Daily Defense 1-23: Doing Dry Fire Practice Safely

Jeff has mentioned dry fire practice in earlier videos. Now, he goes into depth and explains a safe dry fire protocol. Dry fire practice involves operating your gun without firing live ammunition. It's a great way to build your skills and develop "muscle memory" between range visits. You can practice a lot of basic gun operations - loading, unloading, reloading, clearing malfunctions - so you're familiar with your gun's controls and operations before you actually shoot at the range. Dry fire practice STILL requires observing the Four Rules of Firearm Safety. You need to select a designated safe area for dry fire. Perform your standard safety check to make sure the gun is unloaded. Make sure there's NO live ammunition in the dry fire area. For loading / unloading practice use dummy ammo, inert rounds usually made of orange plastic. Do dry fire practice only for about 10-15 minutes to avoid the "law of diminishing" returns. Consistency is more important; a 10-15 minute practice session every week is better than an irregular schedule. Define what you're going to do in each session: for example, 15 repetitions of a malfunction clearance or 10 repetitions of an empty gun reload. You'll need a target - Jeff has some suggestions - and when you're done, remove the target from view to eliminate the temptation of taking a dry fire shot at it without having done a full safety check first. If you leave the area during practice, perform the full safety check before resuming.