Dry firing

The debate about whether or not to dry fire has been popping up on the gun blogs I follow lately. I’ve got a friend who swears to me that dry firing will damage my guns. He’s a good guy, and has probably forgotten more about guns than I’ve ever known, but I ignore him on this one. The three handguns I have for carry and regular shooting all came with manuals saying that dry firing will cause no damage to the gun, and I dry fire as much as I can (but not nearly as much as I should). In fact, I was just thinking about selling my Ruger GP100, and one of the main reasons I decided against it is that dry firing with a penny on the barrel is such good practice.

As far as I can tell, there are few things more useful for improving your handgun skills than dry firing. I practice with my carry gun several times a week, drawing it cleanly and dry firing it for about twenty minutes. I not only get the practice of focusing on my front sight and maintaining trigger control, but also get to work on some of those other fundamentals just as important for concealed carry: drawing and reholstering cleanly, and keeping my finger off the trigger until I have the target in my sights. Maybe it’s just an indication of my own limited experience, but I tend to think my dry firing exercises are a hell of a lot more important than shooting with live ammunition.

Here’s what some of the other folks have been saying:

View From The Porch (where it started):

As a matter of fact, my daily routine over a period of several years was to dry-fire my pocket J-frame, at first a 442 and then a 432, fifty times as rapidly as possible with each hand and then, while my fingers were good and worn out, try to hold the dot from the laser steady on the backstop through the normal double action pull. Now, both these guns had the newer frame-mounted firing pin, but still… Call that 150 dry snaps a night, pretty much every night, for a five year stretch, and you have a wheelgun that has been dry-fired well over a hundred thousand times. Last time I was under the sideplate, nothing was out of sorts, although I’ll note that the bearing surfaces of the lockwork were shiny.

Similarly, I couldn’t tell you how many times my two current carry 1911s have been dry-fired, except to note that I religiously replace the firing pin springs whenever I replace the recoil springs.

The rest.

The Firearm Blog:

I dry fire every gun I own and won’t buy a gun I cannot dry fire.

Guns, Holsters and Gear:

Reading Tam’s blog this morning, I discovered that there is still a largely overblown fear of damaging firearms by dry firing a handgun.  ‘Damaging guns by dry-fire’ seems to be the gun hobby’s version of ‘I woke up in a bathtub filled with ice-water and one of my kidneys was stolen.”  While it may be possible, it is highly improbable.

I’ve carried a gun professionally since 1995.  In 15 years, I have personally dry fired dozens of guns, including Glocks, Sigs, and Smith & Wessons – thousands of times each.

In every police academy and agency I have been associated with, firearms training included dry fire training, mostly without snap caps.  These academies and agencies have trained thousands of cops.

To date, I have not encountered a single officer, agency, or academy instructor who has experienced or seen first-hand any damage resulting to any modern handgun.  Although you should check your owner’s manual, I’m very comfortable with saying that modern pistols can be dry fired with little possibility of damage.

The rest.

The above also linked to another article about the benefits of dry firing:

Baby Steps

As with any kind of training, start with the very basics and build from there.  For dry firing, start with just trigger control and sight alignment.  Once you have cleared your firearm, obtain a good grip, align the sights and smoothly press the trigger.  Repeat.  Concentrate on the front sight and a smooth trigger press to the rear.  If you start to get fatigued, take a break.

When working on your sight alignment and trigger control, you can place a penny on top of your slide near the front sight.  If you are properly pressing your trigger, the penny stays in place.  If you are not properly pressing the trigger, the penny will fall off.  You can challenge yourself to see how many trigger presses you can make until the penny falls.

To get the best benefit from this practice, I feel that a mere 5 minutes of practice a day over several weeks will benefit you more than a lot of training all at once.

The rest.

I also spotted this advice on dry firing from The Katar.Net (via pistol-training.com):

Most people find dry fire incredibly boring — me included. I think it’s a mistake to set a time limit (i.e. dry fire for 20 minutes) because this kind of tedium winds up with you watching the clock.

I recommend giving yourself a set number and break it into small bites. I try to dry fire 200 times each day, broken into bites of 25. I like to start with 25 strong hand supported, 25 weak hand supported, 25 strong hand only, then 25 weak hand only. I usually stand very close to a bare wall for these, and allow myself to consciously reset the trigger.

For the next 100 I like to practice dry one-shot draws… if I’m feeling frisky I’ll incorporate weak hand draws. Generally I pick out an aim point for this series instead of the bare wall. Dry fire is great because it don’t cost nuthin’ and you can focus on perfect presentation and trigger press, allowing you to work on increasing your speed with live fire at the range.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but that “don’t cost nuthin’” line is pretty important. Ammunition’s loosening up and all, but it’s still not a sure thing, and most of my spare funds right now are going to research books for the next novel and some upcoming expenses in support of Pike.

And, given that a fair portion of what I’m practicing is concerned with safety — drawing safely, reholstering safely, and exercising trigger discipline — I’d rather get those mechanics down with an unloaded gun than with a loaded one. Especially in a stressful situation where my fine motor control may not be all it could.