What To Do If Your Handgun Breaks

By G. Halek

When a person says his gun broke, it could mean anything. There’s a lot of things that can go wrong on a handgun but most of them are fixable. Outside of some catastrophic failure where the pistol breaks in two or blows up (extremely rare), there’s almost always a way to fix a gun.

The first priority should always be safety. If you are at the range when a gun breaks, keep the muzzle pointed down range until you can clear the chamber. Attempt to rack the slide (upper receiver) to the rear and lock it in place. In general, when doing this, make sure no one’s face is near the chamber.

A break is when a component on the gun is physically broken, i.e. cracked, split, splintered, etc. A gun failure is when a gun fails to operate. Gun failure does not equal broken gun.

Gun failures are many times more common than gun breaks.

Here’s a brief run down of most typical failures:

• Failure to feed
• Failure to eject (a round or a spent shell casing)
• Failure to fire
• Slide (upper receiver) locking to the rear after every shot
• Double feed or bore obstruction
• Upper receiver is locked
• Magazine fails to drop
• A sight dot pops off
• Cracked lower receiver
• Trigger fails
• Striker …Read the Rest

  Source:: Concealed Nation