Dry Firing

[klmhq]

What are the rules on dry firing your pistols? General rules, I suspect that every manufacture has their own.

I know you aren't supposed to dry-fire rimfires. I thought it was OK to dry-fire a centerfire pistol as long as you don't do it a lot. Centerfire revolvers are pretty much OK to dry-fire.

Is that correct or not?

[BlackDog]

Those are the general rules, but I like to handle each one on an individual basis. Refer to the manual for each.
This site is an incredible collection of owners manuals stevespages.com/page7b.htm
My centerfire P99 in 9mm is fine to dryfire all day long, my centerfire Beretta Cx4 in 9mm is not. They don't want you to dryfire it, but they don't want you to store it cocked, either. How does one decock without dryfiring? I haven't figured that out yet.

[TBT]

I know my Kimber is fine to dry fire as it is stated so in the manual. The Springfield XD is the same way, no problem.

["DoubleAction"]

When in doubt, use snap caps, and do not dry fire the Single Action Army type revolvers from Colt, Uberti, and a few other SAA Clones. The Rugers are alright with it, but to be safe, I always use snap caps. On the semi autos, do not let the cartridge extracter ride over the rim of the cap case, load the snap cap from the magazine.

[redneckruss]

The primary reason that dry firing is detrimental on older weapons is that the firing pin was hardened and the place it hit wasn't. Repeated dry firing deformed the place it hit and pushed the cart forward. If the cart was too far forward, the primer strike was inconsistent, and on some, the integrity of the back end was compromised.

Most modern weapons do not have this problem. I am not aware of any striker fired pistol that can be damaged by dry firing. I am not aware of any pistol with the firing pin on the hammer that will NOT be damaged by dry firing. Hammered weapons with the pin not on the hammer are a mixed bag. My 1911 is OK, my P3AT is not.

[MLB]

Up untill I got into handguns, I would have said that you never dry fire a rimfile.

Short of using a .22 snap cap (do they make such a thing?), you have to dry fire a Ruger Mark II to field strip it. Doing so without the firing pin stop in place can damage the breech though.