While over at Brady’s the other day I was bemoaning my drastically depleted stocks of 16 gauge ammo after last year’s slaughter-rama squirrel season. He gave me this old box of ACTIV he’d reloaded who knows how long ago. ACTIV was a big thing back int he day for a few minutes. I have heard many rumors about what happened to them but have no idea what the deal is. I suspect the American shotgunner wasn’t ready for what looked like an all plastic shell.
Brady was a big fan but stopped reloading them when some issue came up involving not being able to source wads or cups that would work in them. I don’t know, I never have been a shotshell reloader myself. I only do rifle and handgun.
Scattered Shots 
Vaguely remember these but never messed with them. I can reload shotshells but don’t anymore. Too much hassle for minor savings on low volume rounds. Plastic hulls get brittle and crack, crimp issues, lead shot cost is way up, etc, etc.
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We dont have squirrels here, so this may be a silly question, but is there any reason you couldn’t hunt them with a .22LR instead of the shotgun?
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some states won’t let you. I dont use them because because of the extreme angles of shooting on mountain hunting with houses down in the hollows, I don’t feel its safe
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Hunting squirrels with .22s is pretty common in my AO. You do need to be a little more careful with your backstop, but things are less dense here than in Sean’s AO. Well, less dense in the places you can hunt squirrels. Our metro areas limit hunting to shotguns or archery (or a few other low-powered weapons), but good luck getting a quarter mile from an occupied building around here.
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I’ll consider myself lucky. I’ve got tens of thousands of acres of uninhabited state forest that I can shoot on at any time within a few hours drive in any direction, all of which contains feral game animals such as rabbits, foxes, wild boar and deer.
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I own plenty of private lanmd land like that , but even on that land if I shoot up towards the sky at a 45 degree angle from the slope of the mountain with no backstop and miss, i dont know here that 22 round will come down two ridglines over
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Very sensible. There was a guy killed here about 35 years ago at a popular swimming hole in a river valley. Some kids were shooting tin cans with a .22LR on a ridge line about 800m away, and one round went down into the valley and hit this poor bastard on the temple.
It was an absolute miracle of bad luck, and showed thst those warnings on ammo boxes need to be taken seriously.
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That sounds awesome.
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its not populated here. there are scattered homes in some of these hollows that have been there a 100 years. but when you are on top of a mountain 500 yards high, there is no such thing as looking down into the bottom hollow to tell if a home is there or not.
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I get what you are saying. My neighborhood is probably 1000x denser than your neighborhood. But the places where I hunt—exclusively public land in the desert southwest—are fantastically less-populated than your neighborhood. Sometimes there is some checkerboard private land tucked into the public land, but it’s very, very sparse.
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I remember those when I was a kid back in the 80’s. My buddy worked at the club where my uncle took me to shoot trap. My buddy used to pick up all the left over hulls, Winchester AA’s went in a separate bag, then another held every other hull except for Activ. He used to toss those in the trash. My buddy would sell the hulls to club members for some extra cash, getting a premium for the bag with the AA hulls.
Activ shotshell ammo was pretty inexpensive back then, only $2.99 for a box of 25 while the cheap promotional Winchester and Federal were $3.99 a box and the premium Winchester AA’s were $4.99 a box (yes I’m dating myself as old). Everything gun related was pretty affordable in the mid 80’s, SKS rifles were $89 and M1 Garands from the CMP were only $165. I should have bought a bunch back then.
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