A bad round doesn’t announce itself with a bang. It announces itself with a soft thud, a recoil that never arrives, and a second and a half of you standing there with your ears working fine and your brain insisting that can’t have been right.
It wasn’t right. There’s a bullet stuck in your barrel.
That’s a squib, and it’s the real danger in questionable ammunition — not a spectacular failure, just a round without enough push behind it to clear the bore. The bullet got moving, ran out of gas, and parked. Your barrel is now a solid object with a hole in one end.
The gun will let you fire again. That’s the whole problem. It cycled, or you can cock it, and everything about it feels normal. Pull that trigger and the next bullet arrives at a stopped bullet with nowhere to go, and all that pressure has to find somewhere to be. Bulged barrel if you’re lucky. A split barrel, a wrecked cylinder, a ruined gun with your hands wrapped around it if you’re not.
So the drill is short, and you ought to know it cold. Anything sounds wrong, feels wrong, lands wrong — stop. Finger off. Don’t fire again, don’t reach for the slide. Keep the muzzle downrange, unload it, and look through the barrel from the breech at a light. You want to see light. If you see anything else, that gun is done shooting today and it’s a job for a rod and a mallet or a gunsmith, which will be the cheapest thing that happened to you all afternoon.
Teach that to everybody who shoots with you. It’s worth more than any ammunition opinion in the world.
Squibs don’t fall out of the sky. They come out of a short list of boxes, and most people reading this have one in the house.
The coffee can is the classic. Somebody’s father died, a grown man inherited a garage, and in that garage was a can of loose mixed rounds, some in calibers nobody in the family owns. People treat that can like a gift. It’s a question mark with a lid on it. You don’t know what’s in there, what the man did or didn’t do, or what the shed did to it over all those winters.
Right beside it is the handloaded stuff, and here I’ll be careful, because handloading is a craft and the people who do it well do it better than a factory. A box labeled in a man’s own handwriting — powder, charge, bullet — from somebody you knew and trusted is one thing. A plastic tray of unmarked, mismatched reloads from a stranger at a gun show table is something else. You cannot see a powder charge. There’s no way to look at a loaded round and know whether there’s too little in there, none at all, or a double.
Then water. Ammunition out of a flood, a leaking basement, a cooler somebody left the lid off of. It might look all right. It isn’t necessarily all right — primers and powder both care very much about having gotten wet, and drying it doesn’t put it back.
And then the ammunition that tells on itself, which is the easy part. Green powdery crust on the case or around the bullet — that’s corrosion eating the brass, and a case corroded through can let go. Rust on steel-cased stuff. A split or hairline crack at the case mouth. A bullet you can rock or twist with your fingers, or one sitting noticeably deeper than its neighbors in the same box. A primer that’s crusted, high, missing, or in backwards. Powder weeping out from anywhere. Anything that looks like somebody already tried to shoot it. And anything so filthy you can’t see its condition at all, which counts as unknown — and unknown goes in the same pile as bad.
Here’s the honest advice, and it’s the part people fight me on.
Throw it out. Don’t shoot it off at the range.
That sentence — “I’ll just run it through the old .38 to get rid of it” — is the most common way this ammunition gets a chance to hurt somebody. It’s a plan to deliberately fire rounds you’ve already decided you don’t trust, out of a gun you’d like to keep, with your own hands on it. Nobody says it in those words, which is why it keeps happening in different ones.
Look at what you’re trading: a small pile of money you were never going to see, against a barrel, a cylinder, a frame, or a hand. It only feels like a close call because throwing out ammunition feels wasteful to anybody who’s lived through a shortage. I understand that. It’s still the wrong instinct.
Getting rid of it isn’t hard, and it isn’t the trash, the fire pit, or a lake. Call your range — plenty keep a bucket. Call the sheriff or the police department; a lot of agencies take it, some don’t, it’s a phone call. Call your county’s household hazardous waste collection, the same outfit that takes your old paint. Every one of those puts it in the hands of somebody who knows what they’re doing, instead of you finding out the hard way.
You’ve got a can like that somewhere. Most people do. Go pour it out on a towel in good light and be honest about what you’re looking at.
Then be honest about the fact that it was never worth a barrel.
