When I was training my wife (First Wife) to shoot, I bought her some snap caps so she could practice loading, unloading, clearing jamz, working the slide, dry firing, etc.
One day she needed to shoot a dog that was attacking our dog. She pulled her pistol out of her purse, racked the slide to load a round and fired. She missed the first shot so she racked the slide again, slinging the live round that was already in the chamber into the grass. By the time she was ready to fire the second (er... third) round from the pistol, the bad dog had run around the corner of the house and was gone.
Why am I telling this story? She had trained so much with the snap caps and manually shifted each round into the chamber so many times that she had developed muscle memory in this order:
Put mag in pistol
Rack the slide
Pull the trigger
Rack the slide
Pull the trigger
Rack the slide
Pull the trigger
What she had effectively done was take a 16 round pistol and reduce it to 8 shots by manually ejecting every other round. She never knew what she had done either. When I came home she told me about the shooting. I decided to reload her magazine for her later. A round was missing. I asked her how many shots she fired and she said, only 1. There were two missing. I had her take me to where she fired the shot. Sure enough, I found the spent casing and a loaded round laying in the grass.
While Dry fire techniques with dummy rounds can be handy to get the feel of the action, once you get it down, switch to live ammo and never look back. Get the feel of live ammo and develop good habits!
One day she needed to shoot a dog that was attacking our dog. She pulled her pistol out of her purse, racked the slide to load a round and fired. She missed the first shot so she racked the slide again, slinging the live round that was already in the chamber into the grass. By the time she was ready to fire the second (er... third) round from the pistol, the bad dog had run around the corner of the house and was gone.
Why am I telling this story? She had trained so much with the snap caps and manually shifted each round into the chamber so many times that she had developed muscle memory in this order:
Put mag in pistol
Rack the slide
Pull the trigger
Rack the slide
Pull the trigger
Rack the slide
Pull the trigger
What she had effectively done was take a 16 round pistol and reduce it to 8 shots by manually ejecting every other round. She never knew what she had done either. When I came home she told me about the shooting. I decided to reload her magazine for her later. A round was missing. I asked her how many shots she fired and she said, only 1. There were two missing. I had her take me to where she fired the shot. Sure enough, I found the spent casing and a loaded round laying in the grass.
While Dry fire techniques with dummy rounds can be handy to get the feel of the action, once you get it down, switch to live ammo and never look back. Get the feel of live ammo and develop good habits!
Last edited:
