Seismic High Mass Ammo is an 185 grain hollow point 9mm round, and it surprised us how well it shot.
We toss around the term "massive" for a lot of stuff, sometimes applicable and sometimes not so much. In one sense it's meant to describe something BIG, but that's not its exactly definition. Really, "massive" means it has a lot of mass.
Take that notion and apply it to firearm ammunition, and things get really interesting. That's the objective behind new Seismic High Mass Ammunition, which we got to try out for ourselves at the 2019 Industry Day at the Range prior to SHOT Show.
Seismic's 9mm round, fittingly dubbed the QuakeMaker, was featured just outside Vegas at the Boulder Rifle and Pistol Club, a massively large range (there's that term again...) that serves as host for the biggest firearm and ammunition companies in the world.
A standard 9mm round is in the 115 grain ballpark, but Seismic's weighs in at 185 grains. That's 1.6 times the weight, ringing in as the heavyweight (literally) in the business. No other ammo company has released a round with more weight. Even +P loads only approach the 124 grain window.
Moving at subsonic velocities, it still hits harder and penetrates farther than anything else in the same category.
We fired several rounds of the QuakeMaker, noticing its significantly decreased felt recoil first and foremost. You'd think an extremely heavy bullet (remember, 185 grains has never been done before in 9mm) would cause a lot of kick, even going so far as to raise a 9mm handgun higher in the air. That just wasn't the case.
Seismic battled against that recoil with a much slower burning of gunpowder, meaning the impulse is spread out over time. The result gives you the heaviest bullet of its kind to ever hit the market, and less recoil than a fair amount of far-lighter competitors.
What is more mass getting you, as an end user of Seismic 9mm rounds? More mass equals momentum (even if velocity is maintained), and that translates to more knockdown power.
In essence, the 9mm delivers the destructive momentum of a .45 ACP. That's saying a lot.
Even if Seismic's presence was a little smaller than the kingpins in the ammo space, we're predicting this 185 grain 9mm bullet, and the soon-to-come 325 grain hollow point .45 ACP and 2.5 oz 12 gauge slug, are going to be one of the bigger stories industrywide.
NEXT: CCI AMMO'S NEW 'CLEAN-22' AMMUNITION COULD BE THE FUTURE OF RIMFIRE
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