(first post)
I have not been a gun owner for long, fired about 400 rounds through about 7 different guns, then decided since my wife liked the looks of the basic Ruger MK3 and was afraid of the bigger calibers to start off with the MK3.
I must say, at first it was a great gun (the first 200 rounds) because I purchased some CCI mini mags or whatever they are called for it. Those worked flawlessly.
Then when we were browsing the local Walmart I realized they sell ammo, and bought 6 Federal 550 round bulk packs. Also bought (upon my buddies reccomendation) some CCI shot shells. Had 1 jam and 1 failure to fire out of about 400 rounds. (I assumed it was the cheap ammo) Then played with the shot shells, horrible mistake as one broke (as pointed out, yes it was the feed ramp that made the plastic shell break) and shot and powder ran through the mag and the gun. A quick wipe of the gun and we were playing with it again, but after finishing that box of ammo, I noticed one of the mags was pretty sticky, crunchy, dirty (probably the one that had the broken shot shell pour into it?) Anyways, went home, dissasembled everything, cleaned it, lubed it, reassembled it.
The next day I went to the range and ran 5! 550! round box's through it! No cleaning, 4 failures to eject, 3 failures to fire. The mag is still sticky, so i bought another mag and everything is good, cleaned, lubed again, and played more at the range, enough for the Range Officer to ask me how many rounds I was planning to run through that day. Ha! Gotta love dumping $100 bucks worth of Bulk Ammo through a 22lr in one standing. (my feet were tired!)
So to clarify... Base madel MK3, 6k rounds through it (in under a week), less than a dozen failures, and works GREAT! In fact now that its broken in, it works even better.
I cleaned it, took my Sister in laws out to the range and let them each run 200 mini mags through it, not a single problem.