Montreal police 38Spl brass
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Midnight Rider
CGN Ultra frequent flyer
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- ......the Vanishing Point .
Interesting ; I wonder what the reasoning was behind the police services stamping their brass ?
RJ
YUP all the Special Stamped brass is KOOL ! Depts - Forces having there own HEADSTAMPS ! jmo RJ
My guess is way back when....if there was a police involved shooting, the members involved "better be armed with only Dept. issued ammo". Imagine the liabilities and public uproar if an officer "chose a specific non-issued type of ammo designed to perhaps be more lethal".
It's true that years ago police didn't equip their members with the best ammo available mainly due to cost. So it was probably very tempting to use your own choice especially if you tested it on wet newsprint for example, and it was far superior to issue ammo.
It's true that years ago police didn't equip their members with the best ammo available mainly due to cost. So it was probably very tempting to use your own choice especially if you tested it on wet newsprint for example, and it was far superior to issue ammo.
I am betting to prevent theft of ammo by members or staff...
Yes he was still working with us at the time. There was two reasons for the custom head stamp, first the force was trying to reduce lead emissions at the shooters level and after trying the S&W “Nyclad” ammo for a few 100,000 rounds the encountered QC problems, mainly a lot that was seated so high that the mod 10 did not close and poor accuracy for the lots that chambered, the price was high so they looked at the option to buy their own brass and have it custom loaded. They opted for a Speer 125 gr TMJ with a standard leaded primer, at the time Speer had the bullet but not the round loaded with it. In fact the first rounds we loaded for that program was with a Hornady 150gr Silhouette bullet as TMJ did not exist yet. First batch of custom head stamp brass was bought by City of Montreal true Le Barron witch were Winchester sport distributor and they simply asked for a “SPCUM” head stamp (it was a requirement because they wanted to reduce the possibility of resale in case they were stolen) so that’s what they got; plain, mil style, no caliber identification, circular head stamp. The order was around 500,000 brass. At one point CCI came out with the Clean Fire primers, lead free (very hygroscopic), so they opted for that and liked it, few years down the demand was pushed up by more agents, more practice and lost brass so they went back on a bid for more 38 and 357 as the just started getting their new GP100. We were bidding since we just became a Winchester distributor and won the bid so I sent a drawing at Winchester with the purchase order for a “commercial style head stamp” ID at 12h, caliber name at 6h in order to respect SAAMI specs. My memory now fail me but it was something like 500,000 38’s and 1,000,000 357’s , we probably loaded them for 15 years until they switched to 9mm.
