🔴 Red or Blue 🔵 H&K MP5 mags - lesson from Die Hard - Ammunition Management [Range Talk]

This video is brought to you by MidwayUSA. Support the channel by choosing Midway for your shooting and outdoor supplies. An interested enthusiast. Interesting. This one shoots differently. Ho ho ho. I have a... So the question is, and I'm glad you started off with that quote, ho ho ho. I now have a... Why do I have my magazines in red and blue? Because you're a man of culture. Specifically here to reference classic 90s films. Sort of. There are many different colors and shades of electrical tape. I choose red and blue not to delineate blank and live ammunition because as I will demonstrate right now, this very much is not. That's spicier. What ammo is this? This is not. This was definitely not. Was that your plus P mag that you just magged up? Did I just dump a plus P mag down there? That was going a lot faster too. We're never going to financially recover from this end, right? Sorry. Wow. I use these, in short, I use different colors to delineate which magazines I choose. I have zero question on reliability. Red being something that I have zero question on whether it could fill a duty role. And blue I designate as my training mags. Why, Josh, why? Right? Because H&K magazines, they come in a lot of different forms. Of course, these red labeled ones are all my German H&K mags. From Deutschland. Yeah. But I also have these blue ones that you'll see have no marking on them, just 9x19. From Turkey. Korea. From Korea. So what I've had in the past, these Korean mags, specifically these KCI mags, they come out with different generations of them, but all of them, inevitably, I have issues with the reliability with hollow points. And so I want to be sure when I'm grabbing an MP5 mag that I grab the magazines that I have zero question whether I could have the firearm functioning with hollow points in them. So bottom line is that. I can't believe I blew all that spicy ammo just right now. But let's see how this one does. Cardinal Sync. Oh, did you see? Yeah, you had stacked rounds in there. Yeah, there's a half and half on that. But the magazine had no issues running. Obviously, it is a red labeled magazine. In case anyone's not catching what just happened, Henry loaded ammo of two different types in that magazine, and you could hear the cadence change, as well as the speed change about three quarters of the way through the mag. Yep, yep. And it was a blazer mixed with some magtech. Yeah, okay. For that one. Got it. But okay, so that I think goes into the larger point of magazine reliability, magazine maintenance, magazine identification, right? Because for a lot of the stuff that we treat as potential duty firearms that we have that we want to have a certain dependability on, whether it could run a wide assortment of ammunition, which hollow points is a big deal for MP5s. We want to make sure that the magazine as the very crucial part of the machine's function is clearly delineated between magazines that we could depend on and magazines that we could use as training. Because typically I use these KCI mags for a full metal jacket, it has no issues feeding. But sometimes I actually load hollow points in here to induce failure. So I could run failure drills on MP5s. I mean, that's a terrible marketing statement if that's what you're marketing. But these are reverse engineered magazines. So that's why you have certain small things like that. Well, I think that we can probably take a second here and extend the conversation outside of the MP5 world. I know this will be painful. Continue. But if you go off the shelf and you pick up some PMAGs, these are relatively new PMAGs that I put into circulation like, I don't know, maybe two, three months ago. But as you will see, and you shouldn't have to worry about whether a brand new reputable magazine like a PMAG is going to function. I think it makes sense to like, shoot it a little bit and test it and be like, yep, okay, good to go. But magazines are disposable items. The more you use them, parts, the springs, the followers, even the potentially the feed lips, they're going to wear out over time. It's inevitable. And so as you'll see, we actually have have markings where I just put a paint pen mark on some of the various like checkering. The dot matrix. For the sheer purpose of being able to identify a magazine, A, that's mine on the range. I get that it doesn't say Josh, but like, that's mine on the range because not many people use this particular configuration. But moreover, that I know that if I start getting a failure, where the gun starts to malfunction, I can at least be able to identify which magazine I was using and then test that magazine a bit more to see. It might, it could have been ammunition. It could have been the gun was dirty. It doesn't necessarily mean it was the magazine, but it allows me to isolate different components during failure and remedy and testing. Now, I mean, you'll notice that Josh, like a lot of guys, they'll mark these magazines like as a fashion statement on the outside. This is on the inside. So Josh knows as he's shooting, he sees which magazine it is on the shooter side. And to that point. Right, right. Exactly. I've been working on the UMPs. It doesn't have a dot matrix on it, but you'll see a lot of my magazines are labeled because UMPs have two different calibers for, well, three different calibers. I have two different calibers of it, 45 and 40. So these are my 45 mags. So you'll see they're 45-1-2-5. The different magazines, I just label them, the caliber and the number of them. Right. Which, which number and sequence it is. This one is marked in blue because earlier we had issues. You remember this one was the one when we were shooting the COVID era LAX ammo? And it gave us a malfunction. Now I want to see if it's an ammunition issue. What are we shooting out of it today? Is this LAX again? No, this is Fiocchi. Okay. So theoretically we've switched the ammo. Right. Which should give us, if it happens again. Then it's the firearm. It's probably magazine related, right? Okay. And if it doesn't happen, although that doesn't mean that it's not the magazine or the ammo, it can at least allow us to again, look at variables. Yeah. It's a little bit punchier than 9mm MP5. Clear. Definitely a little punchier than I remember too. Yeah. So as far as like, this is just for us as a part of when we're working, when we're reviewing firearms and we're checking and double checking and trying to go through like a scientific method to figure out certain attributes or potentially certain problem sets that run into the evaluation process. Labeling magazines, numbering magazines, and marking magazines have kind of been a crucial repertoire, even though we do it in different methods. It's kind of been like a crucial repertoire that we have when it comes to us dealing with firearms. I'll give you guys another example. And like, this isn't relegated to just purely testing. To Henry's point, it's extremely critical for us in testing because we get a number of firearms in that we don't have experience on, that we don't have, we don't know the mags for, we don't know how they're functioning or why or what they do or don't like. But even on personal guns, all my Glock mags have... Look how fancy this is. Yeah. Laser cut. Little, little grip tape. See, this is a difference between Henry and Josh. Great paint pen, man. So these are grip tape base pads. I think I got these from Dawson Precision like 10 years ago. They do look nice though. Oh, so do you just switch the base pads out when you switch magazines? I mean, generally speaking, the idea is that you, yeah, I would keep this base pad with this mag. But the idea here is that you've got a functional piece that you have grip tape on the base pad, so you get a better like insert into the gun, right, without your hand slipping. It's the idea. But they're laser cut with the numbers on the bottom. So to Henry's point, like these two mags right here that I happened to grab for shooting today, these are mags number 7 and 8 out of my Glock 17 mag pool. And over time, the reason I'm on 7 and 8 right now is because I've kind of like burned out 0 through 3. And like I think 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 are sort of like in my cycle right now. So when I go to shoot these, like if I were to have again, some sort of a malfunction, I know that it came out of magazine 7, right? And again, especially if I'm shooting a gun that's very reliable, like the Glock, like the MP5, like most of our ARs, it's a pretty good indicator that a magazine problem is is a probable thing to look at. And I would say like for Dude, that was like some ninja shit. Well, I was about to add to that for the UMP's thing. The UMP has a reputation. Yes, it is punchier, but it has a reputation of being fairly reliable, specifically when you're running H&K magazines. Now, earlier we had issues with non-H&K magazines with a UMP. But in this instance, we're also labeling the magazines because now we know that potentially this is an issue with ammunition. So we could also separate the different types of ammunition that we're shooting through it as we're evaluating the firearm. Actually, not done on purpose, but as you can see here, I've got Freedom Munitions in magazine 7 and I have MagTac in magazine 8. So magazine 8 is going to function and number 7 is going to be... Hey, 7 just did fine. We just hit 40 yards and things are great, my man. Look, just because Henry said it, I now insist on shooting... All right, so a little impromptu here. We'll make this into its own video later. Something somebody actually was showing me on malfunction clearance for double stack handguns. Okay, so gun doesn't go off. You get, you know, gun doesn't go. There's always the same sequence. This is something I've been trying to remember to do because I normally would have done the whole like diagnose the problem and then solve it. Yeah, at first you let your soy jack jackass friend on the side like make fun of you. Okay, right. Okay, so gun doesn't go off. Tap rack. Gun still doesn't go off. In fact, in this case, I made the situation worse. Mag out. Oh, it fixes. Mag in. And it fixes it. I've yet to see a malfunction that wasn't a catastrophic failure that couldn't be solved by that sequence on a double stack like handgun like this. Well, but how... Now we have to shoot this one because that, I mean... Well, despite me missing the last round, it worked. It worked. It worked. So this is, as shown, this is also a useful tool for us to diagnose ammunition sources and whether the ammunition is something that induces malfunctions as seen in this one. I now can isolate the magazine and run different sources of ammunition through it to then use it as a control test to see if that was a source of problem, which this has been the third full magazine I've run through with the Yoki and I'm getting more and more confident that it was an ammunition issue. Right, right. Yeah, and like in this instance here, I have shot enough out of mag 7 here for us to identify it was probably the ammunition. Also, we don't have exactly a great track record with Freedom LAX COVID special. Anyways, I have a training mag here. Okay. Full metal jacket. I don't have any questions. This is also an MKE mag. Typically, MKE mags, I actually do trust MKE mags with hollow points. Yep. But because I have H&K mags, you just, it's just easier to say the H&Ks are the ones I would grab for anything. For hollow points. Yeah. So the reason this became a thing for me is because for years, people have told me that, oh, MP5s have trouble with hollow points. And I thought that was really interesting because I see a lot of law enforcement in the 80s and the 90s using MP5s all around the world. And it would be absolutely bonkers for me to think that all of these agencies all of a sudden all missed the mark in using a firearm with issues with hollow points. Right. And so I tested it for myself and I've had zero issues when I'm running H&K mags. Got it. So you think that it was more of a... I think people are using copy magazines. Having issues. Having issues. Because the copy mags are not completely true to spec. Correct. And so that's my theory is that I think people are using copy clone magazines, dropping it into actual H&Ks and the magazines choking the firearm up and not the firearm having issues with hollow points themselves. Ah, interesting. But I would love to see you close this video out. Dude, out of the guns, like I'm relatively confident in my, um, my shooting, like, you know, recoil control and everything. But I don't know if I'm going to beat your recoil control earlier. That was really good. All right, maybe I will. Yeah, dude, you're good. All right, guys, as always, thanks for tuning into this video. Bottom line, if you aren't labeling your mags right now, it's probably a good practice to add into your repertoire. And until next time, we'll see you in the range.