Home CMMG Should You Store Your Magazines Loaded?

Should You Store Your Magazines Loaded?

604
37

In this video, Mike takes Magpul PMAGs that have been loaded for 10 or more years and sees if they’ll feed in his 5.56 DISSENT. Answering the old question of “is it ok to keep your magazines loaded?”

Go to to sign up to be a CMMG Insider, and you can click the home page icon to take you to our website.

Check out our Instagram
Give us a shout on Twitter

Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, social media, internet forums. etc.

37 COMMENTS

  1. brotha n fellow patriots out there , buy n use mags from a u.s.veteran owned company out there only ! , also military vets clean n take care of there mags n springs too , thanks > tom !

  2. might be simpler to best physics of springs themselves.
    Can you over compress a regular, car, magazine spring?
    hypothesis: I would think by bending metal potentially it could loose its life span. springs loose their strength from over expansion. Possible compression and over compression past the point of normal would cause failure. Have some magazines reloaded while your stockpile untouched.
    also I've seen video on WW2 magazine or X years still functioning.

  3. This is just another piece of fudd lore that never had any basis in reality. It was probably started by Hackathorn, and Ayoob. I still remember for years being told that on a slide lock pistol reload you could enduce a malfunction if you used the slide release/slide stop lever to release the slide. That proved to be inaccurate, and a much less efficient way to reload when speed is vital.

  4. Thanks, I didn't know that bit about the covers taking pressure off of the feed lips. Sometimes those covers don't seat well (or at all) on my gen3 pmags and when they don't I've tended to just not try. I'll revisit those next time….

  5. But if my magazines are loaded it means I want to shoot, which unloads them, so I load them again, which makes me want to shoot again and.. you see … it's a satisfying but expensive cycle. I tend to only stop shooting once I'm out of ammo. lolol

  6. There have been people that have found magazines that were loaded interwar 1911 magazines that loaded sometime in the 1930s or early 1940s and left as that for 70 years. They worked.
    As Mike states, it's compression/decompression of the magazine springs that weakens them (or over-compression, but that's unlikely if not impossible in some magazine designs).

  7. I sometimes find thirty-round magazines with only twenty rounds loaded in them. Sometimes, I'll have a box of twenty rounds and load them in a magazine just to avoid having odd boxes of ammo sitting around. I'm guessing that having them only two-thirds loaded doesn't hurt the magazine regardless of whether I have a dust cover.

Leave a Reply