Bent Ramrod
04-15-2006, 10:17 PM
Where I don't find anywhere from three to a shirt pocketful of unfired .22LR rounds? Some, of course, are bent or the bullet damaged so feeding might be too difficult to bother with, and some have a firing pin indent and didn't go off, but a surprising number are just lying there, like somebody dumped them out of the box and left them. Or tossed them around at random.
I guess I'm showing my age and the poverty and victimhood of my childhood, but when .22LR used to cost an outrageous fifty cents a box (limit two boxes on special sale at K-mart) I and my youthful shooting companions were at pains to make sure that each and every one of those cartridges fulfilled the function envisioned for it by the factory, the gun manufacturer and ourselves; i.e., ka-pow, ka-blast. If one didn't fire, we rotated the rim and snapped again and again until it did. And, by the way, the ammo in those days didn't seem to require as much of that as some of it does now.
We were warned, of course, that a dropped round would carry dirt up the barrel, scratching it and ruining its fine accuracy, but my Glenfield .22 autoloader with the Micro-Groove rifling seemed to lose not the giltiest edge of its minute-of-tin-can accuracy as long as I conscientiously and thoroughly wiped the bullets off on my carefully laundered blue jeans. Nobody had enough ammunition to shoot at paper targets anyway back then, except at Boy Scout camp and other such places, so "fine accuracy" was kind of a null concept. If I didn't hit what I shot at, I was the one that missed, not the barrel.
I now have a Winchester Model 06 with a somewhat scruffy bore that I can recycle all these found cartridges through. Very few of them utterly refuse to go off, and most manage to salivate whatever I'm shooting at. I'm wondering if I should ask the state of California to pay me a subsidy for removal of all this pressure-generating, reactive, explosive hazardous waste I keep finding on the very surface of our precious environmental heritage.
Does anyone else notice this profligacy in the matter of lost and found ammunition? It's all over the desert out here where people shoot as well as the formal ranges. I can't imagine anyone of my generation being so wasteful. Maybe it's these kids today (*tsk*tsk*).
I guess I'm showing my age and the poverty and victimhood of my childhood, but when .22LR used to cost an outrageous fifty cents a box (limit two boxes on special sale at K-mart) I and my youthful shooting companions were at pains to make sure that each and every one of those cartridges fulfilled the function envisioned for it by the factory, the gun manufacturer and ourselves; i.e., ka-pow, ka-blast. If one didn't fire, we rotated the rim and snapped again and again until it did. And, by the way, the ammo in those days didn't seem to require as much of that as some of it does now.
We were warned, of course, that a dropped round would carry dirt up the barrel, scratching it and ruining its fine accuracy, but my Glenfield .22 autoloader with the Micro-Groove rifling seemed to lose not the giltiest edge of its minute-of-tin-can accuracy as long as I conscientiously and thoroughly wiped the bullets off on my carefully laundered blue jeans. Nobody had enough ammunition to shoot at paper targets anyway back then, except at Boy Scout camp and other such places, so "fine accuracy" was kind of a null concept. If I didn't hit what I shot at, I was the one that missed, not the barrel.
I now have a Winchester Model 06 with a somewhat scruffy bore that I can recycle all these found cartridges through. Very few of them utterly refuse to go off, and most manage to salivate whatever I'm shooting at. I'm wondering if I should ask the state of California to pay me a subsidy for removal of all this pressure-generating, reactive, explosive hazardous waste I keep finding on the very surface of our precious environmental heritage.
Does anyone else notice this profligacy in the matter of lost and found ammunition? It's all over the desert out here where people shoot as well as the formal ranges. I can't imagine anyone of my generation being so wasteful. Maybe it's these kids today (*tsk*tsk*).