[Colonel Sanders]

Today I went out to practice shooting with a Smith & Wesson model 686 .357 Magnum revolver (about a month old) and I took along a box of 50 Winchester shells which were purchased at Wal-mart. Out of these 50 rounds, 5 did not fire on the first attempt. Pulled the trigger, the primer was struck, the rounds failed to go off. . . So with these rounds I proceeded to attempt to fire them again, and the rounds would go off on the second attempt. I'm not sure that is the safest practice, but at least it produces the end result of a fired round. Is this a bad idea which I should not continue? What should I do with a round that fails to fire?

Anyways, what is more important is the fact that out of 50 shells, 5 failed to fire on the first attempt. That is a 10% failure rate in the Winchester ammo. Prior to this, I have shot about a total of 400 Winchester rounds through the pistol, and only 2 or 3 had failed to shot- less than 1%, but this time the percentage is alarmingly high. All the ammo has been Winchester purchased from the same Wal-mart on two different purchases. I thought a well known gun (and ammo?) maker like Winchester would have produced better rounds than this. Is a 10% failure rate acceptable or not? Is it possible that the plain Winchester ammo from Wal-mart is a lower-grade ammo then the rest of their ammo and more likely to fail, or is Winchester ammo just bad in general? What type of ammo should I use? So far I only want/need cheap ammo for target practice, I don't need anything fancy, but I hate haveing such a high rate of failure.

L J