I call boo-hockey on that. If a gun is to tweaked there isn’t enough overtravel for the sear to clear the moving part of the hammer then the weapon is likely to be unreliable anyway. In any event lowering the hammer while holding the trigger in a 1911 (so it doesn’t catch the intercept notch) is exactly the same as firing the weapong except the hammer isn’t moving as fast.
You have a point that firearms culture is rife with superstition and its own urban legends. My own 1911 is tricked out but not tweaked so tightly it won’t function any more. Fact is it’s a series 80 Colt so I have to allow a little more overtravel so the mechanism will allow the firing pin to move.
I know nothing about guns, but I’m curious – if the firing pin is the thing that triggers the primer, then isn’t it constantly exposed to the heat and pressure of the cartridge exploding? And wouldn’t that kind of punishment eclipse any sort of damage that might be caused by dry firing?
The very tip, just a few thousandths of an inch, of the firing pin is in the chamber. It takes a certain amount of punishment but not nearly as much as you think. The fact is that crushing the primer absorbs energy that must be absorbed elsewhere when dry firing. Most modern firearms are designed to absorb this energy without damage due to robust firing pin stops. This is not always true of rimfires or guns like the Colt single action army (1873 “Peacemaker”) where snap caps are recommended.
God only knows how many thousands of times I dry fired that M16 in the course of normal training in three months of USMC boot camp. Pretty much cured my fear of dry firing centerfire rifles. (Although I would ask the owner first.)
With all this talk of how bad it is to dry fire a rimfiring gun, I have a question. I recently came into possession of my dad’s old Winchester Model 74 .22L semi-automatic rifle. After a target shooting session, when the last round has been fired, the hammer is still cocked and ready to keep going. Should it be left in this state with the safety on, or should it be dry fired to uncock it? Or, is there another way to safely uncock it for storage?
Don’t leave it cocked! The usual procedure is to grab a few empty shells at the shooting site, and when you get home, first hold them upside down and tap them with a screwdriver or something a few times good to knock out all the crusty burned ash, and then insert one through the ejection port (use a pair of needle-nose pliers if you have to) and then fire the last time on that. And you shouldn’t let the gun fire twice on the same spot on the rim–if you take the shell out and need to reinsert it, note where the firing pin is striking (12 o’clock seems most common) and rotate the shell so the pin strikes on an unflattened spot.
There is also a company that makes snap-caps, plastic spring-loaded shells to allow dry-firing without any damage. They sell a 22LR model but the problem is that it isn’t spring-loaded, it’s just a hard plastic shell shape and it gets chewed up quickly with use. Nobody I have ever met used a 22LR snap-cap.
And while we are on the general subject of shooting, I have never never never understood the reasoning behind “dry-firing for practice”. I have heard people say that “it smoothes out the trigger on a new gun”, but I would bet that is BS in practical terms; you would have to fire a gun thousands of times to accumulate any significant wear on the concerned parts, and a gunsmith can smooth them in less than an hour anyway, for a fee. And I have heard of Olympic-style target shooters actually going to the range and spending a significant time dry-firing and “envisioning the shot”, and I just GOTTA say, this sounds like hippy BS to me. The only justification for it is some lame excuse because you can’t afford to blow off that much ammo–if you are at a range in front of a target and pulling the trigger, then the best practice would seem to be to, you know, actually firing bullets downrange. It is simply the beginning of an unsafe habit, like doing trigger-finger spins. Bow-hunters don’t seem to suffer from not being able to dry-fire, and my firm belief is that nobody else benefits from doing it either.
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[QUOTE=DougC - And while we are on the general subject of shooting, I have never never never understood the reasoning behind “dry-firing for practice”.[/QUOTE]
My impression was that it acclimates one to the “feel” of the trigger action. I can see this being useful for a firearm one is using for the first time, or haven’t used in a while.
Outside of the scope of the OP but I differ with you on dry fire practice DougC. It isn’t a substitute for live fire but can be very beneficial for trigger control and follow through, particularly with double action weapons. Learning to exert force with one’s index finger while not moving the arm or other fingers has to be learened. Dry fire allows the shooter to watch the sight picture and see any unwanted movement, unlike live fire.
Comparing it to bowhunting doesn’t hold water. How would you dry fire a bow? The stored energy can’t be taken out of the system as it’s directly tied to the shooter’s fingers. In any event while there are similarities the motion of releasing a bow string and pulling a trigger are not the same.
Oh, you can do it, but it’s exceptionally bad for the bow. As you say, the energy has nowhere to go but back into the system, i.e., you and the bow. and unlike the dry-firing or a pistol, there’s a LOT of energy to dissipate in a dry-fired bow.
Quite a few modern .22 rimfires are safe to dry fire, as they employ stops to prevent damage to the firing pin. Of course, not all of them do, so better safe than sorry.
One of the worst bad habits a person can develop is the anticipation of recoil. I always stress to my shooters that they need to pull the trigger the same way every time. And they need to pull it as if the weapon was empty. “Pretend you are firing and empty weapon” I tell them.
Dry firing gets you accostummed to a smooth trigger pull with good follow through and no muzzle movement. If all you do is shot live rounds, I will GAURUNTEE… I will bet any amount of money, that you are jerking your trigger just before firing. To prove this to people, I’ll load their magazine and place a dummy round in it. When that round is chambered, they always jerk the firearm wildly. That’s when I tell them to dry fire 25 times and I’ll be back. Then, when I come back, I randomly load their magazine with live and dummy bullets. They must concentrate on smooth trigger squeeze and just let the live round “suprise” them.
Firing with recoil just develops bad habits. To undue these habits, you’ve got to have dry-fire practice. IMO dry fire exercises are better per trigger pull than live fire.
Yeah, dad pulled this one on me a couple decades ago… The embarrasment cured me of the ‘jerk-one-off’ school of shooting once and for all. Another training technique dad used on me was to place a pencil in a worn-out replacement barrel, aim at a dot on a piece of paper from a distance of about a quarter inch, and dry-fire. The firing pin would strike the eraser on the pencil and kick it out against the paper. The idea was to practice sighting, consistancy of hold, and trigger control. Ideally, the little dots from the pencil would be more or less on top of each other, about 5/8 of an inch below the aiming point. After fifty or so of those, I’m starting to get a little wobbly. Dad, OTOH, can go a hundred or more while still spotting each point directly where it’s supposed to be. Yes, he’s a spectacular shot!
