Shooting Steel Point Blank? No Problem.
Statistically speaking, recreational shooting is one of the safest hobbies you can participate in. This is partly due to the fact that, as a shooting community, we all observe more or less the same basic safety rules which are mostly designed to keep anyone from getting unnecessarily shot.
However, there are other risks involved in shooting that don’t get quite as much attention, like ricochets and lead exposure. These are two of the problems solved by shooting frangible ammo.
What is Frangible Ammo?
Frangible ammunition is no different than normal target ammo except the bullet. Instead of a lead core with a copper jacket, frangible bullets are made from compressed copper powder. Whenever the bullet strikes something harder than itself at full speed, it crumbles to pieces. Still dangerous if you’re standing on the wrong side of the muzzle, but once they hit a hard target, the bullet fragments are too small to cause any harm from ricochets. That also means there’s reduced risk of damage to steel targets themselves from frangible ammo.
This even works for frangible rifle loads, which we got to see in action at SHOT show this year. Sinterfire makes about 90% of the bullets that go into frangible loads in the U.S. and they invited us to check out a demo of their products, which you can see in the video above. If you’re curious, you can get a good look at SinterFire’s 9mm ammo here and their .45 ACP lead-free rounds here.
The Sinterfire guys were also quick to point out that their ammo is just about the cleanest you can shoot. With no lead in the projectile, there’s no airborne lead released when the bullet leaves the barrel. On top of that, Sinterfire’s Greenline ammo also uses a non-toxic primer, so there’s virtually nothing harmful released into the air. Well… nothing harmful except the bullet, but only if you get shot with one.
Sinterfire also has a really cool promo video. It’s produced by the same guys who did all the eye candy super slow motion work on Top Shot and you should check it out.