Gun Myths: Gun show reloads are wastes of money.
There’s a lot of bad information on the intertubes. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve seen horribly bad advice being passed off as “expertise”, I wouldn’t need to be working anymore and could do GunNoob.com full time. With that, I’m going to start picking out bits of bad advice I’ve seen around the internet and then go all Mythbusters on it.
The first one was inspired by a strange set of circumstances. I was browsing one of my favorite forums and saw someone just ripping on those gunshow reload ammo packs. You know the ones: $12 for 50 rounds of 9mm FMJ and so on. Even though he stated that he “had never had a problem with them”, he wouldn’t “waste his money on that junk”. About an hour after I closed my browser with a chuckle, I got an email from someone asking about reloads for range practice. Part of me wonders if he was reading the same forum that I was browsing.
Regardless, those “worthless” gunshow reloads have made up about 99% of the countless number of shots I’ve made while running this site (and for a while beforehand as well). Why? Because I can get hundreds of rounds for the cost of a single 50 pack of the brand name stuff. Unlike some bloggers who are sponsored, or run their own stores, or are filthy rich to begin with, I’m just a guy running my own blog out of my pocket. The money I spend on this blog competes with things like mortgages and electric bills and such. I save money where I can and the biggest place to save money is on ammo. Granted, if someone wants to sponsor this blog, or just throw money my way for no reason whatsoever, I won’t turn it down. My first wife got my dignity in the divorce.
Anyway, here’s the thing about those reloads. A lot of people don’t trust them. They don’t have the quality controls that a lot of the big name manufacturers have and that could lead to a higher number of bad rounds. The funny part is, I’ve never personally had any. In fact, I’ve had more bad rounds from those Remington UMC boxes than I have ever had from the gun show reloads. It really comes down to volume. Let’s say that, for whatever reason, both a GSR (gun show reloader. I just made that acronym up.) and the big name brand both have an average bad round rate of about 2%. Now let’s say Big Name, Inc brand churns out 2 million rounds a day while GunShowReloader, LLC puts out maybe 10,000 a day. After crunching the numbers, we see that the reloader would have about 200 bad rounds while the big name brand would have 40,000 bad rounds. In other words, the big name brand would churn out more bad rounds in a day than the total number of rounds the reloader could churn out almost a week.
In fact, in my research, I can’t really find anything substantial. I haven’t seen anyone saying “they blew up my gun”. I’ve seen a few cases with a home reloader blew up their gun, mind you, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. All the stories I’m seeing are “they blew up some guy at the range’s gun” or “I know a guy who knows a guy who gets his hair cut from a guy that lives next door to a guy who’s gun blew up from those”.
Keep in mind, a lot of companies say that using reloads voids the warranty. My question has always been “how would they know?”. You’d have to be one heck of a self-incriminating person in that case. Am I saying be dishonest? Not at all. There’s only a couple of ways your gun can be damaged on account of reloads and both of those couldn’t be explained as a “warranty issue” by any stretch of the imagination. Keep in mind, I’m not advocating underhandedness. The reloads DO void your warranty and you should shoot them with that understanding. What I am saying is that, statistically speaking, it’s not going to be an issue either way.
So by all means, load up your gun with them, go to the range and blast away. They’re great rounds and the hate they get is unwarranted by far.
Myth: Busted Sorry, our staff of law-monkies has informed me that’s copyrighted.
Myth: torched!
What’s what you say? Would I bet my life on the reloads and use them for self defense? Well…uhm.. I would have to say LOOK OVER THERE! SOMETHING VERY DISTRACTING IS HAPPENING! **runs away**
Like what you read? GunNoob is now part of Pew Pew Tactical. Check out the rest of our awesome resources:
Leave a Reply