Quote:
Originally Posted by S-W4EVER
Clean and properly lubricate the rifle and it should be good to go. When I was a LEO we were required to put 500 rounds through a newly issued service pistol but we never put that many through a new carbine, they were all good right out of the box.
I know ammo is kinda expensive these days but you’re gonna want to put some rounds through that rifle just to get comfortable with it (especially if you’re gonna use it for personal defense). AR’s are a lot of fun to shoot. I like to keep my AR’s clean and the bolt wet (oiled).
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Good advice to recommend a fair number of rounds before putting it to use, just on general principal.
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The reasons behind policies are important.
If a department allows officers a choice of pistols, or allows officers to carry something else off duty, then you can have a situation where a required 500 round break in period is important to meet the break in needs of some models that don’t apply to others. And of course if the department selected duty pistol needs 500 rounds to reach peak reliability then, that’s what it gets.
There’s also an unrelated argument that 500 rounds fired by the shooter does a fair not to ensure the officer is competent with it and hopefully confident in it. Since duty pistols are far more likely to be used than a duty rifle, the cost benefit analysis favors putting 500 rounds through a pistol, and that might not be the case for a duty rifle.
Finally, it depends on the duty rifle. If you are issuing proven rifles or carbines that are known to run right out of the box with proven issued ammunition, then firing 100 rounds to verify that rifle or carbine runs, and familiarizing the officer shooting it might be plenty.
The point here is that none of those arguments might be valid with someone choosing an AR-15 given the wide range of quality in AR-15s and the wide range in quality and characteristics in ammo.
I recommend shooters put a minimum of 200 rounds of ammo through any semi-auto weapon, with 100% reliability using all the magazines they plan to use, before considering it fit for self defense use.
In other words, if you have a failure to feed or eject on round 30 you are now looking at a minimum 230 rounds to reach the 200 consecutive round threshold. If you find a pattern of failures with a particular magazine, it gets marked, gets eliminated from the test phase, and is subsequently not used for anything other than range practice use.