Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Guns: Cleaning after Weekend Shooting

This weekends trip to the range went well. I stuck to pistols after shooting my rifles for the better part of a month. It really put the wimpiness of the handguns in perspective for me. I've gotten used to the bang and crack of a short-barreled AR-15 with a flash hider. Those guns are loud, especially for such a small gun with shooting such a small round. My .22 and 9mm sound like just pop guns in comparison. Which is great because I have a tendency to flinch.

My handgun performance was competent. I'm not an amazing shot, but when I get into my groove I'm capable of putting a multiple rounds into the center rings pretty quickly. I suppose that lack of patience and emphasis on speed over technique is probably part of the reason I'm not a better shot.

Once I got home it was gun cleaning time. Cleaning guns gets almost as much discussion as shooting them in the firearms community, as Geek with a .45 clearly demonstrates. I generally clean my guns by field stripping and using a fair amount of patches, Q-tips (for the nooks and crannies), and lots of CLP. The bore gets cleaned with an appropriately size boresnake using CLP or Rem Oil. I probably should get in the habit of using real bore cleaners instead of just using CLP all the time, but I haven't yet.

The exception is my Buckmark. Since it's a target pistol, field stripping the Buckmark requires tools and is far less fun than guns actually designed as weapons. I just swab it out without taking it apart and then do a more thorough cleaning when it starts to act up on me. It's a rimfire and I feed it cheap (and dirty) ammo, so I expect some reliability problems anyway. It's about due for a detail strip and cleaning soon.

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