Take a good look, kids. Don’t flinch. Don’t avert your eyes. Bullet setback is real, and it could be happening in your very own neighborhood as we speak.
“Impossible!” you say. “My community is free of hippies and bullet setback! It could never touch our halcyon lives of quiet desperation!”
You’d be wrong. Dead gun wrong. See Timmy with his new 1911? Look how shiny it is! A wholesome, all-American boy with his all-American gun! But watch as Timmy loads up a magazine and slaps it into the pistol to “function test” it. He dry-cycles the ammunition by racking the slide to chamber and eject each round. Sure, it looks “cool,” but it’s a tragedy waiting to happen.
The sad truth is, Timmy’s in bed with Communism. The Reds want him to have a negligent discharge! If they can’t succeed at that, they’ll make darned sure he has a case-head blowout at the range, just like the one pictured above.
What Uncle Joe Stalin knows is that the bullet gets pushed slightly into the case each time it hits the feed ramp. Setback can also occur with folks who constantly unload and reload the top two rounds of their carry ammunition.
“Well, Vladimir’s not getting to me!” you might say. “I’ll get one of them newfangly plastic pistols!” Wrong again! You’re no safer than you are from the lead paint in dear old mom’s kitchen.
As the bullet gets pushed further into the case, pressures increase, and that’s got to go somewhere. It can happen with any gun. The combination of hollowpoints and the 1911 seems to be a good recipe for this, but I’ve seen it happen with most major service calibers and guns.
Now, there are other causes, such as improper seating or crimping, but most of the issues I see are from the two aforementioned practices. Dry-cycling ammunition doesn’t prove any sort of functionality (or lack thereof) that won’t become apparent in live fire. All it does is damage the ammunition, and possibly the gun.
And that’s just what the Bolsheviks want.