In an effort to distract myself I have been reloading a herd of 9mm Luger Ammo with my old RCBS presses. And hunting 2nd Amendment gems online.
Like this batch:
Some words to the wise. Shooting Advice from various Concealed Carry Instructors. If you own a gun, you will appreciate this. If not, you should get one and learn how to use it:
Guns have only two enemies rust and politicians.
Its always better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6.
Cops carry guns to protect themselves, not you.
Never let someone or something that threatens you get inside arms length.
Never say "Ive got a gun." If you need to use deadly force, the first sound they hear should be the safety clicking off.
The average response time of a 911 call is 23 minutes, the response time of a .357 is 1400 feet per second.
The most important rule in a gunfight is: Always win - cheat if necessary.
Make your attacker advance through a wall of bullets . . . You may get killed with your own gun, but he'll have to beat you to death with it, cause it'll be empty.
If youre in a gun fight:
If you're not shooting, you should be loading.
If you're not loading, you should be movin,
If you're not movin', you're dead.
In a life and death situation, do something . . . It may be wrong, but do something!
If you carry a gun, people call you paranoid. Nonsense! If you have a gun, what do you have to be paranoid about?
You can say 'stop' or 'alto' or any other word, but a large bore muzzle pointed at someone's head is pretty much a universal language.
You cannot save the planet, but you may be able to save yourself and your family.
If you believe in the 2nd Amendment, please share.
Oh, for those that have interest in such things as DIY ammunition:
Reloading is relaxing but much like DIY electricity production you really don't save a lot of cash unless you can salvage the brass which is problematic with semiautos. It calms me and you can customise the loads the way you like them rather than the one size fits all of factory loads.
9 mm F.C. once fired brass. from Brassman.com
115 grain , FMJ bullets from brassman.com
4.7 grains HP38 [From 1998]
CCI #500 Small Pistol Primers [from 1999]
Nice, light end loading. Cycles the P-11 perfectly. Not too loud. Untested accuracy. Only cracked off 10 rounds "limp wristed" to check cycling and sanity of the powder charge.
Brass was sorted and came up with 500+ hulls of "F.C." brass and a half dozen Speer branded.
Tumbled the cases for 4 or 5 hours to clean then decapped and sized in one pass. Ran them through the expander die to just open enough to start a bullet.
Tested my 25 year old RCBS 5-0-5 scale against the test weights. After cleaning some crud off the beam and slide weights it is as good as new. Dead on at all possible combinations of the test weights.
Decided on the 4.7 grain powder charge of HP38. Set my ancient hand me down Ohaus powder measure small measure to throw that amount. Ran off 160 rounds, with the first 10 as the test rounds. Weighed every 10 charges to assure the measure stayed on. Absolutely no variation detected in 160 rounds.
Seated bullets to 1.165" overall length which is a tad shorter than the specification of 1.169" but they seem to cycle fine.
This is range ammo so not super critical like carry ammo which I only use factory Hornady 147 gr XTP ammo for.
Now I need to rig up a catch screen to recover the brass for next time. Snow is hell on recovering brass when the automatic flings them 20 feet away.
It is the DIY side of shooting and I haven't done any reloading since befor Y2K!
Carry on.
Tom
PS. Added this photo of the ballistics lab after the original post: