Back when I was still slinging guns across the glass for a living, one of our wholesalers had a deal on some overrun Smith & Wesson 325 AirLites. For those of you not familiar with the arcane language of Smith revolver designators, that's the great big N-frame in .45ACP with, in this case, a titanium cylinder and a scandium frame*.
So we had several of these snub-nosed beasties in stock (I bought one, of course) and a problem immediately cropped up: Customers who bought them would come off the range complaining that their gun had locked up.
Seems like most plain ol' range 230gr FMJ isn't crimped very enthusiastically and only two or three shots in these flyweight big bores would cause the heavy .45 bullets in the cylinder to remain at rest while their cartridge cases recoiled along with the rest of the gun. When the bullet came all the way out of the unfired case, it would bind up against the forcing cone, tying up the gun. (At the time, our range .45 ammo was Speer Lawman.)
Anyhow, fast forward a half-dozen years and I've got a T&E Boberg XR9-S pistol on the range. Now, the Boberg is an unusual gun that gets maximum barrel length in a minimum package so as to get maximum velocity from modern 9mm JHP loads, theoretically making proper expansion more likely. It does so by extracting the round rearward out of the magazine and then loading it forward into the chamber. The chamber is actually over the magazine, making a sort of "bullpup pocket pistol", if you will.
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| Relax: You don't suck and Boberg doesn't hate you. |
The picture above is the loaded Boberg magazine and not, as one might suppose, an outtake from an H&K catalog photo shoot.
Anyhow, I took the Boberg down to Coal Creek Armory (now
Tactical Advantage Corporation) Tennessee for its baptism of fire. I trooped out onto the range with Shannon and Gunsmith Bob and my ammo can of 9mm FMJ ammo and started thumbing rounds into magazines. We each fired one magazine, and one round on each of the three magazines exhibited the rather exotic malfunction you see below:
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| It's a pistol! It's a bullet puller! It's two tools in one! |
It was pretty obvious what was happening: The slide was yanking the round rearward from the magazine briskly enough to disassemble the cartridge.
Each of the three rounds was... you guessed it: Speer Lawman.
I went on to fire hundreds more rounds of ammunition, mostly PMC and Federal FMJ but also a few magazines of a half-dozen different premium JHP rounds, and never experienced this malfunction again. Of course, looking at the owner's maual, it clearly states on page 4:
Due to the Boberg XR9’s unique feed mechanism, aluminum-cased ammunition is not recommended (See back cover for color example). This type of ammunition has no crimp, and usually no adhesive, and could allow the bullet and case to become separated while being drawn from the magazine. While this is not considered a safety hazard, it can result in a mis-feed or jam. Please note that there may be styles of brass-cased ammunition that have no crimp that may cause feeding problems. Information on crimp-less styles of ammunition can be found at
www.BobergArms.com.
Going to
the list at the website, I see that Speer Lawman is right there.
That's what I get for not RTFM.
to the M&P357 for the time being, holstered it up, and
SWORE A MIGHTY OATH that I would clean my M&P 9 ASAP.
", which uses Cpl. Jackson as a viewpoint character and picks up her story at the tag end of the "Battle of Detroit".
