Shoot Your Carry Ammo At Least Once

hornadyCDLet me tell you a story. Remember that XDs review I did a while back? That was my father’s gun. He bought it for his daily carry gun. After I did the review and gave it back to him, he held off carrying it for a while until he had the chance to shoot it himself. That turned out to be a good idea.

I’ve always been a fan of the Winchester PDX ammunition. The problem is, there was a bit of an ammo crisis in recent months. You might have heard about it. I believe a couple of blogs might have mentioned it as well. Either way, PDX ammo was difficult to find so my father loaded the gun with Hornady’s Critical Defense ammo instead.

Come range day, my father went to try his new gun and he wanted to see how the defense ammo shot. First round fired but the 2nd round got stuck. It wasn’t a typical “tap, rack, bang” failure either. This was a “dang gun seized up” type of failure. Couldn’t rack, couldn’t do anything. The gun was a brick. Fortunately, the range safety officer had gunsmithing training and he was able to get the gun working again. They tried it again with a different magazine and…same problem. Useless gun after the first shot.

Once they got it working again this time, they tried different ammo in it. At that people, the gun worked like a dream. Upon returning home and spending some time on Google, it turns out that almost the entire XD line has issues with the Critical Defense brand ammunition. There’s something about the odd shape of the CD ammo that just doesn’t jive with the design of the XD.

Imagine if he hadn’t had that failure in the nice, “safe” shooting range. What if he had just loaded it up and carried it assuming “Hey, it’s Hornady! They know what they’re doing!”. Statistically speaking, he probably would never have actually found out. Murphy’s Law, however, might have intervened and my father would have been in a bad situation: a bricked gun when he needed it most.

Keep in mind, this isn’t saying anything bad about the XDs or Hornady. With all the different gun and ammo designs, it’s only logical that some just aren’t going to get along. That’s why, when we (myself or other blogs or magazines) review guns, we try to test with a multitude of ammo. Some ammo will be more accurate out of Gun A than Gun B, some will have different velocities, some will have reliability issues. If every gun and bullet behaved the same, there’d be no reason to have more than one company.

Now, I know defense ammo isn’t cheap. I’m not saying use it for all your practice. What I am saying is sacrifice a box of it to test. The peace of mind knowing that the ammo in your gun is going to work, to me, is worth the price of at least one box of the good stuff.

P.S. You’ll be happy to know that my beloved PDX ammo works just fine in the XDs.


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