One of the best things a person can do to improve their ability to shoot a handgun is to dry fire.
Dry fire practice allows you to concentrate on sight alignment and your trigger control without having to be at the range or spending money on ammunition. As they say, perfect practice makes perfect, and dry firing allows you to perfectly practice trigger control and sight alignment.
There is a lot of concern about damaging the firing pin on a gun when dry firing. I have dry fired thousands of times with a variety of revolvers and autoloaders. To date not a single problem. Nor have I ever met anyone who broke a firing pin while dry firing. If you are concerned, no problem, buy some Snap Caps
RangeMaster is a range, gun store, and training school in Tennessee that offers excellent firearms and tactics training from instructors that include Tom Givens and Jim Higginbotham. On their website, they have a series of dry fire training exercises. Just click the ‘dry fire drills’ link on the left side of their web page and follow the instructions.
The main objective of dry firing is to improve your shooting skills. The fantastic side benefit is you also improve the quality of the trigger pull. As you repeatedly work the trigger, you end up smoothing the pull much like a stream wears a rock smooth. I’ve got a Smith and Wesson Model 10 revolver that has a double action trigger pull that is as smooth as glass from all of the dry firing I have done with that gun.
Just remember: safety first! Make sure the gun is unloaded and only dry fire in a safe area where you are not pointing the gun at anything (your TV for example) that you would rather not shoot…just in case you failed to pull that round out of the chamber.
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