I agree, its up to you when you do it, however, waiting isnt smart. What if something happens and you need the gun you "waited to clean"? Some guy is harming your family and you take a shot and miss, things go from bad to worse all because you didnt feel cleaning your weapon was important.
My opinion on that is that there is NO conceivable realistic instance in which you could not defend yourself or your family because your gun wasn't clean. If you take a shot and MISS, it is NOT because your gun was fouled -- and if you're accustomed to making such excuses for poor shots you really need to a) get better training, and b) be more honest with yourself.
As I said before:
Me said:
In fact, WHY would you trust a gun that had just been disassembled and reassembled? Would you not be significantly safer with a gun that had been (at least) function fired a few mags' worth to make sure everything went back as it should have and no extra bits of cleaning rag, bristles, debris, etc. got lodged somewhere they shouldn't have?
I don't ever take a freshly-cleaned gun to a match -- that's just begging to find that some pin wasn't seated fully or that I managed to put a spring in backward. I always put at least a week's practice session through the gun before an important shoot.
Why would carrying a defensive gun be any different?
Clean guns are NOT to be trusted!
accuracy of a gun partially depends on a clean bore, clean parts to work correctly.
Not really. Not in a defensive, close-to-medium range weapon. Not to any conceivable degree that could matter.
I shoot ~ 1,000 round between cleanings of my defensive and competition guns. I see no measurable accuracy loss over that number of shots. None. None AT ALL.
Clean parts to work correctly? No. They require serviceable parts that aren't so gummed up as to become UN-serviceable. Not spotlessly clean so you can eat off of them.
If I shot a gun 200 or 300 times, recently, the chances are very VERY good that it will fire the next time I pull the trigger, too. And, due to my own shooting practices I know that, there is a very high likelihood that it will keep on firing accurately and reliably for at least another 1,000 rounds beyond that.
Pull it all apart, clean it out, and put it back together. Will it fire the next time you pull the trigger? Well, you hope so. You
believe so, but you don't know that it went back together just right, no springs are displaced or in backwards, no pins were misplaced, no lint ball is hung up on some critical part that you didn't notice.
Shoot it and you'll KNOW it's right. You can't trust a CLEAN gun.