Border Patrol Short a few Thousand Guns
A large portion of the U.S. Border Patrol’s inventory of 16,300 Colt-made M4A1 rifles have been pulled from service after inspectors found many to be unserviceable. as I covered over at Guns.com
The news came as reports surfaced of agents stationed across the Southwestern border with Mexico having to pool rifles following a series of bad inspections, or worse, go without during a time of increased tensions along the international boundary.
Over at Gun Nuts, it seems they have the inside scoop on this and its a barrel issue…kinda…
However, the rifles are being deadlined at very high rate and sometimes for the wrong reasons. One of these wrong reasons is diagnosis of a “bent barrel.” A bent barrel is indeed an extremely worrisome problem but to diagnose it, one must have the barrel’s bore spotlessly clean. I spoke at length with Greg “Sully” Sullivan of Defensive Edge Training regarding this and he confirmed that even just a bit of fouling in the bore will absolutely throw off the reading and make the armorer think the barrel is bent. Sully was kind enough to expound upon the issues common to police and (especially) military trained armorers inspecting rifles:
Testing a barrel for straightness without thoroughly cleaning the barrel ahead of time
ofttimes armorers use the wrong or an incorrect headspace gauge as Sully has found that many of these gauges are meant for both 5.56x45mm and .223 Remington. This is incorrect as 5.56 does indeed vary slightly from the .223 headspace specifications. This product on Amazon is a case in point regarding the widely available yet incorrect headspace gauges. Sully and Defensive Edge uses only Pacific Tool & Gauge headspace gauges.
Border Patrol and other armorers recommending and allowing only Breakfree CLP instead of something like Slip2000 EWL (Sully’s favorite) which breaks down the carbon.