It was a lot easier to hoard ammunition when I didn't shoot as much.
2020 was a slow year, and I still burned up a little over six thousand rounds of my own 9x19mm, not counting the couple of times I was lucky enough to get a class with Other People's Ammunition. These days it's a situation of "Beggars Can't Be Choosers" and so my favorite brand of range ammo has been whatever's in stock. For test guns, I only shoot factory ammo for a number of reasons. If I pull components out of storage and set up the reloading press, it's going to be for recreational use only. Or because zombies are in the wire.
Anyway, this year has seen me buying steel-cased TulAmmo at prices that would have been a little high for premium jacketed hollow points in 2019. I've found myself shooting Scorpio, from the Czech Republic, which is a brand I'd never even heard of in the Before Times. (My friends in the EU assure me it's good stuff and a number said it was their preferred brand of range fodder.) And just before Christmas, on December 20th, I ordered some Sarsilmaz 124gr FMJ from AmmoMart.com at near sixty cents a round.
It shipped from Findlay, Ohio on the 22nd. A couple days after Christmas, I got an email from UPS letting me know that there were weather conditions causing my ground shipment to be delayed in Minneapolis, which seems rather a roundabout way of driving to Indianapolis from north-central Ohio, but okay.
The package finally arrived yesterday morning with a corner of the box stove in. The resulting hole was enough to have let one of the rounds get away, so my 250-round order turned into a 249-round one.
Gotta say I'm not super-impressed with Sarsilmaz's packaging. The material of the boxes is closer to construction paper than cardboard, and the plastic cartridge trays are brittle and flimsy. We'll see how it does when I get to the range with a chrono today or tomorrow.
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