Ammo In The Car Under Summer Heat: How Stable Is It?

By James England

With those hot summer days upon us, we’ve been getting a lot of Facebook questions about how safe it is to keep a gun locked up in a car. Many of the questions relate to whether or not the ammunition will self-ignite or whether a round may go off in the chamber.

Let’s dispel a myth right now: your car will not get up to the temperature needed for ammunition to begin cooking off. Cooking off refers to when a round of ammunition discharges itself due to the primer going off due to ambient heat.

If you throw a round of ammunition in the fire (never recommended), it can cook off. That’s because the heat of the fire exceeds the temperature needed for the gunpowder to explode. When we look at a modern round of ammunition, it consists of the following:

• Smokeless primer incorporating nitrocellulose.
• A lead projectile.
• Gunpowder.

There can be other ingredients depending on the specific make and model of a round of ammunition but those are the three primary components. For your reference,

• Lead melts at 621 °F
• Nitrocellulose ignites at around 320-338 °F
• Gunpowder ignites at 801–867 °F.

Surprisingly high temperatures, right?

The hottest recorded temperature in the world was 134 °F in Death Valley, California, on …Read the Rest

Source:: Concealed Nation