Walnut Hill

There was a time – not that long ago – that if you neglected to clean a rifle regularly, you could pick it up one day and find the barrel rusted, the bore pitted, accuracy nonexistent and the action turned to scrap metal.

- Terry Wieland

There were several causes: Corrosive primers fostered rust, ingredients in gunpowder mixed with water to form acids and ate away at things, and salt from fingerprints etched patterns in the steel.

In the black-powder era, it was even worse. Woe betide the shooter who came in from a day in the field and did not immediately take his gun apart, clean it thoroughly and oil the bits. In rain-soaked Scotland, this ritual was so much a part of shooting that time in the gun room became a social occasion and even sparked a subgenre of shooting literature. Books called In the Gun Room, or something similar, were written by several well-known shooters, including the redoubtable Major Sir Gerald Burrard. These charming works combined practical information on gun maintenance with asides on everything from combating grouse ticks to cooking hares.

In those days, riflemen became intimately familiar with their guns because they were constantly dismantling them, checking parts and servicing intricate mechanisms. That, alas, is a valuable aspect of shooting that has been largely lost, simply because we no longer have an overwhelming requirement to clean guns regularly. Unless a rifleman has a deep interest in how things work, there is really little requirement to take much apart.

The average owner of an AR, shooting modern .223 Remington ammunition, could go indefinitely without cleaning it, and the only risk would be a slight loss of accuracy due to cuprous fouling. As for the standard, greased .22 rimfire, unless a rifle was dropped in a river, you could literally never run a cleaning rod through it, and neither it nor you would suffer any ill effects.