Silver Bullets are so hard to find.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

OK here it goes, and so what if everyone decides I am absolutely nuts. Perhaps they are even right.

I started shooting recently. Entirely new pastime for me. I inherited a Colt M1911a caliber .45 automatic pistol. The guy at the range tells me mine was manufactured in 1943, and the magazine in it was made in 1917, or 1918. I bought the usual accouterments, some spare magazines, ear protectors, a holster, a trigger lock, a cleaning kit, (Hey, this stuff is getting expensive even with the free pistol!) Ammo. (You go through ammo really fast, if you start out as a fairly bad shot.) Membership at the range, targets, (which last longer, if you are a bad shot.) and then you find out about different types of bullets.

Internet time! So, I look up bullets, and ammunition, and read a few hundred pages of semi technical stuff.

OK, so I buy special ammunition for theoretical non target shooting (called “home defense” among my new circle of acquaintances) because I find out that they (the special bullets) won’t penetrate two sheets of drywall, so I will therefore not kill my roommates or neighbors whilst gunning down the intruders that have stupidly waited through the entire first half century of my life while I was unarmed, and choose now to intrude. Glazers, they are called, I think. (The bullets, I mean. The intruders are called “dead guys.”) Turns out, in addition to not going through walls, they are extra deadly to folks on this side of the wall, compared to FMJ bullets. (I had to throw in a newly acquired jargon acronym, sorry.) However, they are more expensive. Like six of them cost more than fifty of the ordinary ones. A magazine holds 7. Doesn’t that just figure. I buy 24, and shoot three to make sure they shoot like the other ones. They do.

So, I shop a bit at the range every Wednesday, after shooting fifty rounds of cheap ammunition. (I keep the expensive stuff at home, waiting for the intruders.) I see the new laser targeted light weight 38 revolver. Very cool, and I am sure I would shoot much better with a laser. The guy offers me a straight up trade for my pistol. Ah, I get it. It’s actually worth something. Cool. But unless he can get my Grandfather to carry the new one around in a war, I think I will keep this one, thanks.

Then the free range wierdo part of my brain kicks in. I check for the existence of actual silver bullets. The Lone Ranger made his own, I know. But, hey, this is the twenty first century. I Google “Silver Bullets.” Don’t bother. Lots of politics, medicine, economics, business, and bullshit. No bullets. One brand name of bullet, but they aren’t made of silver, they are just called that. So, I ask the guys at the range. I get fifteen minutes about how there ain’t no point in silver bullets, cause they would be this or that, or some other thing wrong with them. No, no one sells them, and no one makes them.

Now I ask you, which is worse, to feel silly because you have a silver bullet, and you don’t really need one, or to feel silly because you really need a silver bullet, and you don’t have one? Well, I asked the guys at the range, and one of them said: “You get the silver, I’ll reload you the bullets.” So, obsessive behavior is no stranger in my house, and I go price silver. Right away it gets more complicated. Do werewolves care if you use 92.5 percent silver? I can get casting shot at 92.5 percent. But 999 fine cost more, and only comes as wire. (Let’s not even talk bullion. Those folks are nuts. I ain’t collecting the stuff, I want to melt it.)

So, it turns out that enough silver to cast a dozen bullets is going to run me a hundred dollars, delivered. Then I have to find out how much my range buddy wants for loading a dozen hand cast bullets. I chose a dozen, because I want to shoot one, to be sure that they work, and I need seven to fill a magazine, and I figure that leaves me four, to sell.

So, my real question is how much can I get for silver bullets, on an open market? Can I sell them on E-bay? Can I mail them USPS? How do I make sure the buyer isn’t a juvenile? How do I make sure that the Werewolf Anti Defamation League doesn’t get my name on their list? Am I totally out of my mind?

Anyone want a silver bullet?

Tris

2

Can you list it on eBay? Yes but it has to be sold without a propellant.

Can you send them through the mail? Maybe.

One bullet would probably be all right. I don’t know much about ammuition; can you send the slug and the propellant separately for extra safety?

You can require payment by credit card to help insure the buyer isn’t a minor.

Yes, I would like a silver bullet.

Are you totally out of your mind? No, not totally.

3

I seem to remember a bunch of threads on rec.guns about how tough it is to cast and load silver bullets. Something to do with difficulty in swaging to the exact diameter and voids in casting, not to mention the expensive base material.

The consensus was that it can be done, it’s tough, and probably not worth the trouble. However, if you have supernatural reasons, there’s some discussion as to what will get werewolves, vampires, faeries, etc… on there too.

4

OK, thanks! I sent an email to the one guy who actually claims to make functional silver bullets, asking how much a small lot would cost. I will let you all know if he comes up with a still active email address, and some sort of answer.

I love this board!

Tris

5

If they don’t have to be pure silver, at least one commercial cast bullet maker claims to add a small amount of silver to harden the alloy.

6

Hmm, I don’t think this will matter much. If we presume that only silver hurts the werewolf, in this case he will feel shot by 92,5% of a bullet, won’t he?

7

Update:

The guy on the threads linked has an invalid email address. Back to ordering silver, and trusting my new hobby associates.

Tris

8

Very wise decision. If your gun is in good shape, it is worth possibly over a thousand dollars.

9

Handloading is a common enough hobby that I think you’d get plenty of offers for silver slugs without having to worry about cartridge and powder.

Unless you know the “rules” that werewolves, faeries, et al., observe, I think it would be advisable to go with .999 pure. I also think that hollow points would be advisable. Assuming that silver is toxic to your supernatural intruders in some chemical or metaphysical sense, you’d probably want your silver bullet to stay in the target instead of blowing through and merely stinging.

An extension of that thought – aren’t glazer rounds effectively just a jacket filled with BB-sized shot? I would think that a glazer filled with silver BBs (regardless of the composition of the jacket) would have the desired effect on your foe at a slightly lower cost in metal, albeit significantly more effort to produce.

10

Tris, these are as close as i could find to a silver bullet.

11

Yeah, I saw those. Only a few percent silver, no doubt enough to piss off a werewolf, but certainly not a classical “silver bullet” in terms of reliability.

Tris

12

I don’t know if you’ve taken this into account, but Winchester makes these.

13

If you are going to have someone make you some silver bullets, make sure they make them jacketed hollow-points. The jacketing is necessary to keep the bullets from eroding the lands in the barrel, and the hollow-point will maximize the contact of the silver with the werewolf. According to legend, contact with any silver is painful to a werewolf, so you could in a pinch repel one with a bucket of used photo developer solution (all that silver nitrate). Glazer Safety-Slugs filled with silver wouldn’t work, because the jacketing completely covers the silver. It wouldn’t penetrate a werewolf’s hide, so the silver would never touch him.

BTW, no way would a war-time .45 Colt be worth more than $200 or so, in any condition, so fire away!

14

I’m going to check on this 'cuz I heard different.

By the by, the uber wolves in Underworld developed muscle memory to spit out silver slugs, so the vampires started using hollow points filled with silver nitrate, IIRC.

15

OK…I type corrected. I just check auction prices for 1943 1911A’s. If you have one in Fine+ condition, and made by an interesting subcontractor, you can get some bucks for it. I found an Ithaca model that is going for over $1000. Odds are Tris has a standard model, but it wouldn’t hurt to check.

16

Oh, and if it’s werewolves you’re worried about, recall that in the classic Wolf Man film the beast was dispatched with a silver-tipped cane. You may not need bullets at all.

17

One of the fascinating things about the Anita Blake vampire hunter novels by Laurell K. Hamilton is the elaborate descriptions of various forms of weaponry (silver and non) and who or what is affected by it. (Some vampires, werewolves, werehyenas, wereleopards, wererates and other were creatures are more powerful than others, this makes them harder to kill) There also exists a fairly hefty dose of sexual sadomachism laced throughout some of the books.
Some of the bullets that Anita’s friend Edward provides her with in one of the books are silver with Holy water in them.

18

Hey, Tris check this site out. You might find that you’ve got a serious piece of artillery there. Some, depending on manufacturer, could be worth low four digits.

19

According to them, mine was made in 1942, later in the series listed. I don’t know about dollar value, but I don’t plan on selling it anyway.

Tris

20

Personally, I wouldn’t sell it if it were my grandfather’s WW2 sidearm either. Here’s something to think about, though: Good new barrels for 1911s are relatively inexpensive, easy to find, and drop right in when you field strip the piece for cleaning. If you find that ol’ warhorse isn’t grouping as tightly as you like, it’s simple enough to give it new life while still being Grampa’s Gun.

I love my 1911. Fun to shoot, plenty of stopping power, ammo is relatively cheap… what’s not to love?