How long loaded magazine

You can also think of the convenience factor. If you are heading down to the gun range, you might be paying a hefty sum for the privilege of being down there.

You will normally pay by the hour, so every minute counts. It will very quickly eat into your time. So, bringing loaded magazines can be a time and money saver. Not every range will allow you to bring in multiple loaded magazines, for safety reasons.

Magazine springs always wear out. Even if you only use them and reload them each time, rather than storing them fully loaded, they will begin to lose their spring. Except, each time you do this the spring wears out a little more. The problem comes after years of use.

They will spring up, but not as well. Essentially, over time magazine springs lose their ability to store kinetic energy. Luckily, springs can be replaced. Magazines can be unscrewed, the springs can be swapped out, and then they will be screwed back together. You can do this yourself, though it might be better to let a professional handle it if you really are unsure, but it is a maintenance skill you might want to learn.

It is always risky using tools on your gun, taking it apart and putting it back together. The magazines are less dangerous, but failing to put it back together properly can lead to your gun jamming and even misfiring.

There is a little bit of contention in the gun community surrounding how long you should keep a magazine loaded.

Both for efficiency and safety. The army, the top-level gun associations, and most professional shooters all agree that around 6 months is a good middle of the pack time for storage. If you leave them any longer, you run the risk of the springs wearing out and the magazine spring losing its power.

If you are someone who only shoots casually, then keeping one or two loaded magazines in the house at all times is a good idea.

If you are planning on going shooting soon, then loading a few extra magazines beforehand would be a good idea. A neat little trick is rotating your stored magazines out for ones you just loaded before you head down to the range. That way you are using up the mags that need using and ensuring that fresh ones regularly take their place.

For a professional shooter, like a soldier, then a faulty magazine may be the difference between life and death. It can also be hard to know how long a magazine can be stored while loaded and still function normally.

As mentioned above, a magazine should last for at least 6 months across the board. Some will last longer, very few will last less than 6 months though. Some magazines can keep their spring for years, even decades, after they were manufactured.

In world war one, magazine-fed rifles and pistols only just started entering into circulation. Beforehand, cavalry and bayonets still played a large part in wartime tactics. You can get a good idea just how much weaponry and war progressed between world war one and two with this alone. This led to a huge amount of allied soldiers using world war one weaponry, with old magazines, before they would eventually have their issued weapons replaced. And sometimes people died because of this.

Even without being stored fully loaded they will begin to lose their tension. Since the magazine will lose its tension in its uncompressed state, filling it with ammo will compress it again giving you a little bit of spring.

In theory , if you started with a brand new magazine and loaded it to full capacity, then left it in a drawer, it should not lose a significant amount of spring tension for a very, very long time. Probably years.

But reality is messier than that. Using the spring loading and unloading the magazine frequently will cause it to wear out as well. The spring should last tens of thousands of cycles before this occurs, but it will happen eventually. When left loaded to full capacity and not used, most magazines will very slowly lose some amount of spring tension over time.

Some springs may stay loaded for decades and still function, and others might wear out after a much shorter period of time. So just to be safe, the best practice is to rotate the magazines periodically. A gunsmith at Beretta who claimed not to be speaking on behalf of the company told us he rotates his personal carry magazines every two weeks. The customer service rep we spoke to from Sig said that once every six months would be sufficient.

Polymer followers in particular seem to be a common failure point for magazines. Adding some complexity to this debate is whether loading the mags to their full capacity will make any difference in how quickly the springs wear out.

Again, there is not a clear consensus in the industry. However, Wolff Gunsprings , a company well known for manufacturing a wide variety of springs for the firearms industry has a slightly different take.