Dry fire is going through all the motions of firing your gun, including pulling the trigger, when there is no live ammunition in it. It can include all aspects of gun handling that are involved in marksmanship and gun handling. Whether new or experienced dry fire can help you master your firearms skills without spending money and time going to a range. All of the top competition shooters honed their skills through copious dry fire. By getting rid of noise and recoil it can help novices avoid developing a flinch, or cure an existing one. Not all firearms (especially rimfires) are suitable for dry fire though, check out this article regarding firearms wear and tear from dry fire.

Dry fire is more convenient than going to the range and you get to practice most gun manipulations without spending any money on ammunition. Through dry fire, you can do thousands of repetitions of drawing from holsters, attaining perfect sight alignment, a perfect trigger squeeze, transitions between targets and a complete follow through. Dry fire practice helps you to develop proficient motor shooting skills through many repetitions and works to train your muscles in proper safe shooting techniques. Bad habits, such as flinching, eye blinking and lack of follow through can be difficult to diagnose during live-fire shooting.

While dry fire is a great free and convenient way to practice for action shooters, there are a couple of handy accessories that can make it even safer and less of an issue from others in your home. We all know that we're supposed to triple check to ensure that our gun is empty, that any dummy rounds are truly dummy and that there's no live ammunition in the vicinity of the practice area. I known when I've checked my gear before starting a session but for the family there's an element of trust. Being a naturally sceptical person I prefer being shown something rather than being asked to trust that someone else has done something correctly every single time.

I recently bought several BarrelBloks from Blok Safety Systems after receiving some Cyber-Monday "spam" from them. It's a piece of orange plastic with one end shaped as a rimless cartridge and the rest being a segmented rod, While the manufacturer's instructions say to insert it through the ejection port, I found it much easier to remove the barrel, drop in the plastic insert and then reassemble the pistol. I first tried this with a dirty chamber and found that it was a very snug fit. After an overdue barrel cleaning it was easier to reinsert the BarrelBlok. I trimmed the plastic so that about a centimetre protrudes from the muzzle. This isn't enough to interfere with drawing or holstering, but is enough to be clearly visible from across a room. The plastic rod is fairly rigid so in my experience the gun has to be disassembled to remove the BarrelBlok. While not a lock, this would thwart anyone who wanted to load the pistol but didn't know how to field strip it. I showed the rest of the family how it works so now they can tell at a glance that the pistol I'm using cannot have a cartridge in the chamber. There are other makers of similar devices (e.g. Train Safe) but I haven't tried their products.

Lots of people who reload make some dummy cartridges with a bullet and cartridge casing; leaving out the powder and primer. This lets them safely have a realistically weighted magazine during dryfire. I also drill several small holes around the circumference of the casing as an extra visual and tactile indicator that it's an inert cartridge. I've also dropped a spent primer in the casing before seating a bullet so it will rattle when shaken, in case I ever want to check dummies while blindfolded. I've never mixed up a live cartridge with dummies prepared in this way. On a recent Para-cast podcast there was an account of a mixup of dummy and live ammunition. The shooter accidentally put a magazine loaded with dummy cartridges into his range bag when going to an action shooting match. When he loaded the mag of dummies his pride ended up being wounded and his time for that stage was killed, but there were no injuries as he ran through his malfunction clearing drills. If you're ejecting magazines loaded with dummies, the mags will take a beating as they hit the floor repeatedly and dummy rounds will routinely pop out of the magazine on impact. There is a better way.

I have one piece dummy magazines made by C.R.T.C. and SIRT. These are both quite durable and avoid wear and tear on your actual magazines. The blue plastic of the CRTC serves as a highly visible indicator that the magazine in the pistol is an inert training mag. I've tried these training mags for the Glock and the 1911 and found that they stick a lot in the magazine well. After using a chisel to shave off the raised lettering on the side of the magazines they would then insert reasonably well but dropping free from the Gen4 Glock's mag well isn't happening. It would seem to make a lot more sense for the manufacturer to make these with recessed rather than raised lettering to avoid the problems with sticking. The black SIRT magazines have a rubbery basepad to reducing battering on the magazine and floor. I've found that they fit as well as factory magazines and have a much more realistic profile for practising magazine insertions. It would be nice if they had a brightly coloured pad to make it obvious that they're training mags when inserted into a live pistol. Of course, without a spring loaded follower pushing against the bottom of the slide these training mags just rely on gravity for their ejection from your pistol. On the SIRT site several customers have commented about the magazine catch cut getting rounded through use and no longer retaining the magazine securely. I haven't practiced enough reloads yet for this to be an issue but if it does happen I'll just consider these to be consumables. I figure it's better to wear out a dummy mag than your actual Glock mags. One piece of safety equipment that goes along with weighted mags is regular footwear. If you drop one of these on a bare foot, there will be expletives - I know!

I should mention the actual SIRT pistol as a dryfire tool. They're very well made and have become quite popular in training circles. However the SIRT pistol's laser is a real magnet for drawing your eye to the target, which you don't want. It's probably good for checking the accuracy of your point shooting and has some utility for shooting on the move practice, but the trigger pull on the ones I handled in the USA is different enough on the Glock version that I wouldn't use it for competition training. In my opinion the SIRT is designed to obviously not be an actual pistol and is readily and instantly distinguishable from the real thing. There have been reports of these being seized as replica firearms at the Canadian border. I don't know if there's been an actual court ruling yet regarding their legal status in Canada.

The other gizmo that I've been using is the Glok-E-Trainer. The manufacturer was kind enough to send me one for evaluation a few months ago. I've pulled the trigger thousands of times with this in place and it works well enough. Some would question how this is better than just putting a piece of cardboard between the breech face and the barrel hood to hold the slide slightly out of battery to prevent the trigger from firing. Good question. It achieves the same results but is much less finicky to position. Also if you practice things like IDPA's slide lock reloads, the cardboard trick won't work when the slide is opened, but this will. When I take a few minutes break from dry fire training I do find that the protrusion of the glok-E-trainer can rub against your side when seated. Individual love handle results may vary. One reviewer on the Glock Pro forum suggested trying this with the heavier NY trigger spring installed to give a more normal trigger pull weight. Seems to be a good idea that I'll try. In Canada you can order most Glock parts from Police Ordnance. Overall, it's not something you absolutely need, but if you have one, you'll use it instead of messing around with tiny pieces of cardboard. For others around your dryfire area it will be obvious that your Glock is in a non-firing condition, if you've explained what that gizmo attached to the slide does. The manufacturer has a video showing how easy installation is, and how easy it is to point your muzzle at your left hand!

My latest dryfire aid is the DryFireMag for Glocks and it is quickly becoming my favourite. It's a spring loaded mechanism inside a modified Glock magazine body. The mechanism stops the striker from being released but gives a very realistic sensation of the 'shot' breaking followed by automatic reset of the trigger. If you visit DryFireMag, they have a good video showing how it works. I've only had mine a week but have pulled the trigger a couple of thousand times already. For multi-shot drills with a Glock, this gizmo is the way to go. It makes the training more realistic and fun. Assuming the mechanism holds up the only problem I can see is repeatitive strain injuries! You cannot practice reloads with it but it is now the tool I use for all of the non-reloading drills. (After a few weeks and tens of thousands of trigger pulls I started developing a tendon problem in my trigger finger. It took months of rest before the swelling went away. Now I only use it in one handed drills and a few transition drills.) I would prefer if it was 70 grams heavier as it weighs that same as a factory 10-rounder that's loaded with only five cartridges. I haven't taken it apart yet to see if there's space to add more weight.

Between the bright orange barrel block and the blue magazines, everyone can see at a glance that the pistol I'mtoting around the house is incapable of firing. While these steps go along way to eliminating any fear or discomfort, they don't address the irritation caused by hundreds of timer beeps during a dryfire session. Using an actual shot timer is relatively slow and the volume can be nerve wracking for people and pets. The shot timer doesn't pick the sound of your firing pin's click, rather it gives you a start beep and an end beep. Last year I started using the Dry Fire Par Time Tracker app on my Android phone and this at least let me turn down the volume by adjusting the ringer volume. You can set PAR times to the hundredth of a second. Be sure to click the "basic" button as this will give you the "advanced" options for setting up customized sequences of PAR times with whatever time interval you want to give yourself to reset your gun and/or mags and you can have it automatically change your par time every so many reps. This is perfect if you're following a training regime like that found in Steve Anderson's books on dry fire training for competition. I contacted the programmer and suggested that it would be handy to have an option to output the beeps to the headphone jack. A few weeks later he added that feature into the latest update of the software. Now you can use earphones and this app for all of your par times and nobody else around will hear anything beside the sound of your drawing and holstering. This is a great training tool.