You need to clean that gun

By MARJ LAW

Special to The News

Marj's .22-caliber pistol after cleaning.

It’s been a good day at the range. You’ve put 230 rounds through the gun. You’ve shot out the X-ring on your target.
Man, you’re getting good!
Now it’s time to return home and put everything away safely, right?
No.
Now is the time to return home and clean your .22.
Learning to clean your gun properly is important. If you do not clean your gun, two major maladies can happen: failure to feed and failure to fire.
This is known as FTF. With either one, the gun does not shoot when you pull the trigger. If Mr. Bad Guy is in your home and you can’t defend yourself, then your gun isn’t any good to you, is it?
When the bullet does not “feed,” that could mean it did not adequately get into the chamber to fire. This could be because of dirt in the magazine – the object that holds the bullets.
The bullet then goes to the chamber from the magazine. The previous casing may not have been ejected because of dirt, thereby preventing the next round from entering the chamber. Failure to feed strikes again.
Failure to fire can be caused from debris around the firing pin that does not allow the pin to strike the bullet adequately to ignite the primer. The primer sets off the bullet, so it must be ignited.
Debris falling down into the trigger mechanism can prevent the trigger from being pulled. This is also in the category of failure to fire.
When you lock the bolt open, you can see right into the chamber. If you have a stainless steel gun, black residue from burnt powder is easy to spot against the metal.
This has got to go, go, go.
To make it go away, you can use cotton swabs dipped in solvent. Clean all around the chamber. Clean where the firing pin comes out, clean the extractor that holds the bullet casing, and clean the ejector that tosses that casing out.
Clean the loading ramp where the bullet slides into the barrel. Clean the chamber to the trigger pull. Use a long swab along the length of the barrel.
This seems like a lot of work, but you get used to it. Next time, we’ll talk about taking the bolt out and cleaning around the bolt and the bolt chamber. We don’t do that so often, but it still has to be done. It’s a bit of a project.
Yes, there are about as many tiny locations to clean as a newborn baby’s neck.
The next time you plan a visit to the range, remember to plan an extra half hour to clean your .22.

Marj Law is retired as the director of Keep Wakulla County Beautiful and an occasional columnist for The Wakulla News.