Having recently gotten in 1200 rounds of Speer Gold Dot carry ammo, a thousand 124-grain +P 9mm and a couple hundred .38 Special Short Barrel, I’m reminded of the importance of having vetted guns for serious business with the ammo they’ll be used with “for real” instead of for practice.
Some guns simply won’t run with certain ammo. A couple of my .22 pistols, a little Ruger LCP-II and a Glock 44, run reliably only with CCI Mini-Mag cartridges. So long as I’m careful to work around their “dietary needs” and “ammo intolerances,” no problem.
There are lots of other things to watch for, and you’ll find several of them in this article I did in 2011 for this blog’s host, Backwoods Home magazine. The advice therein is still current.
USE THE RIGHT GUN!
While I was RO’ing a stage at our local IPSC/USPSA match a shooter fired his first shot and had a malfunction. The gun (Sig P229) did not fully cycle and eject the empty case. He manually cycled the slide and fired another round. Again it fired and did not cycle and eject the round.
I stopped the shooter and told him to unload. The were two holes on the close target but it looked like the bullets tumbled. Luckily I saw the two cases drop on the ground. I picked one up and it was a 9 mm but the front of the case was expanded out. (To 10 mm.)
The shooter has TWO Sig P229’s. One a 9 mm and one a 40 SW. He had loaded the 9 mm magazines into his 40 SW P229.
The best I can figure is that the extractor has held onto the rim of the 9 mm enough to ignite the primer.
Neat looking case. I gave it to the shooter (a good friend) as a reminder to check his guns.