As I have mentioned before, I shoot my "collectible" guns, but I take precautions. I remove the commonly broken numbered parts, extractor, firing pin, perhaps the holdopen, and replace them with non-matching spares BEFORE I shoot. Then, barring any catastrophic failure, I put the matching originals back in the gun when I get home and clean it. Folks have mentioned cracked frames, broken breech blocks and such, but I am willing to risk those, as I think those are rare occurances. Plus, my intuition tells me that the guns that suffer major failure were abused at some point, such as firing British machine gun ammo, or bad "hot" handloads or some other tom-foolery. But, that being said, I like to shoot old guns, and don't care if that offends a "collector". I have 40,000 dollar guns that go to the range, and I rather enjoy shooting them. It is why I buy them. If I want wall hangers, I can get those cheap. If others want to buy guns and NOT shoot them, thats OK too.
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