I've always assumed that some good people put many hundreds of hours into a gun so it would perform. As such, I shoot everything I own (with the exception of a gold-plated Colt SA that I bought in a moment of utter madness). Every gun carries battle scars. My favorite rifle shows worn blue where it has sat in the rack in my ph's vehicle through miles and miles of bloody Africa and I wouldn't retouch it for the world. As for bad weather, Brit guns were made to be shot in the worst climate in the civilized world. I will have deep gashes or real damage worked on. Otherwise, each scrape is a memory, like the scratch in a rifle butt where I was leopard crawling towards a kudu.
