I just had a thought: after I bought the rifle, I tried practicing loading the mag tube a few times just to see how it worked, as this is my first lever gun besides my Marlin Guide Gun (and I basically just feed sinlge rounds into that beast). Turns out I was in fact doing it wrong (I thought I was supposed to push the cartridge all the way in, I was saying to myself "boy this is tough to load" until I realized you're supposed to leave the base of the previous cartridge outside of the loading gate. Feel free to laugh at me
), but found out how it was supposed to be done, so I used (for the most part) the same 6 or 7 rounds to practice it the right way a few times. It worked and I went from not knowing what I was doing to loading it rather quickly in a few tries (no, I never chambered a round or anything like that).
Anyways, my point to all this is the fact that those same rounds I was playing with were all in the twenty round box of ammo I took out to the range today. Is is possible - due to repeated loading/unloading - that some of the primers that were duds today somehow got "squished" so to speak by the pressure of the rounds behind them during my schenanigans from earlier on? I can't really feel much of a difference between the primer "depth" of the duds and the fired casings, but then again we are talking fractions of a millimeter between a light strike and a "BOOM".
Also, I went back and did some more investigating and found that, if I manually put a spent casing in the chamber, it actually did make a small difference as to how far up the lever was. Even past the "safety" point, the bolt contiuned to move forward like maybe 1/3rd of a millimeter. The problem is that I really, really had to be gentle to not quite put the bolt fully forward. Any sort of normal manipulation of the handle will put the bolt all the way forward to stay. Granted, this is with a spent case, which is very snug inside the chamber, while an unfired round will glide right in/out. With a normal round I don't think it would make a difference.
Sorry for the long post...