Filth

The uncle who taught me to shoot was influenced by his military experiences about cleaning.

"The gun should be spotless when put away and have a protective coating of light oil applied to it.  This oil should be renewed as often as it took to prevent rust."

The Army reinforced this idea to me.  I see why now that I'm in my dotage.  If they didn't force privates to clean their rifles, the rifles would never get cleaned or lubricated.

Zero preventative maintenance on any machine will eventually get to the point where it gums up the works and stops the machine from functioning.

A couple of boxes of ammo at the range does not constitute this level of filth.

I read over and over the round counts people have put into ARs without cleaning and without function problems.  I've seen pictures of the accumulated grime.

I could never let it go that long!

My tolerance for a dirty gun is far better than my uncle, but I start getting twitchy when my hands come away with carbon on them when I shuffle them around to get to the back of the safe.  But I notice that it's fastidiousness not concern about function that gets me to cleaning.

Still...  The haughty dismissiveness about how gun x could never go y number of rounds without cleaning is preposterous.  Especially when so many people have gone to the trouble of documenting it.

ARs and 1911s can't go y without cleaning and parts breaking?  Lots of examples out there doing just that.

AK and Glock never fail and don't need cleaning?  There's just as much documentation showing that they can fail and will fail from accumulated debris if you let go long enough.

Never say never.  Never say always.

I cannot help but think that a good hunk of this is "grass is always greener".

Another amusing part of this reliability and cleaning discussions comes from reading old Ordnance reports from when smokeless powder had just stopped being a French state secret.  They're doing comparisons between the issue guns of the day and talking about the inherent reliability of the actions and doing so independently from the reliability of the feed system; for bolt actions.

Go to any forum where there's a fully developed thread on AK v AR and you're going to see the exact same arguments as were put forth just prior to The Great War War to End All Wars World War One concerning the old and busted Rifle, Short, Magazine, Lee-Enfield Mark III against the new hotness Gewher 1898 Mauser 1895 and 1893.  To the point that the Brits adopted the AK, um, Mauser in the Pattern 13.