Insanely Practical Shooting Tips: Dry Firing Its Not As Dirty As It Sounds

Here’s an excerpt from our newest book, releasing June 15, 2013 – The Insanely Practical Guide to Guns and Shooting. Like The Insanely Practical Guide to Gun Holsters, now available at Amazon.com, it’s a direct, practical and amusing way to learn. We hope you find a useful tip or two about improving your shooting skills by dry firing your handgun!

Some Shooting Tips About Dry Firing Your Handgun

You have to admit, “dry firing” sounds just a little bit dirty. Like something that might happen in a nightclub of ill repute. When it comes to shooting, dry firing is a great thing. Like the other less-desirable implication, it’s safe, but is far more respectable.

Dry firing a gun simply means practicing the shooting motions without actually discharging a projectile.

We’ll talk about the instructions on how to dry fire in a minute, but first I would like to make a money-back guarantee. If you properly (and safely) practice dry firing on a regular basis, your shooting skills will improve by 312%. Or maybe 31%. Or 19.3%. But they will improve. You can bank on that.

I like to think that dry fire practice and teeth flossing fall into the same general category. Neither activity is fun or sexy, but both make a huge difference over time. So if you want to have teeth like Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts, then commit to dry firing on a regular basis.

Let’s talk about how to do it, without harming yourself, your family or your new love seat from Haverty’s.

The most important consideration is safety. You have to develop your own method that insures that you will never, ever, ever have bullets anywhere near your gun when you dry fire. This is because you will be pulling the trigger on your actual firearm when not at the range. All of the safety rules we discussed earlier still apply. You’ll treat the gun like it’s loaded. You’ll keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to fire. You won’t point your gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy – except perhaps that Haverty’s love seat. And you’ll be sure of your target, and what’s behind it. We’re going to follow all of these rules because if all the stars align just wrong, even for a second, and a live round is in your gun, you won’t hurt anything except your pride and maybe an ottoman.

The first step is to remove all ammunition from your gun. Remove it all from your revolver’s cylinder or the magazine in your semi-automatic. If you have a semi-automatic pistol, clear the round from the chamber. Stick your finger in there to make sure the chamber is empty. Now look at it. Now look through the magazine well and make sure you see nothing but air. Now do that again.

Those bullets you just removed from your gun? Take them into another room and set them somewhere you can see. Now count them. Are there as many there as were in your gun? Next take any full spare magazines you have and place those next to the bullets in the other room.

The end result of all this activity is that you have taken every round of live ammunition from your gun and anywhere else OUT of the room where you will be dry-firing.

While all this may sound excessive, just trust me and do it. Life has far too many distractions and interruptions to be anything less than obscenely safe. If if all of your ammo is in a different room, preferably where you can see it from your dry fire practice area, there is simply not a chance that you will absent mindedly fire a live cartridge.

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