Fmj= barrel wear?

I doubt copper jacketed bullets will wear out a barrel in many thousands of rounds. Copper is much softer than steel. The barrel throat would wear out much faster than the rifling due to the hot gasses.

If you wear out a 9x19 barrel with any kind of factory ammo, you are a rich man with a lot of time on his hands. 1000 rounds, is your barrel made of brass? Then maybe.

old fart my brother came by this morning and told me not to buy any full metal jacket ammo, he said it will wear the gun barrel out in less than a thousand rounds. is this true?, i use federal 115 grain fmj to target shoot and hollow points for defense. thanks

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Ask your brother to tell you where he heard or read that.

Hogwash.... Your brother needs to start reading better sources.

Are you sure he didn't mean a hundred thousand rounds? I've put tens of thousands of FMJs though one of my 38 Supers and the barrel is just fine.

I've seen one 9mm barrel where the rifling was actually worn out, but it was from WWII vintage, and had been fired with corrosive ammo all its military service life, probably tens of thousands of rounds. I've probably put at least a thousand rounds through the 9mm Glock I shoot in monthly matches, and I can't see any noticeable wear to the bore at all, yet, from a steady diet of 115-124gr. FMJ ammo.

Pure BS.

FMJ = copper jacketed bullets will wear a barrel out about 100 times faster then grease lubed pure lead bullets.

However, you will die of old age before you wear out a 9mm barrel shooting jacketed bullets.

The major factor in barrel wear is burning powder and abrasion from the powder granules blowing through the barrel at very high velocity.

If you somehow could find grease lubed lead 9mm ammo, your great-great-grandson would not have worn the barrel out yet in HIS lifetime.

But you can't.

So tell your brother he is wrong and continue to shoot what you want to shoot.
Which in the case of your 9mm will be FMJ or JHP ammo.

rc

it will wear the gun barrel out in less than a thousand rounds

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Incorrect.

If that was true, there would be an absolutely massive market for replacement barrels, or nobody would ever use copper jacketed ammo.

Barrel wear, no. Shoot a lot of rounds and it will change your cleaning methods as compared to lead. I don't think anyone is shooting a lot of lead in 9mm anyway so you should be cleaning for copper already.

FMJ barrel wear

I have a Glock gen I that has shot nothing but FMJ and it has been fired over the last 20 years maybe 2,000/year. No perceptible barrel wear.

If FMJ ammo wears barrels out in less than 1000 rounds my police force would be replacing barrels every year. Absolutely no way.

It is possible, but I will still give you a crisp $100 bill for your guns that you wear out with 1000 rds

Nah, shoot the things as much as your wallet allows.

Best bet: comments about steel cased ammunition being hard on pistols + "the telephone effect" turned into somebody deciding that FMJs were bad for barrels.


Nearly 100% of pistol shooters use FMJs for practice, and hundreds of thousands of them have pistols with more than 1,000 rounds through. At that round count, NO pistol should be 'worn out', and a lot of them are operating at peak efficiency, having become truly broken in.

Nope; that just defies common sense and every-day experience...

If true, it would be true for JHP bullets, too, as the jacket material is the same, and the portion engaged by the rifling is the same with both types of bullets.

If true, all the cadets at my agency's academy would be replacing their barrels during their attendance period at the academy. In reality, one barrel will likely last a whole career.

If true, several of my pistols would have needed barrel replacement at least once, if not several times over. When I have adopted a new pistol platform, I have generally felt fully comfortable, and "bonded" with the new weapon, after several thousand rounds. All of my pistols are still fine with their original barrels.

Competition shooters will wear out barrels, but not with a mere 1000 rounds.

News flash!

The tip of the bullet doesn't touch the barrel.

I forget what Elmer Keith said about jacketeds (fmj) wearing out barrels of national match .45's.. I know it was way more than a thousand though.. In this day and age, and with such passage of time, this information should be readily available. I don't know though.
You'll never wear out the inside of a barrel with lead though (pretty much)

Since the major component of wear is from the hi pressure gases the jacket material is not very important. Lead bullets have the adverse effect of more lead vapor exposure and increases the health risk. One solution is to use cabelas/CCI TNJ ammo. Nylon is softer that lead and prevents exposure to the lead core of the bullet. Also, much of the fmj ammo is really plated bullets that have such a thin coating of copper that it deforms like lead. In reality most shooters will never have a barrel wear out, if nothing else due to the cost of ammo necessary to get the round count up. In most cases other parts of the gun will wear out first.

laughably incorrect

after all of these years you are still believing the tall tales your brother tells you?

The only difference between FMJ and JHP is the nose of the bullet, which doesn't touch the barrel...

I put over 800 iron-jacketed Swiss RWS fmjs through Chinese Tokarev 9x19 with zero ill effects.
Tell hijo not to worry about this.

Nothing that companies commonly make BULLETS out of will wear out your rifling.

This is an application of what we call the "Sniff Test." Wherein, one looks at a proposition like, say, "The single most common bullet jacket material and style of the last 100 years, used for BILLIONS of rounds, shouldn't be used because it wears down rifling," takes a deep sniff, and says, "Smells like bull manure to me!"