Rotate your ammo and rotate your mags
There are various stages of CCW experience, those that have made the mistakes, those that have witnessed the mistakes and those that are doomed to see both. Although a gun owner may be observing all of the firearm safetey rules there are still many things to keep in consideration when CCW a firearm. Even though a gun hasn’t been fired, if it is being carried it will fill up lint or the gun can become dry. I have carried guns through out the summer months and found out that I’ve rusted out screws or pitted firearms. Clean your CCW guns for reliability sake, but also for protection.
It is extremely important for you to rotate your carry ammo. Many reloaders know the importance of having the proper bullet crimp to prevent bullet setback, but this is something that is inevitable going to occur if you keep closing the slide on the same bullet. Even if you are not shooting up your ammo, rotate the ammo in your gun magazines to make sure you are not slamming the same first round. Defensive ammo can be expensive and I realize that you aren’t going to want to shoot it all up after a couple times of cleaning your ammo. If you rotate just an 8rd magazine full of defensive ammo, you should be able to dissassemble and clean the gun safetly about 24 times with the same magazine.
The Mini 14 was hands down the gun that was hit the hardest by the AWB in the 1990’s. Ruger is now making 20rd and 30rd magazines available to the public and those magazines were going for close to $100 at one point in the later 1990s’. There is nothing wrong with having magazines for firearms that are not the best, sometimes it’s better to rotate through cheap magazines and practice malfunction drills or just toss them when they were out. You don’t want to use your carry mags all the time because if you are shooting through hundreds of rounds of ammo using the same mags that you use for your daily carry, you may find out at the wrong time that the springs need to be replaced. I picked up a good supply of Mil-Spec 1911 7rd magazines that I rotate through my guns and save the Wilsons Combat Magazines for the serious shooting. When the mil-spec mags start jamming too much, I just toss them.
Finding magazines that work in your 1911 shouldn’t be a project. If you have been using the best magazines on the market, you are down to probable only 2 or 3 manufacturers. The 1911 pistol design is a very durable design, but part of the problem we see in the gun is it can take a toll on the magazine slide stop tab and some manufacturers have remedied that. Wilson Combat and McCormick are two that we see. Chip McCormick has known the competative shooting sport and knew since his companies inception that the guns were great, but the magazines on the market were all based on the chinsy, slimsy throw away design the military used.