It is no secret that the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, adopted on December 15, 1791, treats firearms enthusiasts as leniently as possible, particularly with regard to their unhindered acquisition and possession. This fact has led for decades to the fact that the majority of Americans have their own personal assault weapons, purchasing them to protect their homes and property. 

According to statistics, there are more than 350 million legally purchased military weapons in the United States today.  

But the current economic situation in the world due to the pandemic coronavirus infection has forced the shooting enthusiasts to think hard because buying the necessary ammunition as well as the bullets for constant training is not a cheap occupation. While some states such as North Carolina and Georgia have seen an increase in demand for firearms and ammunition, this is primarily due to a desire to feel safe during coronavirus restrictions and does not contradict the above. 

All of this has led to an increasing resort to dry fire training, without the use of ammunition, by residents of the United States. For those who don’t already know, dry fire is shooting practice with a live-fire weapon without the use of bullets, with a simulated shot. In addition, this kind of training is conducted using mainly laser-shooting simulators, working on the principle of feedback and the use of mobile, and not only, applications.

In such training with dry fire, there are unequivocally a huge number of advantages: maximum safe training up to automatism of all necessary movements and movements with weapons, possibility to conduct training in any unequipped place, even at home, absence of necessity to clean weapon, continuity of training process and many other things. That is why today I want to talk about the possible harm of such training for the weapon itself because the debate about this is still going on to this day.

According to most gun experts, dry fire negatively affects older models of guns, causing damage to the firing mechanism, in particular to the firing pin itself, if you practice frequent dry firing.

With modern weapons, however, experts agree that the high-strength materials used allow the firing pin to remain undamaged, even under conditions of many thousands of dry fire training cycles.

Understanding the high effectiveness and usefulness of dry fire training to exclude it from the training process would be at least unwise.

Therefore I came to the following conclusion that one should use special dry fire training simulators such as Sirt or MantisX, however training on them is very limited in its variety. But there is a way out here too – it is the additional use of interactive shooting programs and training subjects, which turn the simulator into a full virtual shooting range, but this requires the installation of a camera detector and a projector. 

And as a result, in the case of the correct organization of the virtual shooting range training will be diverse, and most importantly, they can be carried out in any convenient place for the owner of arms, without fear for the safety of their firearms.