I'm not a shooter but...

vector

I was wondering, do you need a permit to buy ammunition, and do you have to account for what heppened to your previous purchase?

Sparks

The permit to buy ammunition is your firearms certificate (it covers both the firearm and the ammunition), but no, you don't have to account for what happened to your previous rounds. In some cases it'd be hard to - air rifle pellets, for example, aren't what you'd think of as ammunition, they're more like tiny chunks of shaped lead. And invariably, one day you open a new tin on the range and fumble it and there goes 500 pellets all over the table, the floor, into your boots, and by the time you've collected them all up again (by this time ready to swear off shooting forever), there's only 490-odd in the tin, with a few gone the way of the socks that vanish in the wash.

That doesn't tend to happen too often with cartridge rounds, mind
(For example, DURC can probably trace every round they've ever shot in .22, but that's because the college security demand it of them).

demonloop

I wish we did have to account for our ammo, coz I often wonder how the hell I need to buy it so often

Sparks

Training diary lad, training diary!

demonloop

Sparks wrote:

Training diary lad, training diary!

I was never one for making notes I musy admit

civdef

Just weigh your spent brass - If you can find it...

Sparks

I don't think the guy beside me on the line would appreciate my retreiving my brass from his shorts civ

vector

Can anyone, off the street, just buy ammunition, or what is the procedure?

Sparks

Not just anyone from off the street, no. You tend to find a firearms dealer that you'd use regularly, you'd give him a phone call ahead of time if you're a considerate soul and ask for however many rounds of whatever kind of ammo, then call round and collect it, with firearms licence in hand so he can copy off the details for his records. Unless you're a competitive shooter, of course, in which case you'd make an appointment with the factory (Eley, Lapua, RWS, whomever), fly out there with your rifle, spend a morning shooting groups of five or ten shots from about twenty different batches through it, choose the best batch and then buy 5, 10 or even 20,000 rounds from that batch. (Note that some shooters, the top ones in the world, will buy even more in one go...).
Oddly enough, the cost for batch-testing 10,000 rounds, even including the flights, doesn't come to that much more than buying 10,000 rounds from a local dealer, it's just that you pay it in one lump sum.