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I’ve seen a few people lately being pretty dismissive of dry fire practice. I have to disagree with that attitude. Dry fire does have limitations, but it also has lot of upsides.
Table of Contents
Limitations.
They’re pretty obvious.
- There’s no noise; I suppose it could make you more susceptible flinching when shooting live rounds, but I’ve never experienced that, myself.
- No recoil, either. I’m not sure that’s a 100% downside. You’re more likely to be startled when live firing, but it will also train out tendencies to anticipate recoil.
- Kind of a pain with autoloaders. After every trigger pull you have to either pull a hammer back or partially cycle a slide to reset your striker. This is not an issue with revolvers.
- Depending on the gun, you may or may not need some snap caps. Rimfire certainly needs snap caps. You won’t need them for most center fire, but there are exceptions: My Beretta Pico’s manual says not to “regularly” dry fire the gun without a snap cap. Read your firearm’s manual. Snap caps are pretty cheap so that’s not a major detriment. I normally get mine at Amazon. Brownell’s also has a decent selection.
Benefits.
Other than if you need a snap cap, it costs nothing. Point and click is all you need. Does it help? Well, you decide.
The only thing I did between the two target pictures below was a week of dry fire. I work from home and had a holster to test, so I practiced drawing and pulling the trigger in my work down times. I didn’t count, but probably 50 reps or so a day for a week.
Picture #1 is before dry fire; the Glock 19 on the top target, and the two lower ones were a Springfield Hellcat I’ve not written a review on yet.
In this after picture, the Glock is still on top. The Hellcat is the lower two on the right side. The left side was my Taurus PT-22. Since I bought it for trigger work and I clearly need some I’ll be taking it to the range regularly for a while.
As you can see, I do need more work. That’s fine. I’ll be doing that this week, then hopefully back to the range next week to see some more improvements.
I see some significant improvements, though, especially with the Glock.
Dry fire aids.
As I said, other than maybe some snap caps, dry fire costs nothing. That doesn’t mean it can’t be improved by spending a little.
I picked up this laser snap cap on Amazon a while back. I love the thing. I don’t use it to zero sights or anything; I don’t think it’s precise enough for that. I use it to check my trigger pull. It’s on long enough that if you’re pulling the trigger you can pretty clearly see the laser move if you’re doing it wrong.
According to the reviews it also works with some of the laser sighting systems. I don’t have any of those and only care about making sure it stays steady during the trigger pull. It does that quite well.
They come in different calibers. The one above is 9mm, but I see .45 ACP, .380 ACP, and .40 S&W. I guess revolver types are out of luck. I may look around later to see if I can find something for them, but for now the 9mm is the one I need the most.
Other considerations.
As I mentioned, I was doing this while working. I was paying attention to the process as I was drawing and “firing.” Just randomly pointing and clicking isn’t going to help.
I only needed a second or two of focus per rep, but I did need it. I think if I set aside some time, 10 minutes or so, to just focus on what I was doing it might be even better.
Conclusion.
As I said at the top, I can’t agree with the people being dismissive of dry fire. My pictures speak for themselves; a few hundred reps, paying attention to what I was doing, helped quite a bit.
And yes, there is still more work to be done. But that’s always true, isn’t it?
