Dry firing question.

[LightningMcQueen784]

... or if you know someone that reloads, get some fired 9mm rounds, fill the brass with sand, and tightly crimp on a FMJ bullet and go to town on those... When you wear out the primer (which should stand up to a lot of abuse) then just grab another one...

Sorry, Chazman, but I do NOT agree with that as it is a HUGE compromise to safety. That would just look too much like any other live rounds, and someone could mistakenly put a live round in the chamber to "dry fire" at home. Why not just spend a couple bucks to get a few snapcap so it LOOKS different so you know for sure there is no way it will will ever go BANG?

Besides, snapcaps are also good for malfunction-clearance drills for when you're at the range. So it's not just an expensive fake bullet "only" for dry firing... sometimes, I mix my snap caps in with my live rounds at the range, so when I reload a mag, I don't know how many live/dummy rounds are in there. When I load my pistol, and it goes bang, keep firing; when it doesn't go bang (and didn't feel or sound like a squib), I do a Type-I malfunction clearance, eject the dummy, and go again. It's great practice.

[MarcS]

glocker,

for the price of them, and the savings of the possible repairs of your weapons, snapcaps are the way to go. You can practice your trigger pull, anything you want to, dry fire your guns 1,000 times with them, and there will be no significant wear with them at all. They are just spring loaded plastic bullets for a lack of a better description.

I've dry fired my glock 19 tens of thousands of times without snap caps and there is no significant wear.

[bradjc72]

Marcs

Like I said, for the price of the snap caps, it does hurt to use them. You don't have to, its your choice, but for all of the money that I have put into guns that I cuurently own, and guns that I have bought and gotten rid of, snap caps are a small price to pay to keep them in tip top shape.

[Lycanthrope]

You can't drop the hammer on a S&W 22 without the firing pin contacting the barrel hood.

Most modern centerfires are fine to dry fire. I don't use snap caps because I don't want live ammo and "dummy" ammo. Ammo gets mixed up all the time. Even the red snap caps that are so common have a brass base and can look the same from the rear of the chamber. It's not uncommon for me to check the chamber A LOT, even in the middle of dry fire......when I come back from the kitchen, bathroom, whatever. I like the confirmation of the empty chamber and I'm not going to unload a mag of snap caps every time, but if you step away from the gun for even a moment, I think you should do just that.

They have a use for malfunction drills, but those are during live fire.

Besides the 20,000 actual rounds through my STI, I'm sure it has over 100,000 drops in dry fire. I think it's harder on a trigger group when you drop the slide on an empty chamber.

Lycanclickthrope