*Gun Cleaning Kits*
By: GVI
30 July 2024

Yer rifle wants cleanin', there's nothin' else to it
Her barrel's so filthy you scarce can see through it
She won't clean 'erself, lad, an' 'ow will you do it?
Yer cleanin' kit's back at the hooch!
- The Armorer's Lament

A search on "gun cleaning kits" here on the Rubicon turns up far fewer results than I'd have expected. This article will not be an exposition on kits themselves nor on how to use them. The internet is awash with information on them. Rather, this will be on the necessity of having "something like a cleaning kit" reasonably close to hand.

Cleaning kits are humble, workaday items. They are less "sexy" than the firearms they clean. Except for armorers, anyone who devotes more care and thought to his guns' cleaning kits than he does to his guns is clearly looking at things from the wrong end.

Its unexceptional nature notwithstanding, the cleaning kit ought to be given the same due consideration as the rest of one's gear. Like most things, there is no one best kit for everyone, nor for every situation. If I'm giving a firearm a thorough cleaning at home, I want different things than if I'm at the range; likewise I want something different yet again for my Get Home Bag. And I submit that it makes no more sense to omit a small cleaning kit from one's bag as it does to omit a toothbrush.

A compelling case can certainly be made that good, modern guns don't need excessive cleaning. The strongest is that if one carries a quality handgun in a good holster in the right way, the gun won't get so funky as to need cleaning in the day-to-day ordinary world.

It is an argument with some merit. One of my good friends, a writer for several firearm publications who has forgot more about civilian handguns than I'll ever learn, used to regularly test automatic pistols for review by first cleaning and lubricating, then firing 2,000 rounds through them with no maintenance other than oiling when needed, recording each malfunction and its reason. She has mostly abandoned this test because, in her words, it became more a test of the ammunition than of the gun. Above a certain modest price point, she will tell you (with a degree of authoritative experience shared by fewer than a hundred living shooters in the United States), most all automatic pistols worth carrying will ace such a test. She also discusses a carbine owned by a late and lamented instructor that was never cleaned after more than 20,000 recorded shots, and she's not alone - "Filthy-14" is a VERY famous gun in the pack she runs with.

More than one Rubie keeps only "bench cleaning" equipment, deferring cleaning until he gets home. I will not tell him he's wrong; it may be that his plans include no reasonable contingency where he'd be so long away from his home that cleaning would be an issue. If it's right for him, I'm not the man to gainsay him. There are others who make the valid point that any gun which must be so scrupulously looked after that it won't go a few rounds (or even several magazines) before needing cleaning is no gun worth having for preparedness' sake.

So the case against making space for yet another thing in an already-overloaded bag is strong. In ordinary day-to-day use, no one is ever going to shoot a good gun, well-kept, fed with modern factory ammunition, so much at one time that it will need cleaning "mid-fight."

And yet, I find the notion of only keeping one's cleaning things at home to be shortsighted. I find it so for the same reason I keep NBC gear in my car, despite being nowhere near the likeliest targets of a nuclear or chemical attack, and that reason is DUMB LUCK.

It'll be just my luck that I'll be away from the comforts of Chez GVI when I need to use a gun. And if this gun-use is while TS is busy HTF, it may be some time before I can make it back to said comforts. My guns aren't so fickle as to need cleaning after each firing. But I know of few guns which shoot well without cleaning after their owners trip and fall in a boggy ditch, or crawl through mud, or climb up a sand dune or whatever else your imagination may conjure. A gun carried around needs cleaning as a result of exposure to the elements and dirt, far more often than it does from shooting. Not even the venerable AK is immune from the effects of such "external insult."

All my cleaning kits are small. Most of them stay at home or only ever go out to the range with me. A few are attached to the firearm to which they belong, as with the one for my Garand which was made for it and fits in holes in the stock. A very small kit - only barely worthy of the name - resides in the satchel that goes everywhere I do.

It is for the express purpose of cleaning the small revolver I typically carry, and only to the point of returning it to function. It's not for detail-stripping or maintenance. And it only has enough "consumables" (oil and "bore mops") for one or two go-rounds. The satchel spends most of its time in my car - even I don't think a cleaning kit should be a part of what used to be called "Tier 1" and is now referred to as "Every Day Carry."

For the rifle that typically rides around in the car, there's an old pull-through, more "bore mops," some q-tips and pipe cleaners, and a small scraping tool made from a coat-hanger. It occupies one of the pockets of the bandolier I have for it. Still far from a complete kit, but still enough to clear "environmental gunk" out and bring it to function.

The fact that I carry a small revolver and keep a simple lever-action rifle in my car means their kits can be correspondingly simple.

There are inexpensive ready-made kits that are far more comprehensive. One of my "Fast Packs" has just such a one - it will work on everything from my air rifle to my shotgun. I'm not about to make any suggestions as to what sort of kit you might need or want - the market is abundant, and they'll all do the job. What you choose is up to you, with the understanding that "choosing nothing" gets you exactly what you asked for.

Back to my gun-writer friend. Her term for a gun owner not having a gun when it's gun-time is "committing a forfeit." She refers of course to leaving a gun at home because you're "only going out for a minute" or some other such miscalculation. I include "not having a gun because the gun you have is inoperable." In my mind it is clearly a "forfeit" when one can't bring a mud-caked or dirt-befouled gun back to working order for want of anything to clean it. The little trifles I keep handy are as much as I need in order to keep from committing such a forfeit, and the cost (in money, bulk and weight) is immaterial.

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