always keeping bullets in magazine?
 

what does everyone do with their magazines. is it a good idea or not to always keep them loaded or will this effect the performance or spring in them when you do need them.

Springs lose their compression ONLY when cycled over and over. Keeping the compression there or leaving it empty will not effect the spring. You should be able to keep ammo in the mags and no harm will come to the springs at all.

Supposedly, it is the cycling (compression and decompression) that wears the spring down. It shouldn't hurt if it is in either relaxed (unloaded) or compressed (loaded) state.

What everyone else said... Unless its an old military m16 mag, then store it with no more than 28 rounds in it, because they (as with many things involving the m16) failed miserably in using their brains and made the mags in such a way that holding 30 rounds over compressed the spring which is very bad news.

I only keep two mag loaded at a time the rest are stored in the ammo locker with the ammo, the guns are always within three or four feet from my side of the bed.

All of my mags are loaded one round short. I don't know if it really helps or not, but it makes me feel better about those springs.

Magazine spring article.....

To put this one to rest, you have to understand creep. Creep is the slow flow of a non-ferric metal like copper, brass and lead under force. At temperatures outside of a furnace, steel doesn't have any appreciable creep. Under most conditions, steel flexes and then returns to its original shape. When pushed past its elastic limit, steel will bend and not return to its original shape. All designers of well-made magazines make sure the spring never approaches the elastic limit when the magazine is fully loaded. Honest. This means the spring will not weaken when the magazine is fully loaded -- not even over an extended time. Like 50 years. American Handgunner recently ran a story about a magazine full of .45 ACP that had been sitting since WWII and it ran just fine on the first try. So there you go.

Magazine spring madness: 'creep' to your 'elastic limit' to un-earth the urban legend of 'spring-set' | American Handgunner | Find Articles at BNET

I can attest to this too, my late father brought his late father's Colt 1911
home after my grand mother died in 1987. My granddad died in 1952 and his pistol had been kept in the brown leather flap holster in the top of a closet since his death. The leather and canvas magazine pouch had started to dry rot, but there was no rust on the pistol or spare magazines. All 3 magazines were fully loaded and all 3 were emptied without any problems.

I always keep atleast one clip fully loaded next to my bed. seems to work just fine.

I'm quoting and replying because this is such a common misconception(I thought this way until I read about the science involved) that it needs to be said over and over and over again to break the chain of misinformation. This is not a shooting issue, it's a scientific issue related to metal and it has been proven.

Now if there is another issue besides the spring that makes cycling a magazine make sense I'm all ears.