Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Dry firing

I’m getting more and more a fair weather shooter when it comes to practice. When the weather gets bad, I dry fire a bit - I have several targets on walls. Some targets are pictures of elk or deer and sometimes I dry fire at deer or elk mounts. The family cats also make good moving targets for the dry fire practice. Seems to me that with the ammo scarcity and expense, dry-firing makes more sense as a supplement to the practice with ammo.
How many of you dry-fire for part of your practice routine?

Nope. Have several air rifles and .22's for cheap practice and can step out onto the back porch and shoot any time.

I dry fire more than I live fire , excellent and inexpensive way to develop good habits.

I do it pretty regularly, but at stuff out in the yard at 25-50 yards.

It’s about convenience. There’s no ammo shortage here, and a range is literally 2 miles away as the stray shot flies.

I sometimes dry fire on the range a few times to check my holding and trigger control technique. I think I shoot enough that I don't really need to do it for practice at home.

When i went to (LE) sniper school in 1996, one of our instructors was former Seal sniper. His advice/ homework to us after two ful days of dry firing was to continue that practice every week when we had graduated from the course. He mentioned that when he was depolyed he did not always get trigger time. So he would practice dry firing when he could as a way to stay sharp. Cheap practice for the real stuff.

It's a great way to practice and stay sharp.

I do several times a week with shotguns, pistols and rifles...

every time I pick one up( center fre, not rimfire)

I use dry fire to work on my grip/trigger control with the pistols I shoot a lot.

If a trigger finger is a student, then dry firing is the finest professor available. In fact, the practice of dry firing allows the shooter to break down the process of actually firing a gun into smaller 'rubrics' that are more easily digested. You can advance a shooting skill set much farther than you think with dry fire practice.

I’ve been shooting a new model 69 a lot and I dry fire practicing double action trigger pull probably 10-1 dry fire to live fire. I’ve been shooting it so much lately that when I took my G19 out for some practice it felt like I was shooting a .22. 😁. Shooting a .44 mag makes one a better shooter of everything else AS long as you don’t develop a flinch. 😉

SOP for me - especially when I have 5 rifles at the range. More to remind me of how each trigger breaks.

I exceeded my recoil tolerance with some heavy bullet 45 Colt loads (for Ruger Bisley and stronger handguns) and honestly have not been the same since.

You can do every thing right, and a poor trigger press will screw it all up, dry firing will never hurt your shooting. Rio7

Dry firing is one of the secrets of high achieving competitive shooters. Key to good use of dry firing is careful and honest assessment of sight movement during and after the shot execution. Trigger pulling without this careful analysis just gets you a stronger trigger finger.

Absolutely critical for flintlock proficiency...the follow through of maintaining the sight picture AFTER the hammer fall.

For those who dry fire (centerfires), do you use snap caps or just let the pin fall on an empty chamber?

Empty chamber mostly, but that’s a good question. I’d like to see some expert opinions on that question. My dry firing is mainly limited to the first few trigger pulls at each range session with both center fire handguns and rifles.

Common sense should tell you that slamming a small diameter, hardened steel rod to a dead stop repeatedly does it no good. I've replaced enough broken firing pins, centerfire, rimfire and shotgun in my life to not be a fan. Dry firing is never going to be as good as actually putting bullets in targets. Since I was smart enough to stockpile plenty of ammo and have a very convenient place to shoot {I'm typing this in my living room and my range is literally 20' away} I'll continue with live fire as my preferred mode of practice.