How to Clean a Gun

Video Transcript

"Whenever you're cleaning your gun, make sure it's empty and unloaded and my best advice is take the ammunition for that gun and put it another room. That way, those gremlins that live with us that some of you don't believe are here, won't stick around in that gun when you're not looking. Put the ammo away in another room, make sure the gun's unloaded. Now that brings up: how do we do that? Different ways for different guns. We've got four different types of guns here. We've got a shotgun. This particular shotgun just opens up like that and you can look right there in the back of the barrel. Obviously, it's unloaded, so for now, it's safe. If you go in the next room and come back, perform that action again, just for yourself and everybody else. Keep it pointed safely. Here we have a bolt action rifle. When you pick it up, again, four basic rules: keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction, keep your finger off the trigger, and open it up and make sure that it's safe. In this case, the bolt goes up in back. He allows you to look right in the back end of the barrel. You can easily see there's no cartridge there. Now you can prepare to clean that gun. Here's what we call a double action revolver. As you pick this up, you need to open the round portion, which is the cylinder. This particular one has a release that comes back. You can see where all the cartridges would be if there were any in there. You know it's unloaded and safe. Put it down. This particular gun's a semi-automatic. It's a little bit different. You point it in a safe direction, keep your finger off the trigger and pull the top portion to slide back. That allows you a visual down inside to the back end of the barrel. Make sure that it is now unloaded. Once you've done that, you can go about cleaning your gun. Number one, my advice, is you should clean your gun every time you take it out and shoot it. That's the best. It's like any other tool. The better you maintain that tool, the longer it's going to work, the better it's going to work for ya. So if you clean it every time you shoot it, it'll last long enough for you to hand it down to your kids. Cleaning it involves cleaning the bore of any powder fouling, any copper or lead remnants are going to be left in there as the bullets travel down the bore. You'll want to clean those out regularly because if you don't, it's just like a twig in a stream, it tends to collect more and more and more and it can turn that gun into an unsafe piece of equipment. It can certainly make it a lot less accurate than it has the capability to be. Whether a shotgun, rifle, or handgun, keep it clean. It also gives you the chance to look it over, really, really well. Make sure you don't see something that's going wrong with that firearm. An unsafe condition that may be happening sometimes, metallurgy can fail. You may have, in the case of a revolver, you might have a crack in one of the cylinders. I've seen guns with a split right down the barrel. Certainly makes them unsafe. If you cleaned it regularly, you have a good chance, you're going to notice that, be able to get it to a gun smith, or back to the factory and get it fixed before you have an accident and it causes some kind of a problem with you. There's videos you can buy if you're a little bit unsure about gun cleaning. These videos go through all different types of guns, pistols, revolvers, rifles and shotguns. There's a little section for each in here. They work really good for people that are a little bit unsure. There's all different types of solvents that you can get. Different solvents in some cases have different purposes. We can talk about those at another time. You can talk to your gun smith, talk to your gun shop, tell them what you're doing. Ask them what you should use. They're all going to give you good advice because they want you to be safe, just like we do, want you to have a good time and enjoy the sport of shooting. Very important is: treat this like a fine piece of equipment 'cause that's just what it is. It was built that way. It was built to last a long time given proper maintenance, just like your car."