Avoid This One Critical Mistake I Made When Buying Ammo As A Prep

Here’s a lesson from the School of Hard Knocks. Sometimes buying ammo is a mistake… or at least buying the particular ammo that you put in your shopping cart is. 

Ammo hard knocks

I’ve made a lot of prepping mistakes over the years, and I am sharing those here in hopes that you can learn from my errors and not make the same mistakes yourself.

Perhaps the worst error I have made (and I see being made) is when preppers stockpile mostly full metal jacket (FMJ) rounds, not hollow points/self defense rounds.

I admit it, I shoot cheap steel-case ammo… I shoot A LOT of cheap steel-case ammo. When you put as many rounds downrange as we do, cost definitely becomes a factor. We have “range guns” that eat steel ammo just fine. My personal range weapon of choice is a WASR 7.62×39 bone stock AK that I don’t care if I wear out. 

Early on in my prepper shooting career, I bought the dirt-cheap milsurp FMJ rounds from Whoknowswhereistan, it was dirty and corrosive and I just didn’t care because I clean my guns after shooting them. When the supply of this ammo ended, I switched over to Tula & Wolf, which I bought by the case.

I had plenty of cases “on hand” for “in case the SHTF”, and when I did an inventory I realized that of my “main” defense caliber, nearly everything I owned was FMJ, stuff that is illegal (and a bit unethical even if we are WROL) to hunt with.

Other rifles factored into ammo choice

My other high powered rifles of choice are Mosins, I have several and bought several cases of surplus corrosive ammo. That surplus ammo is, you guessed it, FMJ.

That’s a problem, because of my philosophy of streamlining caliber choices. My deer rifle is a bolt-action 7.62×39, and my “other” deer rifle is a Mosin sniper rifle (original, not a hacked-together fake). 

I realized I had to fix this, so I went out and bought a couple hundred rounds of brass-cased hunting hollow points for the Mosin, and the same amount of brass-case hunting ammo for the x39 gun. 

I then started letting attrition fix this for me… as I shot up a case of Wolf or Tula FMJ, I would replace it with Wolf (which I like better) hollowpoints. 

Why?

For two reasons. First, if it comes down to it, it’s legal to hunt with hollow points in my state. Secondly, if I have to use them for self defense, hollow points are a better choice than FMJ. I am not an army, and I am therefore not bound by international law concerning ammunition types in an armed conflict.

I do not expect to point my gun at any person in anger (and I hope and pray I never have to) but if I do, I would rather have hollow points in it.

Over time, my storage ammo for my 7.62×39 rounds has mostly now become hollow points. 

We basically shoot only a few calibers as I explained in this article (CLICKY), with our main handgun caliber being 9mm.

When I checked our 9mm stocks, you will never guess what I found. About 95 percent of the rounds stored were FMJ. 

Sigh.

OK, well, this situation is a bit different since we go through A LOT of 9mm, and 9mm hollow points tend to be pretty expensive if  you buy them over the counter at a store.

SO… what I did was divide our 9mm into two piles, one for range work and the other storage. I used up “storage 9mm FMJ” at the range, and replaced it by the case from an online source.

Salty’s Note: The source that was mentioned in this story (written in 2017) became unreliable after the story was written, so I have removed them from the article. I have removed the links to the manufacturer and will rework this article in the future to reflect our current choices. We never had an issue with the manufacturer, but others did. Some of the products mentioned here, like the steel case ammo, are no longer available. We do not and cannot recommend them at this point in time, so I have removed the previous recommendations, but leave the article basically otherwise intact for historical purposes.

We use(d) Freedom Munitions as our manufacturer of choice for 9mm (and we have a bunch of their other calibers as well). NOTE: They do not in any way support this website, nor sponsor us, we were simply happy customers.

The FMJ in my storage has been replaced by new-manufacture 9mm Luger 124 Gr Hornady XTP rounds.

For range ammo, I’ve was buying their (Not currently manufactured as of April, 2019) American Steel 9mm 115 Gr rounds… brass coated steel case, but it shoots much cleaner than the Russian ammo and importantly it’s made in the USA.

Spice’s main close quarters combat weapon is a .223/5.56 Tavor X95 (CLICKY) (before that, it was a Windham AR – CLICKY). Same scenario, I had stockpiled up a bunch of FMJ (mostly brass in this case), and have now transitioned our storage ammo over to Freedom Munitions .223 55 Gr Hornady V-MAX rounds.

Storage Ammo Should Be Hunting Legal / Self Defense

Obviously, your mileage will vary, but I think it’s important that pretty much all of your storage ammo should be hollow point/defensive rounds, while your shooting ammo can be something inexpensive (American Steel, one of the Russian steel brands, Winchester White Box, whatever you choose).

If you are currently FMJ heavy, the best way I can think of to fix the problem is to shoot off your FMJ a box or two at a time and replace it with HP rounds. 

Of course, you need to make sure your guns will eat the rounds you are storing, but that’s another article