Courtesy of Tactical Life
It’s been a gradual thing. Lubricants got better, and then engineers started monkeying with the surfaces of steel gun parts on a molecular level to make them both slippery and corrosion resistant. In the late 1960s American GIs were dying in Vietnam for lack of cleaning gear and the training to use it. Nowadays we expect better. Gun cleaning is an important aspect of gun ownership.
The Apex Predators
What exactly happens when you fail to clean your weapons? If you are running a Kalashnikov or a Glock, not much. I have a Glock 22 converted to 9mm I have owned for a decade. I have brutalized that poor pistol, most typically with a sound suppressor hanging from its snout. Sound suppressors look cool and cut down on noise pollution, but they will render your guns invariably filthy. Increasing backpressure forces some of the carbon fouling that might otherwise vent into the atmosphere back into the action. The result is copious gunk.
My Glock doesn’t care. I have a friend who accidentally ran over his Glock handgun with a bush hog, spraying chunks of that unfortunate smoke pole across half an acre of pasture. Short of such an industrial accident, however, it is pretty much impossible to tear one up. While I would be a bit more attentive to a weapon I carried for personal defense, this particular Glock has not been cleaned since it left the factory, and I cannot slow it down.
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