Simple Preparedness Lesson — Gun Maintenance

PF9 Mag­a­zine release spring and replace­ment.

Just a quick note here.  Learned a valu­able les­son about spare parts, guns, shoot­ing, etc.  I was out with my firearms instruc­tor from GAPP a cou­ple weeks ago doing some basic pis­tol train­ing.  When I start­ed using my CCW firearm, which is a Kel-Tec PF9.  I prob­a­bly have about 500 rounds through it at var­i­ous ranges.  It’s been a great pis­tol to car­ry because it is thin and com­fort­able.  Addi­tion­al­ly, I enjoy shoot­ing it.  Many peo­ple tell me they feel like it kicks like a mule because it is such a light gun.  Nonethe­less, I like it.

To my point, how­ev­er, we were out at the range, and I began fir­ing.  After the first round, the round the mag­a­zine eject­ed, an expired round eject­ed, and a new one did not cycle.  I thought that was weird.  I reseat­ed the mag­a­zine, charged the weapon, and fired anoth­er round.  Exact same sce­nario as the first round.  I then switched mag­a­zines.  Same prob­lem.  I set and fired again, watch­ing where I put my thumbs think­ing I was squeez­ing the mag­a­zine release when I fired.  Nope, that was not the prob­lem.  I had Cam from GAPP fire the PF9 a cou­ple times, and the prob­lem was repli­cat­ed every time.  He took a clos­er look at it, and clear­ly there was a defect or prob­lem some­where.  So, I did a lit­tle research online and on Face­book.  I came across a Face­book group for PF9 own­ers, and joined, I also did a bunch of research online.  I found that this is a pret­ty com­mon issue for PF9’s.

I reached out to the Kel-Tec with the issue, and they prompt­ly go t back to me and asked for my address to send a new mag­a­zine release and spring.  It came in about four or five days.  Impres­sive cus­tomer ser­vice thus far.  I replaced both the slide release but­ton and spring today.  It was 20% a pain in the ass.  Not too bad.  And then it hit me.  Some­thing I already knew; I need more spare parts for gun main­te­nance.  How could I have for­got­ten about this.  There are so many aspects of dis­as­ter pre­pared­ness that I try to keep track of, this has com­plete­ly slipped my mind, and arguably my wal­let is prob­a­bly hap­py I’ve for­got­ten about it as well.  It seems like one of those top­ics you real­ly do not keep track of until you have an issue.

I real­ly just want­ed to make the point here that there are things we all for­get about or don’t think about until some­thing goes wrong.  Don’t kill your­self try­ing to do it all, and if you have to, make a list so that you can get to it when you can.  I’ll be doing some research on com­mon issues on all the guns that I own, and mak­ing some con­tin­gency plans around replace­ment parts to keep in stock so I can fix them on the fly.

An inter­est­ing les­son for me…