Thanks, Nick1911 !
I got a bunch of that ammo a couple of riot cycles ago, along with a couple of cases of XM193 and kind of forgot and didn't document the details for the 7.62 stuff. The XM 193 shoots pretty damned good in my ancient varmint rifle with a 1-14 twist and is known to use noncorrosive priming.
I passed on most of my armament to the two sons, but kept a chink SKS ranch rifle and half a jillion stripper clips. anticipating another cycle of leftygasms, and
lo ! here we are again.
WLJ, I suggested firing an empty cartridge against some clean steel quite a long time ago, but using a sizing die, since it would be easier to clean off than a whole gun. I never actually did it, though, since it is so dry up here, "no rust" could be because of the low humidity rather than the non-corrosive qualities of the primer.
So no rusting would not be meaningful, but rusting would be --at least in the short term.
(Yes, one could use a control surface by sprinkling salt on it, but that starts to morph into a PROJECT rather than a quickie test. And in salty areas near the ocean, the test surface would rust anyway from airborne salt particles, so where are you?)
Hatcher noted that Ordnance had done extensive experimenting on corrosion due to primers with actual ammo and actual rifle barrels and found that if the humidity did not go over ~50%, corrosion would not occur anyhow. This effect caused quite a bit of head-scratching, since rusting would suddenly occur "out of nowhere" days and weeks after the testing. They finally tracked the problem down to variations in ambient humidity.)
RH right now is about 20%:
https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=39.7836&lon=-105.1675&unit=0&lg=english&FcstType=graphicalTerry, 230RN
