If there’s anything gun people love as much as firearms, it’s probably ammunition. After all, without ammo, guns don’t exactly work too well and become glorified clubs. That makes ammo almost as awesome as firearms.

And it seems that Winchester announced three new ammo lines at SHOT last week.

During SHOT Show, Chris covered the ins-and-outs of Winchester’s new WWII Victory Series Ammo. It appears to be historically-accurate enough to appease gun hipsters and shooters nostalgic for the smell of cordite. I, for one, long for the days when nostalgia wasn’t such a big deal. It was just better then; nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. Anyway . . . At Industry Day on the Range I shot Winchester’s other two brand new brands of ammo: Super Suppressed and Hybrid-X. … Super Suppressed is exactly what you’d hope: fully-copper-encapsulated, heavy-for-caliber projectiles loaded subsonic on clean-burning powder and primers. It’s optimized for running through a suppressor with the utmost minimum of noise and dirtiness. It’ll be available in .22 LR, .22 Magnum, 9mm, .45 ACP, 300 Blackout and .308 Winchester (yes, loaded subsonic). The rimfire ammo is “black copper plated” while the rest is jacketed. On the range I fired the .22 LR and 9mm. It was super freaking quiet.

Meanwhile, Hybrix-X is a fragmenting round. However, unlike so many gimmick rounds we’ve seen that are supposed to be completely devastating, the Hybrix-X looks like it may well penetrate deeply enough to do some good. It’s focused on the civilian personal defense market rather than law enforcement.

Unfortunately for Winchester, people are less than trusting of a new round like this. After all, it sounds a lot more like the gimmick rounds that pop up on gun boards and make a lot of noise but are generally good only as a means of separating people from their money. It’ll take time and experimentation to convince a lot of people to try the round.

Speaking for myself, I’d want to see a lot more independent verification that it’s going to do the job before I trust it in my magazines. It needs a track record or a lot of evidence that it’ll work when I need it before I’ll trust my family’s life to it.

But, unlike a lot of fragmenting ammunition on the market, it looks promising. Winchester isn’t known for cranking out crap, as a general rule, so this has some real potential.

I can’t say much about Super Suppressed, mostly because I don’t own suppressors due to the current set of laws. Pass the Hearing Protection Act, and that’ll change. Super Suppressed sounds promising in that regard as well.

The World War II Victory Series, though, is intriguing. You see, since I was 13, I have reenacted various eras of history. Some of my friends reenact World War II. I can’t help but imagine this will be popular with that crowd. After all, historically accurate is kind of the name of the game with that bunch, and now you’re looking at an ammo that won’t just run in firearms of the era, but creates the same smell?

Yeah, that sounds like a win to me.

Someone at Winchester was doing some thinking about what people really want, and they’re meeting that demand.