I was minding my own business at the Range at Austin yesterday, sending lead downrange while testing out a red dot sight. The Primary Arms SLx RS-10 is an impressive optic (especially for its price) with lots going for it…but more on that later.
I was squeezing off a few shots at 10 yards when the pistol jammed.
Did that surprise me? Yes it did. I had mounted the RS-10 on a damn-near bulletproof FN 509 Midsize Tactical pistol. It’s the platform I use for all pistol red dot testing because FN’s MRD mounting system lets me easily mount virtually anything that goes on a pistol. It’s the best mounting system there is.
Then there’s the fact that the 509 Tactical has been a generally great gun in all its many forms. This particular one has nearly 2000 round through it with nary a hiccup…until yesterday when it wouldn’t go back into battery. And the slide was jammed tighter than Jerry Nadler’s pants after a dinner with labor lobbyists.
The pistol wasn’t the problem. This round was.
That’s an Armscor 147gr. round that I mindlessly loaded into a magazine along with scores of others. I’ve shot literally thousands of rounds of Armscor ammo over the years and never had so much as a hard primer. They’ve been very reliable.
But as you can see, this one is, uh, a problem. A slice of the bullet appears to have sheared off when it was loaded into the case, leaving that extra sliver of copper on the outside of the round.
That additional diameter obviously made it too wide to fully load into the chamber, causing the jam. It clearly wouldn’t go into battery and I couldn’t rack the pistol or remove the slide. The gunsmith at the range worked on it for about 10 minutes to gently back it out.
This is not a criticism of Armscor. The gunsmith who helped me said he’d seen the same thing in some Winchester ammo a few years back.
When you crank out tens of thousands of rounds a day, you’re going to get the occasional bad one. It’s inevitable. And it’s not that hard for one to slip through the QC process.
That’ll teach me to slow down a little and pay closer attention to what I’m stuffing into the Maglula. You might want to do the same.
