some friend of mine picked up a box of mixed 44 mag ammo for free. don't know where it came from. all appeared to be reloads so I recommended not shooting it as he didn't know who had done the reloading. I told him that at best I could pull the bullets and recover them seeing how expensive components have become. when pulling one cartridge I discovered the load consisted of TWO! 180 grain sierra jhc behind what looked to be an overly compressed load of 296! he wanted to shoot these and I talked him out of it. I have reloaded since the 70's and was totally blown away by this. surely it would have been the end of any gun attempting to fire this .

That's a good reason not to fire any ammo not reloaded by yourself!

I know an old veteran of Viet Nam that said they mined captured VC weapons and planted 'em beside enemy trails. It got to be a problem that souvenir collectors were getting hurt too. Guess Stars and Stripes released an article not to fire captured weapons with the ammo that was in 'em.

Boy you did good Pike. Did you show him that load? there was a good chance he would have blown the gun up with that one. He stood a good chance of getting hurt which you saved him from doing. Good job.

360gr of bullet over a compressed load of 296, or possibly 231 for that matter.

Sounds like somebody was trying to get rid of your buddy to me. Hopefully his wife didn't get it from a friend. :eek:

I have two batches of .44 mag ammo - revolver and carbine. The hotter carbine loads are in distinctly different plastic ammo boxes to keep them separate from the revolver loads. It might be assumed that there's a 99.x% probability that any .44 mag you find will be safe revolver loads, BUT..............:eek: