My father served in the Army during the Korean War. He’d been a shooter and hunter prior to that, but it was the military that taught him about firearms preventive maintenance checks and service (PMCS). The Army’s modus operandi of cleaning your gun every time you use it originated much earlier than with my father’s military career in the 1950s, and it’s persisted to this day. Dad passed that lesson to me, and it took a long time for me to outgrow it. If you have the custom of cleaning your gun every time you shoot it, you might consider kicking that habit like I did.
GUN CLEANING HISTORY
Our first guns were fueled with ammunition loaded with black powder. Black powder is made of sulfur, carbon and potassium nitrate. When black powder is burned, it’ll leave a layer of soot inside the action and barrel of a gun. The more the gun is shot, the worse this fouling gets, and it can
