Shooting reloaded ammo is a good way to save money and get more trigger time, but sometimes shooting reloads doesn’t go so smoothly. USAAmmo is a popular reload ammo vendor online, but it seems like they’ve had quite a few issues lately. Recently a S&W AR-15 went kaboom using faulty .223 USAAmmo reloads, USAAmmo claimed powder issues from their supplier for the catastrophic failure.
It looks like another shooter recently had an issue using USAAmmo reloads, but it’s a malfunction I’ve never seen before. A poster on the guns section of Reddit recently experienced an odd malfunction using 115gr 9mm reloads with his S&W M&P 9 pistol.
Creamy_pie on Reddit said:
I was shooting USAAmmo’s 115 gr 9mm out of my M&P 9. On one of my shots, the trigger pull is weird, not as crisp as usual, no bang. I check for a malfunction and notice it’s out of battery just a little. I figure that it’s just a simple FTF and tap the rear of the slide with my fist. When trying to fire this round, I discover that the trigger is dead, indicating that the striker is not cocked.
I try to clear the gun, but the slide won’t come back. One of the range officers manages to yank back the slide hard enough so that the extractor lets go of the rim, leaving the round stuck in the chamber. He uses a Swiss army knife to pry the round out.
You can see a light off-center primer strike in the last picture. Best guess is that the gun tried to fire out of battery, which is why I felt a dead trigger after forcing it to chamber. Unfortunately, I have no clue what the round looked like before I loaded it.
I’ve gone through about 1500 rounds of USAAmmo’s 9mm, and this is the second difficulty I’ve had with it. Once I’ve finished up this set of 1000, I’m going to buy my 9mm locally.
I can’t imagine the slide causing that much crushing of the casing, it looks like a bad round QC didn’t catch. The shooter was lucky not to have a catastrophic failure of his own, it wasn’t their first bad experience with USAAmmo however. He also experienced a stuck slide with his M&P 9 using ammo from the same batch of USAAmmo reloads. This isn’t good news for USAAmmo, hopefully they step up their quality control because a string of faulty ammo incidents is sure to drive customers away in an already very competitive market.
