Interesting story in a recent issue of the Federalist Patriot (August 12th).

Basically, the environmentalists (specifically the EPA) during the Clinton administration decided that the U.S. Military shouldn’t be using gun oil that involved Freon CFC’s (which contain elements that harm natural ecosystems. As anyone who has handled an M16 or AR15 (the standard U.S. service rifle, for those who aren’t paramilitary experts) knows, it is a very dirty gun.

When the trigger is pulled, the gun uses the heated gas from the burned gunpowder to propell the bullet out of the barrel. However, it also returns those heated gases to the chamber through a tube in order to push the bolt back and automatically load a new shell into the chamber, ready for the trigger to be pulled again. That’s the very basis and idea of the machine gun- no intervention is needed to allow it to continue its operation.

However, gunpowder is a fairly dirty substance. Thus, fouling literally cakes up on the face of the bolt- the device that actually allows a fresh round to be chambered, fired, and removed. Over time, depending on the local condition, this can cause the gun to jam and fail to load a new shell- an extremely dangerous occurrence in combat.

So the “old” gun oil that the military employed used the strong CFC called Freon to dissolve as much of the fouling as possible. And it worked perfectly, too. Then in the 1990’s under the Clinton administration, the EPA began enforcing very strict guidelines environment friendly substitutes for CFC’s. The Dept. of Defense was asked to remove Freon from their gun oil and replace it with a more environment friendly altenative. They complied.

You get three guesses as to what happened, and the last two don’t count. Yeah, you guessed it, the new “alternative” doesn’t work as well.

Seems as though it takes something fairly strong, like Freon, to clear off the bolt and inner workings. This new stuff forms a horrendous slurry when combined with the fine sand of, say, Iraq and causes even more jams than if nothing was used at all. In fact, a considerable minority of soldiers have simply ceased to use their M16’s now and instead use captured AK-47’s, which are immensely more rugged and reliable in the desert compared to the messy and sticky M16/lubricant combination.

Oh, and by the way, these EPA types are the same people who got the crew of the Columbia killed with the weak, environmental-friendly foam that they required NASA to install in place of the proven variety.

Peashooters, indeed.