Gary Reeder
I am sure I mentioned this before but I will bore
Tuesday, August 20, 2019, 10:03

you with it again. When I was working at the radio station across from Ft. Campbell, I hunted and shot with several of the fellows in the 101st. They would call over to the radio station and ask when did I get off the air. I told them around 10 AM. They would tell me to meet them at gate 14 in the back of the post and we would go shooting. We often would go to one of the big Quonset huts where they kept arms and ammo. There would be cases and cases of AR-15 magazines packed full of magazines and they were all loaded. I noticed some had dates on them a year or two past that current date. I asked one of the armorers who was a good friend if that mattered that they had been loaded full well over a year past and he said it never had. He said when the magazines got to Viet Nam the guys there needed them right now, not an hour later after they loaded all of them.

Quite often one of the guys I shot and hunted with on post would check out a couple of M-16s and a case or 2 of ammo and we would go out to one of the ranges and shoot all afternoon and I don't ever remember any of the magazines having feeding problems.

So the gist of this long diatribe is no, I don't think being loaded full for a long time hurts the effectiveness of the magazines. Spring steel is just that, and it "never" loses it's spring tension.