Up today I have a guest post from one of my friends, Dave from TNgun. Dave in addition to being a blogger, Youtuber, Firearms Instructor is also an author of Understanding the Use of Handguns and the upcoming 52 Projects for a Self Reliant Life. Like myself Dave was also a guest on The Survivalpodcast. Today he has for us both an article and a video on why you should test fire your weapons after cleaning them. Enjoy the great article and video!
I want to share a tip with you that I have heard several times over the years, especially in law enforcement trainer circles, but have never actually seen a time when it happened to someone I know (until last week).
If you go out to a firing range and engage in a little target practice, hopefully you will then clean your gun afterwards. I know that this is something that is falling out of favor with the fans of the plastic fantastic, but believe me – even modern polymer guns need to be taken care of and cleaned once in a while.
Part of cleaning a gun involves function checking the gun after cleaning to ensure you put everything back in the right way. Typically you will check the slide lock and release, the safeties, magazine release, and will pull the trigger on the unloaded (and checked) gun to see if you hear a click.
Now 99 times out of a hundred if you do this and here the click of the firing pin your gun will work when called upon. However 999 out of a 1000 you can leave your home and not need your gun. Those with a self-protection mindset don’t like to gamble, and demand their defense guns work 100% of the time. As David Sensing said “ Guns are like parachutes. You may never need one, but if you do, you will need it real bad. And if you need one and don’t have one, you will probably never need one again. Or anything else.”
With target guns, cool barbeque guns, hunting guns or whatever else you keep a gun for, this tip may not be appropriate – but I have adopted this with all of my self-defense firearms.
When I break down and clean any guns that I stake my life on, once I have function checked them, I fire a single shot through it.
This gives me 100% confidence that the gun was put together correctly.
I have been told horror stories of officers cleaning their guns after the annual pistol qualification, cleaning it and dropping it back in their holster and then working all year without ever thinking about it – then finding out at the next year’s qualification that their gun broke or was put together wrong and they went all year with a non-functioning gun.
Personally I always took this as an urban legend, until last week when a former NRA pistol instructor student (and a licensed firearm manufacturer with a SOT license)
Told me that he witnessed it.
What happened was the shooter cleaned their gun with a cotton swab, and little wisps of cotton found their way into the firing pin channel and caused the firing pin to bind up just enough to cause a misfire.
This is like my article on checking your duty ammunition, statistics are such that you may never have a problem, but I find that luck is caused by preparation – and the more I do to keep Murphy away the less he comes around.
I want you to be safe, and never have to use your gun in a life threatening situation, BUT if you do get attacked I goal is to ensure that the innocent win the encounter and the bad guy is thwarted.
Stay Safe
David Nash
