Dry Firing Rules

Last week, I gave my justifications for using dry firing as a regular technique for improving marksmanship. I mentioned that I cover some rules meant to make dry firing safer. Here are the dry-firing rules that the DPS teaches all new recruits in their training academy:

1) Unload your gun in a specific spot reserved for that purpose. Leave all of your ammo at that place.

2) Go to a 2nd specific reserved spot in another room to do the actual practice. That room must contain no other guns or ammo.

3) Use only one pre-determined target.

4) Practice whatever skill you plan to improve (trigger squeeze, drawing from concealment, drawing from concealment while rolling on the carpet, or whatever) for the time that you have allotted, or until you have achieved the results you planned for that practice session.

5) This may be the most important step: Make a definite mental break when you are done dry-firing. It is best to say to yourself aloud, “I am done dry-firing”.

6) Go back to the place with your ammo, and either restore your gun to carry status, or stow it.

Always start your dry-firing practice at rule #1!

Dry Firing

One of the things I cover in my CHL class is how to dry-fire safely. I present some rules for dry firing that arose from an unfortunate incident involving a DPS officer, and show how each of those rules is designed to prevent a similar negligent discharge.

Why would we want to practice dry-firing? There are some excellent reasons for practicing with an empty handgun, but at least one drawback (covered below).

The first reason that occurs to just about everyone is that dry-firing is cheaper than live firing. That was true even before the availability and price of ammo got ridiculous a little over a year ago. But that might not be the most important reason.

Note that dry-firing a center-fire pistol manufactured in the last 100 years or so should not damage it. However, if you are the least bit concerned about that aspect of dry-firing, you can get a dummy round (the ones sold at the local gun stores are the SnapCap brand) with a semi-hard plastic insert in the place of the primer. They cost a couple of dollars each, and are sold in packs of 6. Although pricey, they can be re-used indefinitely. If you have a rim-fire gun (typically a .22), you MUST use a dummy round to prevent damage to the firing pin.

Dry-fire practice gives you the opportunity to go through some things that you just can’t reasonably do with a loaded handgun. Indeed, practicing a draw from concealment will get you kicked out of most shooting ranges. With an empty handgun, you can (relatively) safely practice things like jumping sideways or rolling on the carpet while drawing from concealment — skills that might someday come in very handy.

Dry-fire is also very good for marksmanship training. This may be counterintuitive, since the main difference is that in dry-firing, the gun doesn’t make a loud noise and try to jump out of your hand, so it isn’t ‘realistic’. The problem is that even though you should always perform the squeeze sequence so that the trigger-break is a surprise, the fact that you know that the gun is going to recoil makes it very difficult to avoid anticipating it. Dry-firing leads to a different type of “muscle memory”, where you honestly are not considering the recoil, but the follow-through. That “muscle memory” will carry over to live-fire practice (and to actual defense use), and your marksmanship will be better on that account.

You can get some of the benefit of that no-recoil “muscle memory” by getting a .22 conversion kit if there is one available for your particular handgun, and use that for at least part of your live-fire practice. While it still makes a noise, it isn’t nearly as loud, and the recoil is so slight you might not even notice it.

A potentially major drawback of dry-firing is that you don’t get quite the same trigger pull sequence as you get with live fire. For instance, with a Glock, you have to manually rack the slide every time before you get to the normal trigger pull, because the Glock is single-action-only. On a D/SA pistol, the first round can be fired double-action (the trigger-pull cocks the gun) and subsequent rounds are then fired single-action, because the recoil of the live round does the work of cocking. When dry-firing a D/SA, every trigger pull is double-action, which is typically several times the force required for single-action. I have actually experienced a case (during a DPS range test) where this slight difference in “muscle memory” caused me to drop a point on the 2nd round. After that, I knew what the problem was, and corrected it — but in a real firefight, that might be a disaster.

Still, I recommend a combination of live fire and dry fire practice. As mentioned above, a .22 conversion kit can be useful for practicing your live-fire marksmanship at a cost substantially lower than using centerfire ammo.

Is it time to buy a gun?

For me, it’s time to buy a gun pretty much anytime I can afford another one. In fact, I’m shopping for a couple of them right now. I want a .22LR semiauto and a .22LR DA revolver for demonstration use in the NRA Basic Pistol course. Maybe more than one of each. And eventually, I’d like to get a 9mm SA that has an available .22LR conversion kit so that I can afford to practice more with it.

But lately, I’ve been getting news from some unusual sources about the increased interest of the general public in buying guns. Any time the government makes some obvious move to restrict gun ownership, gun sales soar. Clinton’s gun ‘ban’ did more to boost gun sales than just about anything else he could have done. And one of the side-effects of the last presidential election was a run on guns and ammo — starting about a month before election day. At that time, I also experienced a sizable jump in demand for my CHL classes. During the last week of December 2008, I had over 100 students, which caused a temporary crisis when I ran short of official certificates (that problem has been eliminated now). The demand for CHL classes and the shortage of ammo persisted for several months (and ammo is still more expensive than it was in 2008), although by last April, the CHL class demand had returned to a more manageable level, and I even had some classes that did not sell out.

The demand for CHL classes is once again growing dramatically. All of a sudden, I’m scrambling to make arrangements for larger classes, and having to turn away potential students because of schedule and range limitations. I’ve started bringing in another instructor to handle the renewal students, which means that I don’t have to turn away so many initial applicants. Yet, there hasn’t been any specific governmental action that I can readily identify as being a cause for this.

Tuesday, I got a financial newsletter with the title “It’s Time to Buy a Gun.” Interestingly, the author also could not point to a particular triggering event. Here is what he had to say:

“But good times for gunmakers are almost always temporary. The boost in sales caused by political uncertainty never lasts more than a few months. That’s a big reason why gunmaker stocks – despite achieving high double-digit sales growth – haven’t really participated in the market rally over the past year. Stocks in the sector trade, on average, for only seven times earnings and 0.7 times sales.

“However, there’s something different happening this time. In the 22 years I’ve known my wife, not once, ever, has she even considered owning a gun… until now.”

He went on to advise a covered-call strategy for a gunmaker stock. Since I didn’t pay any money, I don’t know which gunmaker he is recommending.

Since there doesn’t appear to be an overt gun-grab in progress, I’m guessing that this is a general reaction to the economy, and a suspicion that our government is lying to us about the health of the banking system. Idle chat with other CHL instructors has included phrases like “stocking up on water and canned goods — and ammo, so I can keep the water and canned goods.” I don’t really think that rioting in the streets is going to happen in the very near future, but I can certainly see that having an emergency stash of distilled water and canned food is relatively cheap insurance in any case, and it’s better to have and not need than to need and not have. So, yes, I have several weeks’ worth of distilled water and canned/dry foods in the pantry. I use distilled water on a regular basis for my heated humidifier on my CPAP, and I remember clearly back when some idiot government bureaucrat said that everybody needed to stock up on distilled water, plastic sheeting, and duct tape right away — and I was unable to buy distilled water for nearly a month after that.

That’s my guess, anyway.

If you think you have a better explanation, please enlighten me in the comments.

Related post: What Kind of Gun Should I Buy?

What kind of gun should I buy?

About once, sometimes as many as three times, a week, I get a call from someone who has little or no experience with handguns, asking me for advice on what kind of gun to buy. Unfortunately, that question falls into the same category as “What kind of car should I buy?”, and the answer is the same, namely, “I don’t know.”

I drive a small pickup with a 5-speed stick shift. I like it, and it suits my needs pretty well. It gets reasonably good gas mileage, it’s dependable, and on those occasions that I need to haul a moderate-size load of something, it handles it nicely. I even like the fact that standard-transmissions are less likely to be stolen. So, all of you should go out and buy a small pickup just like mine…right? Probably not. Your needs, wants, and tastes might differ from mine, and the type of vehicle that works best for you might be radically different.

For those of you new to shooting, there is about as much variety in handguns as there is in cars. And since people come in all different sizes, shapes, and dispositions, the gun(s) that I like may not suit you at all. But I can give you some general guidelines that will help you shop for your (next) gun.

Most importantly, the gun needs to fit your hand. If you have really short fingers, a Glock 19 (which is a very nice, dependable handgun that I like a lot) might not work for you. If you have really large, meaty hands, you might have trouble getting the right grip on a Bersa Thunder or a Lady Smith.

Second consideration is how well you can shoot the gun. If it has too much recoil, or the trigger is too stiff (or not stiff enough) for you, or the grip isn’t right, then you probably aren’t going to shoot well with it.

Third consideration is how easy and comfortable it is to carry concealed. A Desert Eagle or a Ruger CP100 with a 6-inch barrel might be tough to conceal — or maybe not, if you are a fairly large person who customarily wears baggy clothes.

Next comes stopping power. Typically, the larger the caliber, the more stopping power, but there is more to it than that. For instance, a .380, a .38, a 9mm, and .357 are all really the same caliber, but they vary dramatically in stopping power (and recoil).

But everything is a tradeoff. The hand-cannon you left at home because you can’t comfortably conceal it isn’t going to do you much good, and the “mouse-gun” you have with you is certainly more useful. Likewise, the “mouse-gun” you can shoot accurately is going to be worth more to you than the hand-cannon that hurts your hand every time you fire it, causing you to shoot poorly.

If your primary need for a firearm is to protect your home, then the best choice probably isn’t even a handgun. For most people, the best all-around home-defense firearm is a shotgun.

But back to handguns… Choosing a handgun can be tough, and I was recently at the Bullet Trap (one of the two remaining dedicated gun stores in Plano), and I learned of a program they have that may be the answer. For $150, they will let you shoot 16 different handguns under the supervision of an instructor. $150 is a drop in the bucket, and can give you the knowledge and experience to avoid much more costly mistakes. Oh, and by the way, if you take advantage of that program, please tell them I sent you. They won’t give me anything for that — I just want them to realize that one of their competitors is sending them business, and I get a little kick knowing that it actually irritates them a bit that they are getting that referral from someone who runs a highly-regarded CHL class that costs substantially less than theirs. For a little extra kick, ask them if their CHL course fee includes digital fingerprints (mine does).

If you are not from around Plano, Texas, then you might want to do some phone-shopping to see if you can find a similar deal in your area.

One of these days, when I have 16-20 different handguns to demo, I might compete with them on that, too.

P.S. When you pick out the two or three guns you like best, shop around for the best price. The Bullet Trap has some competition there, too. Two that come to mind are Gun Masters, and Academy Sporting Goods.