Federal Champion 115gr 9mm – Why we always inspect our ammo.

Shortly after I started taking shooting seriously a few years ago, I began searching for the cheapest ammo I could find. I started shooting this Federal Champion 115gr 9mm from Wal-Mart a lot, because I could get it for significantly cheaper than other brands. Over the years, I would estimate that I have fired at least 20,000 rounds of this particular ammo, and it has served me very well. It is rather soft shooting ammo, which makes it great for shooting matches where I am not concerned about meeting a power factor.

Yesterday I was at the Zombie Shooters Assoc. Action Pistol match and in between stages I stopped at my range bag and began to load my magazines. When I removed a tray from one of the 5 boxes of Federal Champion 115gr 9mm that I purchased from Wal-Mart on Friday evening, I immediately noticed that a couple of the rounds appeared to be sitting differently in the tray. I pulled them out and inspected them before loading my magazines and I found two rounds that appear to have been incorrectly sized correctly at the factory, allowing the bullets to be pushed down into the case. In the pictures I placed a correctly manufactured round next to  the two from the box for scale.

This creates a potentially dangerous situation. When the bullet is pushed so far into the case, this can compress the powder, and if the round were fired, there is a potential to cause an over pressure situation, which could cause harm to the pistol, or the shooter.

Now, I do not believe this is a lesson in buying cheap ammo, but a lesson in why we always need to inspect the ammo that we do buy before just stuffing it into a magazine, and sending it down range. As I said above, I’ve probably fired close to 20,000 rounds of this particular ammo without trouble until yesterday. That comes out to a failure rate of 0.0001% with this ammo, and I’m willing to accept that!

I will be contacting Federal to let them know about the situation, and I will update the site when I hear back from them. Hopefully this is just a one off situation, and not an indication of slipping quality control.

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