Does anyone else dream in terms of life-or-death situations where you draw your weapon, fire, and nada? You rack the slide, try again, still nothing. Try again, ammo ejects halfway, followed by all sorts of malfunctions you didn't even know were possible. The worst part is, it's your backup gun. Yes, you're down to your little pea shooter, and you can't even get it to function right.
I have this recurring dream about once a month. Probably brought on by the fact that I don't shoot my backup gun like I should. Because it's small, has doo-doo capacity, and just isn't that much fun. But I digress. My point is, your BUG (backup gun) should never be your backup. It's the backup to the backup. Or as Mike in Avenger of Blood so lovingly calls it, your OSP. Your oh-shit-pistol. If you have to use it, you're in deep shit.
I say all this to say, it's best practice to have two identical pistols of whatever you're primarily shooting to avoid the nightmare above. What I call your training gun and your carry gun. Put all the miles on your training gun and keep your carry gun in tip top shape. I also apply that to scheduled maintenance. Put the new parts in your carry gun, move its part to your training gun, and keep using it until it won't go no mo. (Probably not best practice, but it does cut down on tossing a part that potentially has quite a bit of life left in it.) I'll cover scheduled maintenance in a different post, or at least how it's approached in this household.
Check out the twins. Every guy's wet dream.
