Rotate Your Carry Ammo

We've talked at length about rotating your preps to keep your supplies fresh and at maximum benefit to you. While most of the time this applies mainly to food and fuel, it really should apply to all consumables you stock, even ones not traditionally considered perishable.

This point was driven home to me on a recent range trip. Having acquired some new carry ammunition for my 10mm, I decided to shoot the old ammo in my magazines, just for the heck of it. It's pretty well established that modern ammunition stored properly will last almost indefinitely, but while that is indeed true, it isn't foolproof. 

The rounds in my magazines were a couple years old, from a major US manufacturer. In the 15 rounds in my primary magazine (the one actually in the pistol) I had 3 failures to fire. On the range, this is an annoyance; in a hunting scenario, that 20% failure rate is bad, but recoverable. In a self-defense situation, however, a failure rate like that has an unacceptably high chance of being fatal.

While I don't have any conclusive answers what caused my failures, ammunition in magazines is subject to the conditions that tend to cause failure, namely humidity and heat changes. Even here in the desert, being out and about means you'll encounter some increased humidity, and obviously temperature swings are a thing.

Ammunition is definitely less perishable than food, and good ammo is expensive to rotate every range trip, so the schedule I'm implementing at home and proposing here is to shoot through your magazines of carry ammo on the same schedule as you change the batteries in your smoke detector, and for the same reason. Having fresh consumables in life-saving hardware can mean the difference between seeing another sunrise... or not.

Lokidude