Over the past few weeks, I’ve experienced a few mechanical malfunctions at local matches. One of those was caused by a well worn magazine that stopped feeding rounds correctly and ended up costing me a stage. Thanks to a few magazine management techniques however, I was able to isolate the culprit and kept it from affecting the rest of the match. That experience in addition to some discussion with other folks made me think it would be a good idea to visit the topic of magazine management. And so, here we are.

Magazine management isn’t a hot topic by any stretch of the imagination, but it can and does matter. Especially to those of us who practice, train, compete, or are involved in other activities with our firearms on a regular basis. After all, they are mechanical devices that are susceptible to wear and tear. Magazines aren’t exempt from that. In fact, as I’ve said before, magazines, or at least their components, are consumables that will need to be replaced at some point or another after sufficient use.

It’s worth noting that the key factor here is sufficient use. A frequent question that I get is, “Will magazine springs wear (or take a set) if they are stored loaded with ammunition?” The short answer to that is: No. The longer answer is that well designed and manufactured springs will not wear or take a set if loaded to capacity for a long period of time. It’s physics and material science. The wear on springs comes from repeated compression and expansion which comes from use. Dropping, stepping on, and kicking magazines can sometimes result in damage that renders a magazine useless prior to meeting or exceeding its serviceable lifetime. Quality construction can mitigate that to an extent, but the bottom line is well made magazines are going to fail from use. That’s all there really is to it.

So if we know magazines are going to eventually fail from use, then what can we do to minimize the impact a magazine failure has when it does fail? And that’s where magazine management comes in.

Magazine Identification

Magazine management begins with identification. We have to be able to distinguish one magazine from the rest. The easiest way to identify them is to label them.

Labeling magazines doesn’t have to be complicated. My preferred method is to number them using an oil-based paint marker. This method works, it’s inexpensive, and is commonly used by a lot of folks. There aren’t any major drawbacks to this approach that I can think of, but there are a few minor things that can get annoying.

The first annoyance is that oil-based paint will eventually rub off and will need to be reapplied. How frequently this occurs depends on the material the oil-based paint is applied to. It’s a nuisance at best, but I don’t find it difficult to live with. Those who find the annoyance to be more than a nuisance that is difficult to live with might want to consider using numbered grip tape labels like these offered by Dawson Precision. I haven’t tried them myself, but I suspect this approach is more durable than oil-based paint.

Another minor annoyance is that sometimes after cycling out failing magazines, a little mental mapping might be required to recall which magazines are reserved for specific activities. We’ll get into activity reservation shortly, but the mental mapping can be reduced either by documenting magazine assignments or coming up with different labeling schemes for different activities. I’ve played around with using different labeling schemes unsuccessfully. It can work up to a point, but it falls short when a specific magazine changes an activity assignment. Perhaps I haven’t come up with the right scheme yet. Nevertheless, I find myself always coming back to plain old numerical labeling.

Activity Assignment

So here is the thing. The magazines that get the most use are the most likely to fail first. Is this always the case? No, there are always exceptions, but those instances are the rare few and far between. With that in mind, consider the activities a specific firearm participates in. Looking closely at those activities, it shouldn’t be difficult to order those activities by the amount of ammo used in each of them.

Consider my VP9. The very one long time readers know was my go to for everything including defensive carry, training, practice, and competition for several years. The one that today almost has 15K rounds through it and I last wrote about when it reached the 10K round milestone. Of the 15K rounds that have gone through it, about 10K were fired while attending training courses, 4K in competition, 1K in practice and 0 in self defense. Based on those numbers, it is apparent that the activity that contributed the most wear and tear to magazines was training. It also happens that is an activity where a magazine failing has little to no consequence. The exception to that would be failing while attempting a qualification test to earn a certification. However, the consequences for having a high round count magazine fail in a defensive encounter could have catastrophic consequences.

Given the consequences associated with magazine failures in different activities and the activity usage profiles, I ended up acquiring a total of 10 magazines for that specific VP9 where three were reserved for training, three were reserved for competition, and three were reserved for defensive carry and I kept a spare around with the intention of rotating into use when a failure occurred. The rotation pattern is simple:

Bad magazine gets taken out of service
A magazine from the next highest use activity is reassigned for use in the activity where the failure was experienced
The a magazine from the next highest use activity gets reassigned to the activity where the replacement came from
Step 3 is repeated until the spare magazine gets assigned to the activity with the least use
A new spare is acquired

So when a training magazine fails, then a competition magazine becomes a training magazine. A defensive carry magazine becomes a competition magazine. Finally the spare becomes a defensive carry magazine and a new magazine is purchased.

Some readers will have noticed that I mentioned that 1K rounds of the 15K that have gone through the VP9 occurred in practice, but I didn’t have magazines assigned exclusively to practice activities. The reason for that wasn’t an oversight. It was that I also used the magazines allocated to training for practice. My rationale was that the consequence of a magazine failure was the same in both activities and there was no good reason for me to justify adding another group of three magazines for that purpose.

The groups that you come up with depend entirely on your priorities, perceived consequences during failure, and activities you and the specific firearm in question participate in.

Some folks, especially those who compete at the national level, may consider their magazine groups to be practice/training, local match use, and major match use. They may even go so far as to have two identically configured guns where one is used exclusively for major matches and the other serves as the practice, local match, and major match back up gun.

The point is activity assignment exists for good reason and while it isn’t required, it should be considered.

Ordered Usage Within Activity

This might appear to be a little anal retentive and it might very well be. However, having a specific magazine usage order for an activity has been a practice that has afforded me the opportunity to get the most out of my magazine management efforts. I suspect it will become clearer once I explain what I am doing and how it has benefitted me.

So what am I doing? Let’s assume I am using magazines numbered one, two, and three for competition. What I do with those is that I make sure that magazine one is the first magazine I use on each stage, magazine two is the first reload, and magazine three is my second, back up, or “whoopsie” reload. I take a similar approach in training where the same magazine will be the first to start work on a relay or drill and take the first drop.

This ordering does a few things for me.

First, because of that specific ordering, I know that magazine one will take the brunt of the wear and tear from feeding rounds into the chamber and being dropped the most. I also know magazine two will have the second most use and magazine three will have the least amount of use. Based on the rule of thumb that the most used magazine is most likely to fail first, I can expect it to fail first.

On the surface, that knowledge doesn’t appear very helpful, but it does help. Since the ordering has become habitual, it becomes pretty easy to know which magazine had issues. If the issues showed up before the first reload, then I know the culprit was magazine one. If the issues showed up after the first reload, then it was magazine two. If I had a whoopsie or needed a third reload and then the problems started, it was magazine three. There is no need to recall where I did the last mag change and find the dropped magazine to identify which one it was. In other words, it reduced guess work and investigation after encountering problems after a magazine failure.

After a failure, the bad magazine is removed from service (at least until it can be serviced) and a new order is established. So if magazine one failed, the new order is mag two, then three, and then spare (which may or may not be number four). If mag two failed, then the new order is mag one, mag three, and the spare.

In the case of the magazine failure that led to writing this post, the failed magazine was the first in the order of use. Given it has been the first magazine used in every match since December of 2023 with the exception of two matches, I was able to estimate the number of rounds the spring had fed into the chamber, the number of times it had been dropped, and number spring compression and expansion cycles with a little back of the napkin math as follows:

# of rounds: 27 matches times 6 stages per match (on average) times 15 rounds before first reload (on average) = 2,430
# of times dropped: 27 matches times 5 (out of 6) stages (on average) = 135
# of compression/expansion cycles: 27 matches times 6 stages per match (on average) = 162

To be fair those numbers are a little low since I have used this gun and the competition magazines in a training class early this year. Additionally, these numbers don’t appear all that high. At least, not enough to warrant a spring and follower replacement which the manufacturer recommends replacing biannually for avid shooters. Definitely not enough to warrant a magazine replacement. So what’s the next step? A good cleaning followed by a close inspection of the spring and follower for damage before being put back into service. If I find damage or it gives me trouble again, it will get a new spring and follower.

At any rate, the point of the ordered usage within an activity practice is that it can be used to help predict which magazine will fail first, more easily identify a misbehaving magazine, and estimate how much it’s been used to help better decide on the appropriate corrective action.

Closing Thoughts

Magazine management isn’t sexy. It isn’t fun. However, it is useful. It’s a practice that I would encourage to anyone who is an avid shooter to put into practice. Especially for guns that are used in multiple roles. Even more so if those roles and activities include defensive carry.

Remember things are going to fail. That’s just a fact for all mechanical devices. Wear and tear can’t be avoided. However, magazine management allows us to reduce the risk exposure we have to consequences from magazine failures by increasing the likelihood of failures occurring during activities where those failures have little to no consequence.