They Knew Things were Bad when he Knitted Little Colt Sweaters for his Parrots

Today’s exciting challenge: forming a plan for 9mm target ammunition. I’m still not done with .45 ACP, but I will be soon.

I have a couple of 9mm Glocks, and they’re pleasant to shoot. They’re very accurate, and they don’t beat me up. I also have a lot of 9mm brass and maybe 200 Laser Cast bullets. I feel like I need to get rid of the bullets.

I can’t recall making 9mm ammunition, but I have a nearly-empty box of bullets, so it must have happened. I don’t have a recipe. Today I started looking around for one. I don’t want super-hot +P loads for target use. Seems like there is no point. I do want a little recoil, because it makes no sense to practice with ammunition which is way easier to shoot than the real thing. Sure, I shoot .22 pistols, so maybe I’m a hypocrite, but it seems to me that when you shoot a big bore gun, you ought to teach yourself to handle recoil.

I keep wanting to look at new powders. Unfortunately, whenever I look for new recipes, I keep coming back to what I already have: Unique and Accurate No.7. It seems like they do everything. No.7 is really hard to get away from. It’s great for .38 Super, 10mm, and 9mm.

I would like to stop using Unique in calibers other than .45 ACP because it’s dirty. I need to shoot up the vast supply I have on hand, but I don’t want to get crud on every pistol I own, so I figure it’s best to sacrifice .45 ACP.

But wait! I just read something online. An article says Unique isn’t actually dirty. What?

The article says Unique used to be nasty, to the point where unburned grains interfered with the way guns worked. At around the turn of the century, Alliant (the manufacturer) introduced a new, cleaner formula.

If this is true, why does my 1911 always have black residue on it?

Is it possible the residue actually comes from somewhere else?

The lead bullets I shoot come covered with greasy wax. Is it possible this stuff turns into a mist, gets contaminated with soot and then sticks to the gun?

I suppose that is not the explanation. I shoot the same brand of bullets from my stainless .38 Super, and it’s very clean. Unique must be dirty.

Makes me wonder what it was like before they cleaned it up.

Is it really a good idea to make 9mm target ammunition? I should try to find out. Let’s see. I have free brass, so that saves me about 15 cents per round. That means I save $7.50 per box. But I can buy target ammo with brass cases for $9.00, or 18 cents per round. I have 4 boxes I bought for $7.85 plus tax, so it was even cheaper.

Bullets are nearly 7 cents each, or $3.50 per box. Primers run, call it 4 cents, so $2.00 per box. Powder is around 1.5 cents, or 75 cents per box. So $6.25 per box for homegrown 9mm, or $13.75 if I use new brass.

Depending on the breaks, I save between two and four dollars per box compared to factory ammunition. Not a huge savings.

On the other hand, I get very accurate ammunition, I know exactly what’s in it and what it will do, and I get the fun, knowledge, and skill. The knowledge and skill could be important some day. They could make it very hard for us to get ammunition in the future.

I don’t know why homegrown shoots better than factory, but it’s true. Maybe not all the time. Some factory stuff is super-accurate. It’s true for pistol ammunition, at least for me.

I can do better on price if I get a few bullet molds. Lead will always be cheap or free. A good mold runs something like $40, which is far from free, but by the time you’ve made 1000 rounds, you’ve saved around twice the price of the mold, which makes me wonder why I’m not doing it already.

Lead ammo is not useless, even if it’s inferior to jacketed. You can hunt with it. Squirrels and rabbits can’t tell it’s lead. It may not be optimal for self-defense, but it’s still very good. It worked just fine during the Civil War. It still incapacitates a lot of bad people today.

If I were a prepper, I guess I’d stock up on jacketed ammo in a few calibers, but I think it would also be smart to stock up on reloading stuff. Powder and primers are not things you can reasonably expect to make at home.

If things ever got really bad, hunting would become very important, and the hunting laws would be ignored. People would shoot game, and they would also look for ways to eat things like coons, coyotes, and crows. You can eat just about anything made of meat. There are bobcat recipes out there. I guess a feral cat would work just as well, as would a feral dog. They’re pretty abundant.

Mmm. Thoughts of a tasty dystopian future. Cat a l’orange. One more thing that would draw us closer to China.

Crows are supposedly delicious. Soylent Crow.

I don’t think I’ll have problems in the future with ammunition data. In the past, I didn’t do much in the way of taking notes, so I floundered when I started making ammo again. Now I’m acting like the scientist I allegedly am. I write something every time I make ammo, and I include anything that could be relevant. That’s how science works. If you’re really serious, you don’t just record the reagent and the amount and the temperature and so on. You record the type of wood the lab bench is made from.

Don’t laugh. An important discovery in nuclear physics involved something that happened when an experiment was performed on a wooden bench.

I haven’t written down what I was wearing or what kind of bulbs were in the overhead lights, but I record very minor things, such as an incident where debris clogged up my primer-seating punch.

I guess my reloading notes could be used by our future hipster/millennial rulers when they round us up to try us for whatever offenses they can make up. “He made 3000 bullety things, and it also says he ate red meat. EeEeeWWwwWWWwwwWWW!”

What else is happening? I think a lot about love these days. A week or so ago, I was putting Marv back in his cage, and he got very emotional and started nuzzling me with his head. He did not want to go. It made me think about what this world was supposed to be. It was created to be a place where love was like a persistent fog no one could escape.

How often do preachers talk about that? We have completely lost sight of it, but love is the single most important thing in the universe. The physical world and the human race were created so God could have a huge family tied together by love. That’s the only reason. You can cite other purposes, but they all stem from his intention to create a family. Remove love, and they all disintegrate.

We’re very busy attending to responsibilities. We have to work. We have to get the necessities of life. We educate ourselves. We deal with our problems and our human enemies. We also spend a lot of time doing frivolous things to make ourselves happy and reward ourselves for the other things we do. We don’t have a lot of time to lie back on our recliners and think about loving other people. We don’t share affection all that much, with other people or with God.

It’s perverse, if you consider the reason why we’re here. It’s as though God put us here to be farmers, but instead of growing things, we spent all our time polishing our tractors and decorating our barns.

I wonder if the church can change. We focus on rules. We expend a lot of effort trying to do things to impress God. We spend a lot of time criticizing unbelievers without presenting them with solutions. When they look at us, they often see anger and stress, not love.

Some of us are leftist Social Justice Warriors, which is incredible. How could anyone be that wrong?

Satan is great at misdirection. He gets us to prioritize the wrong things.

My friend Travis died a week ago today, and it has been rough, but something good came of it. I got together with a group of people so we could pray and try to help him, and we have been communicating a lot. Now we’re closer than we were. Love has been served. I think the effect will persist.