Many folks — cops included — load up their self-defense sidearm, and then those tools silently serve and protect their owners from bad people with evil in their hearts. Unfortunately, most of us don’t think about regularly rotating the personal defense ammunition in our carry gun. or think we need to.
Don’t let that be you.
How long ago did you put the cartridges you’re carrying in your EDC pistol? Six months ago? A year? Two years even?
“I don’t remember” will count as a sub-optimal response. After all, you carry that gun to defend your life. It behooves you to keep up with a little basic preventative maintenance.
“Ammunition lasts for years,” you say. “Why do we need to do this?” Here’s but one reason why you should rotate your defensive ammunition.
Years ago, a retired cop at the police union building where I worked knew that I taught firearms classes on the weekends. He asked a favor: His niece found herself detailed to Darfur, Sudan in her job for the State Department.
Knowing the city’s reputation, she and her hubby both though it wise to seek out some pre-deployment training on the Beretta 92. They knew the Marines there would have M9s. If things went badly, they hoped to acquire a Beretta or two from the security contingent. In their minds, the Beretta surely beat a sharp stick.
So Clyde, a retired University of Illinois police lieutenant, asked if I would spend a day with them. Clyde had trained plenty of cops in his day. Wisely, he sought outside help to teach family members. He joined the niece and her husband, both novices to shooting, for a Saturday at the range.
We started with safety and gun basics and fired their first shots. From there, we covered movement, getting off the “X”, communication, learning to shoot around barricades, malfunction drills, and much more.
Clyde pretty much stayed out of the way, but added to what I taught them with his real-world experiences. By the end of the day, the pair had each fired 250 rounds and laid in a fairly decent skill set foundation using my guns for the cost of defensive carry ammo, lunch and a steak dinner for me. After an intensive day of training, they felt a lot better about their gun-handling and shooting skills.
Toward the end of our time at the range, we shot recreationally. The woman asked her uncle about his .357, the same gun he’d carried for about a million years at UIPD and later as a part-time security guard at an off-track betting facility.
He pulled out his Smith & Wesson from his duty belt. Then he carefully lined up his sights and squeezed the trigger.
“Click.”
Some say there’s nothing louder than the “click” you hear when you expect a bang…or a bang when you expect to hear a click. I’ll never forget that look of abject horror on his face.
“Ho-leee [bleep]!” he said, shaking his head, looking at that old workhorse.
He had fired that gun defensively more than once in his career. In one instance in the late ’60s, while pulling up on a shooting in progress on campus, he came under fire from a carload of Black Panthers. He returned the favor, emptying a cylinder on them. He hit a couple of them around the edges.
On this day though, three of his six cartridges failed to fire from that cylinder, including the first two rounds. Reloads from his belt worked just fine.
While he regularly cleaned his revolver, he didn’t regularly rotate his defensive ammo. He admitted carrying those particular hollow-points for at least a couple of years.
My guess is that excess lubrication spoiled those rounds. Oil in revolver cylinders can work into the cartridges through capillary action and neuter the primers. Just another reason not to over-lubricate the chamber of a revolver or a semi-auto pistol.
Oil contamination doesn’t pose the only risk to your CCW carry ammunition. Your magazines may acquire all manner of crud and debris over time, creating an opportunity for Mr. Murphy to make an unwelcome appearance. Corrosion may occur on the cartridge cases.
Then there’s the issue of bullet setback. If you load and unload your pistol frequently — when you get home, when you put your carry gun in your safe, whatever — bullet setback can become an issue over time. That can lead to over-pressure rounds and a possible ka-boom.
It may be just an old wive’s tale, but I’ve always been taught not to tumble loaded ammunition. Moving around through life over long periods of time may replicate those issues. Thankfully though, Popnfresh at Arfcom has pretty much shown that tumbling for even a couple hundred hours does not cause powder or primer degradation. At the same time, old wive’s tale or not, why not eliminate that risk by rotating your ammunition?
How often should I do it?
For revolvers, check to ensure your loaded cartridges do not feel “oily” 24 hours after cleaning the gun. If they do feel greasy, pull those rounds out of service. Run a dry patch or three through the cylinders, then reload with fresh ammo and repeat.
Once the cartridges come out dry the next day, I would recommend rotating them out every three to six months. Replace them with the brand and style of ammunition proven to run reliably in your handgun.
“Have you seen the price of self defense ammo?” you ask, incredulously. To which, I reply, “How much is your life worth? Or the lives of your spouse and kids?”
Remember: ammo is (relatively) cheap. Life is precious.
For semi-autos, perform the “cartridge in chamber” test after each cleaning. Then rotate out the round in the chamber every three to six months.
For rounds in the magazine carried in the gun or spare magazines carried every day, rotate that ammunition annually or after about 12 months of carry. All of this rotated out ammo should find a home in a box or bag in your range bag.
Test fire the rounds to ensure they fire and function. If they misfire, hangfire or have malfunction issues, investigate further to find and fix the causes. You may need to clean more often, or use (significantly) less lubrication after cleaning.
By rotating out your self-defense ammunition regularly with fresh rounds, you can eliminate a potential failure point of your personal defensive system. After all, most defensive gun uses take place at close range. While you can always pull the trigger a second time in a revolver, that’s not always the case with a semi-automatic. A bad guy can usually cover that distance far quicker than anyone can perform a malfunction clearing drill.
Everytime I go to the range. I shoot the entire magazine in my carry gun. Keep that motor memory of what my carry ammo feels like. Then, I switch to practice ammo. The carry ammo is expensive, and one of the instructors at the range told me it was not necessary to practice with carry ammo, but, I do it anyway.
Used to do that once every 3 or so months back when I could order ammo online. With the current restrictions we have I am reevaluating my options for practice/replenishment.
Same problem here. My oh so gun friendly state of CA, makes rotation of carry ammo basically not possible…for “safety reasons”.
-smh
A bit of an alarmist article.
I use quality ammo (Gold DOts, etc.) and firearms and try to use common sense/reasonable care and have never experienced setback or corrosion issues as implied from the photos or descriptions shown here.
At some point I will shoot the ammo that has been cycled multiple times through my loading after maintenance but that’s never resulted in a failure of any sort.
Much depends on your environment. Vietnam 1971, The nice armorer handed me a S&W Combat Masterpiece and 6 rounds of milspec whatever .38 Spl. I wandered back in about 4 months later, sidled up to the counter and attempted to unload the gun, but I could not get any of the cartridges to come out of the cylimder. Nice armorer pipes up that’s not unusual, he’ll take care of it. The gun had not been removed from the shoulder holster in my survival vest since it was issued. When I picked it up a few days later it was all fine, and I took better care of it after that. Whether it would have fired I haven’t a clue, but I got to see the cartridges and they were about 3 different shades of green, did not look healthy! Now, the equipment room the vest lived in when I was not flying was air conditioned, so the main exposure to the elements was just the 8 or 10 hours a week I was flying, I hate to imagine what it would have been like if it was all the time. But the heat and humidity was pretty intense outside the A/C area, as you may have heard. Today I think I would err on the side of caution.
I follow that routine too.
I don’t do it EVERY trip, but I DO shoot my defensive ammo every once in a while. Bullets can seat into the case if the same round is rechambered very many times. It’s not much added expense to pop off a magazine of carry ammo every few months in addition to cheaper range ammo.
My self defense ammo never sits more than a month in my EDC. I end up shooting it at the range and adding in fresh rounds. Same for the spare mags.
And for those of us who don’t get to range as often as we’d like / should…
Write a date on the top round with a sharpie. Done.
Not a bad idea at all.
Yeah, I have taken to doing that with a lot of stuff that tends to get forgotten. Just replaced the battery in the UPS that runs my broadband modem, firewall, switch and wireless hub…this time I put a post-it on the battery itself on the inside too since the one I stuck on the front last time got lost.
I usually train with what I carry, solves that problem in lieu of another.
That being higher training expense, and of course the supply/demand rarity over the last few years which has forced the issue of using the next closest neighbor.
Great summary of the major reasons ammunition can fail over time. Only ever saw a 45acp end up as a dud from lubricant in the gun but it does happen. Haven’t seen the setback issue yet and hope not to for obvious reasons but always liked the idea of the Beretta Tomcat for that issue.
What causes the setback? Chambering?
Oops guess I could just click on the link…
Could but yes repeatedly chambering the same round can be a problem, I try not to do it more than twice before putting it in the range ammo pile.
Seems like a selling point for crimp locked ammo. Like the Hornady Critical Defense Ammo I use. +p 9mm.
“Seems like a selling point for crimp locked ammo.”
A crimp-locked round is no guarantee the projectile will *stay locked* at the proper depth. You can see the crimp all day long, you at home cannot (at a glance) are unable to determine how tight the actual crimp is.
It’s nice to have, but… ?
@muck
Critical Def not so much recommended performance-wise. Duty is, only because better barrier blindness only if you require that feature. Keep in mind that quality is considered a gross liability in SD shoots.
Best off with Gold Dot or Fed’s various offerings on the daily.
Avoiding setback is as easy as placing the 1st by hand in the chamber, which you should be doing anyway for that +1 cap and moreover with frequent dry fire training.
Muck, I’ve had Hornady Critical Defense rounds seat back in. Only once before I regularly started shooting my carry ammo as well as my range ammo.
lube sparingly. don’t rechamber the same round (more than) twice.
fuzz bunnies.
John, I think you may have misspoke. You do not rotate ammunition. You shoot the ammunition you have been carrying and reload with fresh ammunition. I recommend every six months, but you can get by with twelve months if you take care of your gear. Magazines are what you rotate. Especially, pistol magazines. Religiously
I probably should do that more but I just keep a few springs ready for when my magazine starts to give me any trouble at the range.
Wow! I’ve had 30 rounders loaded for years in the safe. I need to empty them I guess. Crap I hope I haven’t ruined the springs.
muckraker,
The lifespan of your magazine springs is NOT a function of whether they sit around compressed or uncompressed. Rather, magazine spring life is a function of how many times you compress and then uncompress them. Saying it another way, your magazine springs will fail after some number of compression/uncompression cycles.
Think of a solid copper wire. It will not break if it is straight or bent. What breaks that copper wire is repeatedly bending it and straightening it at the same location. That is the same principle which causes springs to eventually fail. (We call that principle “work-hardening” which causes the metal to get harder and therefore brittle–and ultimately fracture/fail.)
“The lifespan of your magazine springs is NOT a function of whether they sit around compressed or uncompressed.”
It’s also definitely a function of the quality of the spring steel. I’ve had Remington 591 .22 magnum magazines that I hardly ever used experience spring weakening even when I only kept 3 out of 9 rounds in the magazine.
I’ve had an aftermarket extended spring for a Remington 870 fail when the tube was kept loaded for an extended period even though it was rarely used.
Meanwhile, I’ve had springs in my Glock factory magazines that have been kept constantly loaded (and regularly fired) for decades and they’re still going strong.
Elastic deformation is the temporary deformation of the mag spring as its compressed and returned to its normal state, within its intended parameters. Every time you load/unload your magazine you’re elastically deforming (compressing) the spring. This is not a bad thing, its not like bending a piece of copper wire back and forth until it breaks, a mag spring is made to do this made to operate like this. Its is not going to break because its operated in its Elastic deformation design parameters.
Plastic deformation is a permanent deformation of the magazine spring. When a spring is compressed or expanded too far outside its design parameters it can permanently lose some or all of its intended stiffness and force.
Quality magazine springs are designed to handle an amount of compression that is greater than their total capacity, in other words designed to work within a certain range.
Magazine spring function is a function of Hooke’s Law, the formula for which is: F = -K(X) – or to put it into words … force equals K multiplied by X. In terms of magazine springs its applied as: magazine tension equals the spring’s stiffness multiplied by how much distance it’s compressed.
This force (in the formula as F) is called elastic potential energy (remember the ‘Elastic deformation’ from above? This is really stored energy being used, its the elastic potential energy being converted into the elastic kinetic energy expressed as ‘Elastic deformation’. See, even the laws of physics at play for magazines.). K (in the formula) is the spring’s stiffness. X (in the formula) is the distance the spring was compressed, a constant, how far the spring compresses when the magazine is loaded to its full rated capacity.
This defines the parameter limits for the mag spring. Exceed the parameters and you get plastic deformation.
Basically (for correctly made quality springs), if spring stiffness (K) and compression distance (X) never change, then your mag spring ability to feed bullets into the firearm (the F, or force) will always be the same (for a longgggggg time).
Basically, as long as the mag spring stays within its design parameters it will last a longggggggg time even loaded fully and stored.
But, two things that mostly affect magazines that are loaded and unloaded frequently (like for example, shooting on the range) or loaded for long periods of time (for example, years), these are Spring fatigue and Spring creep.
Spring fatigue happens when a spring has been repeatedly compressed and returned to rest (e.g. loading and unloading a magazine by firing and reloading or just changing out ammo). This is a form of fatigue that causes an eventual loss in some spring stiffness and and thus force. All springs suffer fatigue as they do work, quality magazine springs are designed to handle tens of thousands of uses (within their parameters) with little to no fatigue. With quality magazine springs you’re more likely to literally shoot a gun wearing out all the rifling and making it unusable before you wear out a magazine spring from loading and unloading it repeatedly by shooting.
Spring creep is the spring permanent loss of stiffness from compression over a long period of time. This is the factor that applies more to loaded magazines in storage or loaded for very long periods of time (e.g. years). I’ve got a few hundred mags, combination of pistol and rifle, that I’ve had stored for at least 8 years fully loaded. I sample test 25% of them once a year, never found one that failed to feed properly.
Do magazine springs fail? Yep, they do sometimes and although , for example, corrosion or high humidity or low quality workmanship or neglect can be blamed sometimes its mostly actually because of imperfections and flaws in the metal that become more affected over time and use leading to premature excessive spring fatigue or failure through spring creep.
clarification for : “But, two things that mostly affect magazines”
affect magazines sometimes, actually rare until a magazine reaches (or is approaching) its end of life tens of thousands cycles later.
clarification for: “imperfections and flaws in the metal…”
Yes, all metal used in all mag springs have imperfections and flaws on some level. However, its the location and magnitude of these imperfections and flaws that determine if they will fail prematurely or not. For example, a flaw at the end of the spring is more unlikely to cause spring premature failure where a flaw in the middle of the spring would be compressed more and thus more likely to cause premature spring failure. Springs that fail prematurely tend to be lower quality material or left overs from spring runs that don’t pass QC or did pass QC but they were not comprehensively inspected and slipped through or ones from batches of springs that have been discarded because they were at the end of a spring chain from where they were cut, and these are where most premature failure imperfections and flaws happen.
.40,
I was worried about plastic deformation I guess. I had a 327 Chevy I put together many years ago and it had sat for 8 years. I fired it up and had a little chatter coming from a couple of valve springs. It went away after a few minutes but that is what I was worrying about with my 30 rounders. Don’t let your small block sit too long was the lesson.
Of course, revolvers relieve the magazine issue and they work very well.
Lightweight revolvers with heavy recoil can have setback issues but it is a less pressing issue generally speaking than with repeated chambering with autos.
safe
I’ve experienced the opposite. Heavy jacketed bullets not crimped tight enough walking forward to the point of binding the cylinder. Happened in a airweight Smith. The same batch didn’t do it in a Smith mod.19. My own fault.
J frame airweight with plus p loads. 158 grain loads. Jammed it up and took three hands to free it. No more plus p loads in a j frame.
Still have those same loads in my model 10. Works a charm there.
Well that makes my list of things to check when I get into reloading for revolvers again.
Exactly, revolvers don’t fail very often but when they do they’re paperweights until you get to a gunsmith.
Gadsden Flag,
Unfortunately, revolvers have springs as well–they can and do fail.
About 10 years ago my cousin purchased a new revolver. Other than plinking a few times, that revolver stayed in a large gunsafe. At some point (roughly 7 years after purchase), my cousin took that revolver out of the safe for some dry-fire practice. And nothing: an internal spring had broken and the revolver would not cycle at all.
Disclaimer: I am not badmouthing revolvers. I am a huge fan of revolvers and own a few. I am simply sharing the fact that revolvers can and do fail.
I’ve seen internal parts breakage disable a revolver. Very rare in my personal experience. Ammo problems cause the majority of problems with revolvers. Again, in my personal experience.
But every trip to a range there are folks having trouble making their semi’s run. My personal favorite, and I see it a lot, is somebody bringing the piece up just to drop the mag on the ground. Just the thing to have happen when you hear that breaking glass at the witching hour.
uncommon, of course revolvers can and do fail. They’re mechanical devices. If guns didn’t break we wouldn’t need gunsmiths, spare parts, etc. I said that a revolver eliminates the loaded magazine spring issue. All of a revolvers springs are at rest at all times except when being fired.
If you are often late getting your kids to school because you sometimes stop along your driveway to shoot at coyotes or other varmints with your carry pistol, you might be a redneck. As a result, us rednecks keep having to buy new hollow point ammunition.
Safe, I like you already. Besides spare mag springs, don’t forget the follower and floor plate. If the magazine body is damaged, never use it front line. They are great for malfunction clearance drills. Keep your magazines as clean as your weapon.
“If the magazine body is damaged, never use it front line. They are great for malfunction clearance drills.”
I mark the few of those magazines I have by deeply gouging an ‘X’ on both sides of the magazine, plastic (Glock), or metal (in my case, currently CZ).
That ways, there’s no question by me if the mag I pick up out of the safe is in a less-than-ideal condition. Even in pitch-black, I can feel the gouges…
Probably should get a few of both but outside of M4 abuse on deployment I have never managed to deadline a follower or base plate. Never hurts to have spares of the little internal springs and pins in case corrosion claims them as well (looking at you new Sig and recently departed Remlin).
Safe, as for as the reset issue, shoot the ammunition and replace it before that happens.
Was the practice before we made ammo even more obnoxious to pick up over here. At this point ammo and many accessories are all cash all out of state unless you want NY asking why you buy enough supplies to shoot occasionally.
I assume “f*** you!” is not an acceptable answer, as would be expected in Texas?
Seldom have the same ammo in my carry weapons for more than a month. I practice with the same ammo I carry. Since I live well away from town, I can shoot when I have the time and desire. Even when I lived in the big city, I made a point to locate and use firing ranges. Made it a point to get out at least once a month and at least burn through a couple magazines or cylinders worth of ammo. 20 to 50 bucks month is not enough to break most of us.
AL, good advice.
Had to mortar a round out of one of my MSRs. I had forgotten that I left it chambered I don’t know how long ago. Badly corroded. Fortunately the chamber was not damaged. Lesson learned. Everything get’s cycled now on a regular basis.
One of the indoor ranges I used to frequent several decades ago told my friend and I a story about a police officer who wanted to practice with his duty gun. He fired the six in the cylinder but couldn’t extract the empty cases. They had corroded into the cylinders. Luckily the range had an onsite gunsmith.
Michael,
That happened to me as well. My cartridge in the chamber of my semi-auto pistol had corroded and became very difficult to remove. Fortunately, I noticed it and removed it.
My strategy to avoid that problem in the future:
First of all, I ensure that there is an ever-so-slight film of oil in my handgun’s chamber–enough oil to resist corrosion and yet not so much to wick into the primer or case and degrade the primer or propellant.
Second, when I take-off my belt at the end of the day and store my everyday-carry handgun, I ensure that I can easily move the slide back about 1/8th inch. If that becomes difficult, that means the cartridge in the chamber is corroding.
I leave revolvers loaded if I’m not going to be using them for a while, and I keep a handful of loaded mags around, but they’re all in climate controlled conditions and good for practically forever. In what conditions were you keeping your modern sporting rifle that corrosion of the chambered round was an issue?
I keep each of my rifles in a silicone sock. In a closed safe in my home. At the time I was living in Norfolk VA right next to a salt water inlet so that might have had an impact. When I moved there from Texas every rifle and mag was empty. When I moved in, I reloaded my mags and probably chambered this particular round and promptly forgot about it. I cleared it earlier this year before I moved to Richmond area in VA. So maybe 5 years or perhaps less because I did get to shoot them.
If your carry ammo stays in your gun long enough to be a problem, you are not practicing with it often enough. That’s really all that needs to be said.
that says it all
My carry gun ammo is all less than 2 years old. Sig VCrown. Shoot some every range trip. Very shiny stainless(?) ammo. Doubt it would ever corrode…
Nickel typically (does wonders for less than ideal storage) and primers are usually sealed. Doesn’t stop all lubricants from getting in on either end of the round but does slow it down a bit.
For my EDC, I empty and rotate out mags once quarterly. The off loaded ammo goes into the range practice pile and fresh new ammo gets puts in the rotated in mags for carry. When the mags are emptied they are checked for wear and tear and spring tension (yes, when the mags are new, if you are a little nerdish like me, you check them for spring tension before they are loaded the first time and make a record of it) then cleaned and if everything is fine they go back into the rotation bunch to be used later. A lot of people can’t afford to rotate ammo out like that I know, I’m kinda lucky in the ammo aspect, but at least they can completely inspect the ammo. I’ve never discovered any issues with the ammo I off-loaded not even bullet setback. I do not carry reloads in my EDC, I only carry new ‘fresh’ (its been in storage) factory loaded ammo.
Here’s another reason why to change out often –
When brass-cased self-defense ammunition in a semi-auto magazine begins to feed when firing, the corrosion, even slightly, will tend to cause the rounds ‘hang up’ on the other rounds.
If you take about 10 rounds of the corroded stuff into your hand and squeeze a bit and work them around, you can easily feel them a bit gritty on each other.
Nickel-plated ammo, on the other hand, almost feels like it’s lubricated when you work them around in your hand.
Try it some time, the effect is real, and it convinced me to only use nickel-plated brass in my daily carry here in sweaty and sticky south Florida…
I switched edc to revolver, my emu gets automatically rotated
Lmao. Good one possum. XD
I knew a guy that would actually hand oil each round in his carry gun. Swore up and down he had to oil his rounds. I told him it was a bad idea but he never learned.
Winchester steel case it’s not a bad idea and does wonders in reducing failures to feed/extract but would really want to only do that to what you intend to shoot that trip.
Revolver chambers get the same treatment as barrels (in my house). Second to the last step is an oil patch, last step a dry patch.
Change the batteries and ammunition to all my guns on my birthday.
This is also a good reason to invest in proper defensive ammo. $1.50+ per round for pistol ammo is painful but you generally get nickel cases for corrosion proofing and they have crimped bullets and lacquered primer pockets to keep oil out.
I am always skeptical when someone uses limited examples of a problem and then develops an entire article on why you shouldn’t do something. I wonder if the author considered how many times some new ammo goes click or why some ammo does not work at all in some guns? I have experienced a number of situations with new or relatively new ammo that would make your hair curl. How about 223 rounds where the bullet has not been crimped properly with the cartridge by the manufacturer and the bullets literally fall out? How about ammo that you buy, and it will simply not shoot out of certain gun or rifle. If you don’t test them first and decide to load them, you can be in a load of trouble whether they are new or old if they don’t work when you need them. The long and the short of it is the problem does not only exist with old ammo it can exist with new ammo as well.
I use hand loads that mimic my carry ammo for practice. Those are my last 30 rounds of a shooting session. When I buy self defense ammo, I purchase usually In bulk. Now when you are talking about 17-18 rounds in the gun and carrying 2 extra mags, that’s $69 dollars to to throw away. I have several gun that I keep handy so we are talking about a hundred rounds or so every year. That’s too rich for my blood. I wil be rotating my mags (once i mark them) I would think and inspection once a year with a 5 year max life. Just my 2 cents worth.
Until I gave it to mh brother I had 500rounds of .30 carbine that was head stamped ’42. Who know how it was stored or where since it was first placed in those tattered cardboard boxes. Its always fired fine for me, operated the carbine fine. OTOH, my brother gave me some steel cased, steel jacketed cartridges with some unknown markings and no date stamp. It looked nice and clean but none of them would fire in any 9 mm handgun. They may have been machine-gun ammo that needed an extra stout firing pin strike to ignite. I pulled the bullets, dumped the powder on the lawn to fertilize it and used the bullets as fishing sinkers. Placed motor oil in the cases to kill the primers and they then went to the dump.
Good advice generally but I’ve got some interesting anecdotes on this. I keep a spare magazine for my Beretta loaded in my car, it’s hot and humid here. They’re high quality HST’s with nickel cases, but I took my spare mag to the range after it had been in my car for over 2 years, both because I was changing carry rounds and to experiment and see if I’d get any FTF and every round fed and fired with no issues. YMMV.
Interesting…My local indoor range does not allow me to shoot carry-ammo-hollowpoints at their targets- they claim it ruins the backstop. So here in Israel I’ll have to go to an outdoor range to pop off my carry ammo…..not so easy…..
Hollowpoints ruin the backstop? OK, that’s a new one on me, just when I thought I’d heard them all.
Seal your ammunition with HERNON. I soaked sealed cartridges in WD40 for a month and bang, bang, bang. Then more sealed went to 320 feet in salt water in a lobster trap and also banged 100%. The Army now uses HERNON at LCAAP, so do ammo companies for Mil/LE ammo. It goes on AFTER loading. Now let’s move on from “contamination” issues…all serious use ammo should be PROPERLY sealed and skip the nail polish which doesn’t.