(As found on Facebook)
While this debate isn’t as old as the Caliber Wars, it has been fought with the same level of…let’s call them apocryphal tales. Lucky Gunner has decided to bring some actual empirical testing to the subject, and sacrificed 4 AR-15s (or at least their barrels) and 40,000 rounds of 5.56 ammo to put the question to the test. The results are most interesting.
If you want to shoot steel case ammo and you’re hoarding it for TEOTWAWKI, you might want to stock up on some spare barrels and extractors.
I wonder what the results of using cast bullets would be. Using cast in a AR-15 is possible with a bit of tweaking. Casting and reloading 10k rounds for a single test would be a real PITA, but would be fun to shoot.
I have always prefered brass cases, but it is also possible to reload steel cases. Steel is just harder on the reloading dies.