Border Patrol recalling M4's

[AKBEE]

Interesting article. Anyone know more about it? Haven't seen or heard anything about Colt having any problems.....

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/11/12...hem-in-danger/

[1Cor15:19]

Interesting article. Anyone know more about it? Haven't seen or heard anything about Colt having any problems.....

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/11/12...hem-in-danger/

I think the AR is a great platform, but many of its parts are consumable, meaning that with enough use they regularly wear out. I should think this is a fairly normal case of refurbishing high use automatic weapons. The failure rate is indicative of an agency that is grossly negligent in its firearm maintenance and the overall inefficiency of the Federal Bureaucracy in charge of such things...........

[AKBEE]

1cor15:19: You offer sound explanation as always- thank you!

[sweepint]

These weapon have to have been pretty old, I highly doubt that the border patrol shoot much as with most LE agency.

[1Cor15:19]

These weapon have to have been pretty old, I highly doubt that the border patrol shoot much as with most LE agency.

Doesn't take long to put 3-5000 rounds through an AR and that's enough to see problems, especially if there are some sustained sessions with significant heat.

[sweepint]

I sort of expected that response. 3000 to 5000 rds is nothing unless you are running one mag after another for the whole 5k. We don't replace barrels until after 8,000 rds and even with that does not mean the barrel is going to get replaced. I logged this year alone over 100,000 rds of 5.56, 7.62 and 9mm while giving instruction down range and I can account for one or two weapons that went down. One was gas rings on the bolt carrier group, the second was a fowled gas tube. I would agree a 100% with you if we were talking about the early model AR but not the ones we see to day. Barrels are better and tolerances are loose enough to sustain the carbon build up.
There just is not a lot to break down on these weapons, the biggest problem I have seen is when the gas rings realign with each other and will not let the weapon to cycle.

[Delta Tenderfoot]

When I went through the USBP academy at FLETC in Glencoe Ga.In 1983, we spent a lot of time on the range. We had Ruger Security Six .357s at the time, when I finished and went back to my field office, I had my sidearm with 10K already through it. BP Agents do A LOT of shooting.

As for the “recall”,I would offer that it’s a red herring; another attempt to demoralize the troopsby pooling weapons. Having 40% of a unit’sweapons down at one time is either criminal neglect or management induced stress.

2 cents

[AZVince]

The Border Patrol is one of the few federal agencies that make shooters out of Cadets.
They shoot a lot. The other guys, not so much.

Sent from my SGH-M919 using Tapatalk

[ADfields]

I sort of expected that response. 3000 to 5000 rds is nothing unless you are running one mag after another for the whole 5k. We don't replace barrels until after 8,000 rds and even with that does not mean the barrel is going to get replaced. I logged this year alone over 100,000 rds of 5.56, 7.62 and 9mm while giving instruction down range and I can account for one or two weapons that went down. One was gas rings on the bolt carrier group, the second was a fowled gas tube. I would agree a 100% with you if we were talking about the early model AR but not the ones we see to day. Barrels are better and tolerances are loose enough to sustain the carbon build up.
There just is not a lot to break down on these weapons, the biggest problem I have seen is when the gas rings realign with each other and will not let the weapon to cycle.

First nobody said they have malfunctions . . . "16,300 M4 carbine rifles were tested by the agency's office of training and development, which determined that more than 2,000 had the potential for malfunction." They are worn to the point of high potential for malfunction, that's something around 10K rounds according to most of the testing. But just because they could brake don't mean they will, just that the percentage that do brake crosses some arbitrary line. I suspect this is a political BS thing, the wider open the border the better this administration likes it . . . disarm the already overrun agency and very likely more will get past them.


Border Patrol shoots/trains a lot. They are more like the military than a policing agency. They work in squads that often confront large groups and get shot at much more than LEOs.

[AK Bearcat]

I wonder if the BP has a miantenance program in place? It sounds like they do not! Our weapons were inspected quarterly with a full blown inspection yearly. I would be willing to bet that if there was a good rpogram in place then some of these issues may have been found, early on.
I agree, in the this sounds like a lot of B.S.

[Armymark]

I know through my experience with the Army(27 years Infantry) that weapons are supposed to be gauged and Technically Inspected (TI'ed)periodically. As a drill sergeant they were done almost every 2 training cycles if I remember correctly. Any armorer out there should be able to look up when the weapons are due for TI where they are gauged. It sure as hell doesn't take a trained armorer to change a firing pin but, it may take one to determine that it or any other measureable technicality needs to be replaced by the appropriate Technical Manual (TM). This usually led to some weapons being pulled from the rack to be serviced because they fell out of tolerance or needed something done that was rather routine for an armorer. I think sharing weapons is wrong but, this article seems a little alarmist to me. It kind of suggests that 40% of the 16,300 weapons were "recalled" but 2000 is not close to 40% of 16,300. If they have agents not armed with a rifle when they should be, then to problem seems like they need to have more weapons at each location they issue weapons. There should be at least 10% more weapons than Agents and those numbers should be where the agents are located, not as a whole across the agency. If they have agents sharing weapons in some locations than others, then the discipline for maintenance is poor and commanders and armorers need the arses chewed!

[1Cor15:19]

I sort of expected that response. 3000 to 5000 rds is nothing unless you are running one mag after another for the whole 5k. We don't replace barrels until after 8,000 rds and even with that does not mean the barrel is going to get replaced. I logged this year alone over 100,000 rds of 5.56, 7.62 and 9mm while giving instruction down range and I can account for one or two weapons that went down. One was gas rings on the bolt carrier group, the second was a fowled gas tube. I would agree a 100% with you if we were talking about the early model AR but not the ones we see to day. Barrels are better and tolerances are loose enough to sustain the carbon build up.
There just is not a lot to break down on these weapons, the biggest problem I have seen is when the gas rings realign with each other and will not let the weapon to cycle.

100,000 rounds through how many weapons? 500 rounds through 200 weapons will get you your round count, but that's a long ways from establishing failure rates on any of the weapons in question.

For my part, I've seen issues with bolt lugs and firing pins that cause failure-to-feed/function with semi-auto ARs that were under 5000 rounds. It's not hard to imagine that full auto would create more of this in a sampling of 5,000+ weapons with many thousands of rounds downrange. I hadn't read that there were malfunctions, only that the rifles were developing potential issues. Sounds like a normal wear-and-tear issue to me, but as I said the fact that something in the order of 40% must be refurbished at once sounds like a failure in leadership. When considering a government agency I kind of expect both of these problems.....

[Malamute]

There have been a couple pretty good discussions of it on other forums. This one is good, though there was a lot of speculation and guessing until page 7, at which point there is some input from people actually involved. I didn't read the Fox link, though expect that its about average for most mainstream media, meaning not very accurate.

http://www.m4carbine.net/showthread....les-Deadlining

[Malamute]

I read the link, I'd read it before. The firing pin comment in the article is a red herring, firing pins werent by any means the only problem. Also, it wasn't a "recall" in the sense we think of in cars, with the factory calling them back in, its an inspection and trying to get them back in acceptable condition for issue and use. The terminology and quotes in the article is awful, which is about what I expected.

From those involved, there was no inspection or maintenance program for the guns. None. Some had been shot a lot, some not as much. Some were 10 years old and had been used as pool rifles for quals. The comments I've seen were that for the most part, the inspectors were professional, and tried to remedy whatever problems they could on the spot by replacing certain parts, though bolts are not one of the parts they are allowed to replace on the spot. There was no plan on what to do when guns needed work as far as replacing them or making sure agent had weapons to use, other than taking guns from other stations and spreading them around. That is more the problem than that they were doing the inspections and work.