"
I have"
my ammo has"
the magazine has"
the recoil spring has"
etc.
But it is never the gun's fault, LOL.
Sometimes it takes time to figure out just what is causing the whole system to malfunction, and that's when the finger gets pointed either ammunition, magazines, or the gun. And if it is the gun, it takes time to figure out what is going wrong, and recoil springs do cause malfunctions, (particularly in ancient S&W M46's!)
1911 magazines feed well in one pistol, and not the other!
When I was shooting IPSC in the early 1980's, custom 1911's with compensators, and gimmicks were all the rage. And some competitor would bring his latest, high dollar tricked out 1911 and immediately have jams and malfunctions. However, factory guns tended to perk along nicely. That made an impression on me, such gimmicks and gizmo's are nice, but if they cause malfunctions, I did not want them.
This rifle is on its third barrel, and I have shot the snot out of other M1a Super Matches and National Match M1a's.
I can say I never had a malfunction that was not caused by me. The one I do recall was due to the Johnson paste wax I slathered on cases so my expensive LC brass would not get case head separations. I had a couple of bolt rides in cold weather, the bolt closed on an empty chamber in rapid fire. Fixed that by polishing the rounds, the glumps of paste wax I left on cases were actually slowing the rise of the cartridge stack in the magazine, in cold weather. After polishing my rapid fire rounds, I never had a malfunction. I also learned to small base size, used case gauges, reamed primer pockets to depth and seated all primers by hand. And I used powders and bullets that everyone else used: 168 Match and IMR 4895. I also never, ever, hot loaded the mechanism, and so, high 90's to snow covered firing points, the rifle always functioned.
The most common malfunction I observed with Garands and M1a's was not really the fault of the rifle. Shooters wanted light, clean trigger pulls. Sears do wear, and if the sears were stoned too much, the hammer would not be caught and the rifle would double during rapid fire. Boom, boom! We always gave the shooter an alibi at club matches, because the shooter had to be convinced his rifle was bad, or he would get mad and not want to leave the match. Inevitably, the rifle would malfunction on the ailib relay, and an unhappy shooter left for the day.
I did see one malfunction wiht an M1a that was weird. I was scoring a shooter during 300 yard rapid fire prone at Camp Perry. He was firing an M1a and was using Government white box LC match ammunition. If you are a scorer you count the rounds your shooter is firing, to make sure the number is ten. Not nine, or 11, for example. On one rapid fire round the operating rod moved, but the case did not eject, and the round hit the bull. The shooter called for an alibi, and when the operating rod was pulled back, the empty case ejected. I don't know how that could happen. I figure a low velocity round would be a low, low shot. If it was, it was not lower than the black. His rifle functioned perfectly the rest of the day.
This bolt came off a virtually new M1a. It is not a GI bolt, this is after Springfield Armory ran out of GI bolts. This sort of thing is probably due to wrong steels or a bad heat treatment.The shooter was using GI National Match ammunition, so probably not due to reloads.
AR's were much more temperamental. All the 223 has is velocity and the round has to be pushed right at the edge, because it is already too wind sensitive. If a primer blows, and drops into the mechanism, I have had trigger mechanism jams that could not be cleared until the trigger pins were pushed out, and the primer fished out of the bottom of the mechanism. I have seen AMU shooters who removed the lower from the upper, beating the lower against the ground, in an attempt to dislodge the blown primer from the mechanism. That will ruin a 600 yard score, as the wind changes before the shooter can reassemble his rifle! I had malfunctions with old GI magazines, those aluminum GI magazines were a poor design from the beginning and the source of the AR15 greatest unreliability. The Army Infantry School complained about magazines being expensive and heavy, and Stoner gave them what they wanted: cheap and disposable. Early literature called the magazines disposable. Guess they were not supposed to be used twice, so, my bad. While I ran the firing line at matches, I saw a number of magazine/ammunition malfunctions, for example, the round would go up under the gas port tube. Could be a combination of too hot a round, or spread magazine feed lips. That's one reason every AR15 competitor learned to carry a needle nosed mulitool. The ejection port is too small to pluck a jam out with your fingers.
Given a well debugged weapon, careful ammunition use, and replacing worn parts (particularly springs), a firearm can be very reliable. One must expect though, that things will break. I have broken Garand firing pins, extractors, while shooting because the were old before I ever received them. Push feed extractors will break in time, and you cannot blame the gun for that, there is a limit to the thickness of an extractor. And then, triggers and sears will wear out. So what, replace them.
CZ PCR (over 800 rds.) and 
