Funny how things have changed, isn't it? The original post is, paraphrased:
Hey, I've found some Russian steel-cased ammo I would never have considered buying before, for only twice the price I used to pay for brass. Yay!
OP, I mean no harm or insult
. Just thinking about your post, it reminded me of how much of an ammo snob I used to be (and we all were). Once, there used to not BE a good price for steel 9x19. It could have been $2 a box, and I probably would have ignored it. Same thing, frankly, with a number of brass-cased ammo; I remember seeing super-cheap Brassmaxx (or whatever it was), and never giving it a second thought. Heck, like I said in the post above: Winchester, Remington? Meh. At least I
tried WWB and Remington UMC, as well as a lot of others, and came across a fair bit of my prejudices via experience. *Not the steel-cased, as like I also said, I loved it in 9x18.
All that's out the window now. I have my stash and that's what I will shoot, but if prices come down again, I don't know that I will be that picky anymore. It's blasting ammo, it all seems to run fine (if it's got decent QC at the factory). I've slung a good bit of steel .45acp downrange, my 1911's love it. Same with the 9mm Luger, haven't come across any of my guns that choke on it. Same with .223 and .308; and obviously x39. Funny enough, my C308 happily devours Red Army 308 without any fuss, while the only failures I've had with that gun came from Armscor brass (the softer case has gotten hung up on ejection a couple times). Picked up a couple AR's and have almost exclusively shot Tula and/or Silver Bear 223; they run great. And the steel x39 seems to be the clear winner of this shortage- the price has gone from about $200 a case, to about $400 (as compared to every other caliber, which has at least tripled, it seems). That seems to be the lesson for everyone- get an AK, SKS, AR in x39, or something similar. Like cockroaches, x39 will (has?) survive the apocalypse. So I pieced together an AR in x39, and tweaked it to run steel fine.