Liberty Ammunition 9mm +P 50 grain lead free

[Aggressive Perfector]

My buddy gave me a box of these to try out when we were shooting the other day. From what I see on youtube, these rounds perform very well, and travel 2,000 fps or faster as advertised. 12" of penetration, star shaped fragmentation, and even penetrates level 3A body armor. These rounds perform well. But I will not carry them. Out of a box of 20 (firing them through my Glock 19) I only loaded 5 (to top off a mag I was 5 rounds short of filling) and had 2 stove pipes. I didn't even bother to load the other 15 or do a group size testing. While my gun doesn't exactly have 20,000 rounds through it (probably closer to 1,500 give or take) it is cleaned and oiled regularly weather I've fired it or not. Despite being designated "+P", the recoil felt awfully light, leading me to think it just didn't have enough bang to cycle the slide. Perhaps I got a bad batch, but I feel that this ammo will be more of a liability than anything as carry ammo. Maybe in a single stack 9mm with a lighter slide it could work well, or even in a revolver (who carries a 9mm revolver though?), but not in a Glock. I'm sitting on 15 rounds of it. Might attempt a mag dump and count how many further malfunctions I get with it. Might give 'em away. Or I may try 3 other 9mm handguns w/ 5 rounds each to see if it performs any better in those.

[Schuetzenman]

50 grain is damn light. I suspect the combination of the light bullet and slow burning powder is the culprit. A Glock 17 having a longer barrel might do better with them. OTOH there are after market recoil guide rods and lighter poundage springs that you could get and your 19 would probably work better.

I worked up a 115 gr. fmj load for target shooting. It was supposed to be mild in recoil. I had to get a lighter spring to allow my 19 to cycle reliably. Unless I used the DEATH GRIP on the 19 it would stove pipe. It was exhausting squeezing it hard enough to prevent lost recoil pulse with the light load. Which makes me think, if you have a steel frame or aluminum framed 9 mm pistol like a Star BM or BKM then I bet those rounds would work.

Bottom line, I only CCW with Speer Gold dot 124 gr. +P. It is the only 9 mm that passed FBI evaluation back when they were looking for something to replace what they had in the 1980's.

[Aggressive Perfector]

You may be right. Forgot to account for barrel length, frame weight and grip. However I've never had any issues cycling any other ammo. Except for a couple ZQI rounds that didn't fire due to what I assume were hard primers, but that's a different story.

[Schuetzenman]

You may be right. Forgot to account for barrel length, frame weight and grip. However I've never had any issues cycling any other ammo. Except for a couple ZQI rounds that didn't fire due to what I assume were hard primers, but that's a different story.

Could be hard primers, could be deep primer pockets. There once was a lot of 8 mm surplus rifle ammo on the market from Yugoslavia. It was all mid 1950's vintage headstamped. People, (myself included) had a lot of rounds that would take 2 or 3 strikes to get them to go off. I miced a couple of them and found they were lower than the majority of the rounds in the case. I took a surplus firing pin and modified it to stick out .005" longer than normal. This stopped the misfires.