Some of you may be surprised that ammo is not listed as an "essential." This is to drive home the point that you don't need to actually fire your weapon every time you practice to develop a high level of skill. Live fire with real ammo should only be used to validate the effectiveness of you dry practice sessions. If you are performing your dry fire exercises perfectly, then your hits with live ammunition will be where you want them. The proper ratio of dry practice to live fire is open for debate but I've seen it recommended from 5:1 to 10:1. That's right - up to ten dry practice sessions to every live fire session.

When you do practice with live ammo, you want high quality ammo for several reasons. The first is your own safety. That is low quality ammo is more likely to be loaded with improper powder levels - either too much or not enough - either of which will hurt you. Second, low quality ammo is more likely to malfunction in your weapon. This is bad because it diminishes your faith in the reliability of your weapon which should be absolute. Another reason to avoid low quality ammo is that it tends to be "dirtier" and produce more fouling than better ammo.

Now, what is high quality ammo and what is low quality. We could go out and buy nothing but premium defensive ammo but none of us would do much shooting at the prices you have to pay. In my mind, low quality ammo is any reloaded ammo that you did not reload yourself. I tend to prefer a mid-level approach when it comes to ammo - buy cheap, newly manufactured ammo.