Why on earth would food have anything to do with your EDC?

By food, I mean ammo. I view the human body as an incredible machine, well a firearm is the same way. What we put into our body will impact how it functions. The same comparison applies to handguns. This analogy is relevant to a few examples with the handgun.

First, and most important, is feeding your gun a lot of food. I mean shooting it a lot. Whether you’re a gun collector, only have one, or own a few, you want to try and shoot as much as possible. The way I do this is being caliber centric, or having multiple guns of the same caliber. I choose 9mm for a variety of reasons which I’ll discuss in an upcoming post. But it is cheap to shoot, therefore I can shoot more often. Like anything, practice makes perfect, and the more you shoot, the better you will be. You can dry-fire all you’d like, but nothing mimics felt recoil from live rounds, and it’s important to know how that feels in case you ever have to use your firearm in self defense.

Another reason ammo is important is because there are different types of it. Like I was saying, shooting a lot of ammo is important for your carry gun. In the market today, there are a lot of good choices for handguns. Most will work with good ammo. Well ammo designed for carrying is different from practice ammo. The bullets are designed to expand upon impact for the best destructive results. You want to make sure your carry ammo, or hollowpoints, will work in your firearm reliably. One thing I do with my desired ammunition is shoot 100 rounds of it through my carry gun before I start carrying it. This can be expensive due to increased prices of hollowpoint ammunition, but if I need to use it and it doesn’t work, that is not the time to find out. Another method of testing I do will be shooting at least 500 rounds of ammo, with at least 100 of that being my carry ammo, before I carry that gun. This makes sure there are no problems encountered with that firearm, and it gets me cognitive and physically prepared with that firearm. I know too many people who decide to carry a gun, but don’t shoot it enough, or don’t use the right ammunition. Don’t be one of those people.

The best recommendation I have is something that I practice. There are many oils on our skin which can impede the function of ammunition. If you are always touching your carry ammo, those oils may debunk the primers inside of the shell casing, making the round not fire. What I do to prevent this from happening is any time I take a round out of the chamber, I put it in a pile, and when it adds up I shoot it. First this helps me test my ammo, but it also cycles my old ammo with new ammunition, which has a shorter lifespan than you think. Find out what your gun likes, and what it doesn’t. Different ammo will feel different while shooting, as well as different guns work better with different types of ammo.