Back when I was a teenager I used to do this sport called Cowboy Competition Shooting. Think normal competition shooting, but everyone's dressed as some charac

Back when I was a teenager I used to do this sport called Cowboy Competition Shooting. Think normal competition shooting, but everyone's dressed as some character from a western movie or trying to realistically portray some figure from the 19th century American West. A lot of the people in the crowd would make their own ammunition. Myself included. I never saw anyone go as far as to make their own lead bullets, but we all generally recycled spent cartridges and reloaded them with powder and lead to make them whole again. There really wasn't anything particularly ideological about it though, no concern that one day big government would take our guns or anything like that. It was a simple necessity of the hobby. A single day of shooting would often have you spend 100+ rounds of ammunition and replacing your loses was expensive. On top of that most of these events took place on some rancher's land, and it wouldn't be particularly kind to leave all these brass casings all over his property. Better to recycle them than throw them away or leave them to slowly pile up. On an unrelated note, nice perk about the sport and the fact that this all took place on a ranch is that lunch often came from where it was served.