Neanderpundit

My drawing

In comments at Tams, some knucklehead mentions that he habitually dry-fires his firearms.

Dry firing, for the uninitiated, is the practice of pulling the trigger with no round in the chamber.

There are a few firearms that are designed to be dry fired with no apparent damage- Many people claim Glocks can be dry fired with no danger, and the 1911 was regularly dry fired in practice by the US military, as well as was the m9.

it is also possible to sit on the bottom panel of a dutch door and swing back and forth. You can pull an engine from the center of many swingsets. There are plenty of people who use the backside of a crescent wrench as a hammer.

Because you CAN do something, is no specific reason why you should. Firearms are made so that the firing pin can come into contact with the primer of a cartridge, ignite that primer and the associated powder where there is any, and propel the projectile down the barrel. Operating a firearm outside of it’s design parameters is not optimal, and the results will not be optimal. Though you can easily use a Colt SAA as a hammer, it is not how that was intended to be used, and it will potentially damage the firearm.

Likewise, letting the firing pin hit air is not in the design parameters of most firearms any more than using them as a hammer is.

Most, being the operable term. I have heard it claimed that Glocks are designed to be dry-fired, and Supposedly they are. Here’s a picture of one that has been safely dry fired. Revolvers with the firing pins in the hammer have similar issues.

At the Glock booth this Shot Show I heard Glock guys talking with an instructor, who was asking this question- they responded that dry firing was “Ok to clear a gun, or release spring tension on the striker, or for function testing” or whatever, but they certainly didn’t seem to have any aversion to using snap caps, reccomending A-zoom to the person in question. If you do a Google search for “Broken firing pin” images, you come up to about 133,000 images.

Is it always bad to dry fire? Probably not. Are all broken firing pins the result of dry firing? Certainly not. For me, I err on the side of caution, and the very first thing I do with every new firearm I buy is get snap caps. See this? That’s a cased Holland and Holland 12 gauge. See the holes in the middle? Those are made to hold snap caps, nickel plated, with soft spring loaded primers, so the gun can be stored with the tension off the springs. If it’s good enough for Purdey, for Holland and Holland, for LC Smith, for all the major makers, it’s good enough for me. I’ve seen bellied-out breech faces on autos, I’ve seen snapped pins on wheelguns, I’ve seen broken or fractured tips on even Mauser firing pins. I don’t give a damn what anyone else does with THEIR guns, I’m anal retentive about taking care of mine. hell, one of the ways I was taught to strengthen your DA pull was to stick the revolver in a bucket of water and just pull pull pull. Using snap caps, of course. Seemed like good advice then, and it still does now. No better really effective way to work those muscles properly.

Nor even a fan, When I was a kid, the idea of spending a buck on comic books when the same dollar would get me one new or several used paperbacks was ludicrous. it isn’t that i didn’t like them, I would read other kids discards- I just couldn’t see spending that kind of scratch on something that was- from a reading standpoint- not a very good bargain. For the buck a couple copies of Batman cost, I could be reading for a whole DAY. A comic book, I was often through in less then two minutes. Maybe three if it had an ad for Johnson Smith.

A book, though. I could read it, and then I had it forever, to read again, if i wanted to. Plus, the art in comics of the day was lame- yes, I know people look back at it as something wonderful, but the movie that plays in my mind when I read something is always better than the movie I see on a screen, and certainly much better than anything I ever saw in a comic book in the 70’s or 80’s.

In retrospect, though, I’m a little bummed that I missed the “X men” stuff. “Hellboy” looks like it was fun, and the artwork better than usual. But, I take consolation in knowing that I come to the movies (Which i enjoy a good deal) without preconceptions, and the visuals are good, and I don’t have a yardstick to measure them against. Now I just wish there were Hellboy books instead of comics.

All this comes to my mind, of course, because I read over in m Alger’s blog that we lost Frank Frazetta last thursday.

Son of a bitch.