondering about brands, that’s a tough one. There’s so many brands and, well, I was really only half joking in the first line of the answer. It’s tough to stick to brands you like right now because it’s tough to find pretty much any brand. Things are getting better lately, albeit a bit slower than we’d like. Either way, I’ve never had much trouble with UMC although I usually average about 3 bad rounds per box of 250. Considering the pre-panic prices of a 250 round box of UMC (<$40 a box), I can’t really complain about a couple of bad rounds. If you really, really want reliability at the range you can’t go wrong with Winchester or Remington when you can find them. UMC is technically Remington but the stuff that’s actually labeled “Remington” will be better. There’s also some new, overseas players that have entered the ring. I’m seeing lots of boxes of ammo lately from a Serbian company called Monarch. It’s cheap as heck and reliable enough but the jury’s still out on consistency of quality. I have heard that people are having much better luck with the brass cased Monarch ammo as opposed to the steel cased.
Side note: there is a lot of contention right now over Brass vs. Steel vs. Whatever else cased ammo. While I haven’t found too much difference between any of them, the brass just…feels better. I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe it’s just a placebo effect or whatever. I know a lot of competitors don’t like them. They certainly do run their guns a lot harder than I do. Just something to keep in mind.
Keep an eye on GunBot.net for deals. They keep track of pretty much all the major online retailers’ inventories in almost real time. Their sorting, alerts and per bullet pricing makes it easy to spot when a good deal pops up and jump on it quick. Ammo-can.net is another great ammo finding site but this one is focused specifically on Wal-Mart inventories.
Thanks for reading, Jeff, and I hope that answers your question. Worse comes to worst, you can always give reloading a shot!
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