What Happens if You Don’t Clean Your Gun?

What Happens if You Don’t Clean Your Gun?

Most gun owners are aware that they need to clean and maintain their firearms. However, not many people know what happens if you don’t. Besides keeping your firearm’s appearance, cleaning comes with several other benefits.

Here are some of the things that could happen when you fail to clean your firearm:

• It could malfunction- Although firearms in use are more likely to malfunction, failure to clean those in storage could also result in this. When dirt and dust accumulate in different parts of the rifle, they could cause a malfunction. For example, your gun could fail to eject when you fire it. Every time you fire a weapon, it must first extract a cartridge and eject it. This mechanism may become faulty if you fail to clean your gun.

• It starts eroding- Every time you fire the gun, some ammo remains in the barrel. With time, the ammo starts corroding the insides of your rifle. If you store your gun without cleaning it, the ammo residue, together with the dirt buildup, corrodes the gun’s insides even faster.

What Do I Use to Clean a Gun?

Gun cleaning kits are different, and you may find different supplies in each of them. However, some essential items should be included in every kit:

• Lubricant: You must keep the friction against the gun to a minimum when cleaning it. Therefore, you should ensure that you use a gun cleaning lubricant to break up the gun’s dirt buildup. The lubricant also helps to get rid of frictions in the bolt action, which you may notice during rechambering.

• Bore snake: This tool is especially useful for people who fire their guns and don’t have time to clean it after every use. The bore snake allows you to quickly clean the barrel without the hassle of disassembling the entire gun.

• Bore brushes: Every gun cleaning kit will contain two types of bore brushes; bronze and nylon brushes. The bronze brush removes massive carbon buildup in the barrel and is usually used first. The silver brush is designed for the more sensitive parts of the gun.

Other tools that should be included are double-ended brushes, cleaning swabs, cleaning patches, and cleaning rods.