[Joe Brower]

"Numerous soldiers showed us bullets in their magazines that had small dents in the primer,” the Army report said."

This is hardly news, as you probably already know. The whole issue of "slam fires" has been one of the most ballyhooed and yet inconsequential "issues" related to the AR-15 series of weapons. It seems scary, but it's not a problem. The firing pin is light enough and the primers hardened enough to where this is a non-issue, at least in my experience. I've seen hundreds of thousands of rounds fired through ARs in all sorts of conditions, and have personally expended tens of thousands myself, and never experienced a slam-fire.

Cheers,

[R. Scott]

I never experienced – or heard of – an actual slam fire, but the thought of it happening would be enough to hinder a soldier’s reaction in combat. The soldier has to have complete confidence in the weapon – and that is near impossible except through training (when budgets allow).

[El Laton Caliente]

Most people don’t realize that military rifles are designed that way on purpose. Most do not have firing pin springs (which break in machine guns) for reliability reasons. Whereas hunting rifles have firing pin springs for safety reasons.

Military specification ammo has a heavy duty (thicker metal) primer than hunting ammo. This is the main and most important difference between the 5.56 NATO and the .223 Remington as well as the 7.62x51 NATO and the .308.

The slam fires are normally seen when civilian ammo is loaded into a military rifle. The military primers are designed to take the “ping” from a free floating firing pin, but the hunting rounds will go off causing slam fire or even an uncontrolled full auto discharge.

Both of my CETME’s dent primers but I have never had a slam fire using mil-surplus ammo. You will never see me feed .308 hunting ammo to the;^)