M855 Issues and Concerns

[Guest hillbilly007]

In case you've missed it, there is a boat load of Lake City M855 62 grain penetrator coming on the market. Usually I would be doing back flips and checking out the sofa cushions for extra coins, but this stuff has clearly stamped on it's label "NOT FOR DUTY USE".

Now I'm sorry, but if the guys at Lake City say it ain't fit for duty use, I have a problem with that. The only explanation I can find is that it has failed some sort of QA/QC check. The details are not easily found, but what I have read says it has something to do with the primers.

Now I like a good deal on the penetrator ammo as the next nut case, but I am not going to have any of this in my storage cabinet. I can buy IMI from Wideners that I know works well. By the way, has anyone purchased the Lithuanian M855 that is available on Ammo to Go?

[Westwindmike]

If it is cheap enough, I'd like a few thousand rounds of it to train with.

[Guest GT_Rat]

Could just be "not fit for duty use" because of the new 855 round becoming the standard.

[Magiccarpetrides]

I got some Lithuanian a couple years back and it was really good.

[G27]

It could be as simple as the 'bad primers' that Speer dealt with with or so year ago - their accepted failure rate was something like 100,000:1 and they found that some new primers they were using failed at a rate of some 50,000:1, so after that you could find super cheap SGD's for a while. I bought >2k SGD in .40S&W for <.40/rnd shipped, still have a ton of them.

But because of that higher failure rate, Speer marked them as 'training only, not for LEO use'...