They say practice makes perfect, and nowhere is this more true than on the shooting range. As anyone who has ever practiced with firearms will tell you, safety is the most important consideration when handling them in any context. Most accidents involving firearms come from inexperience. Being familiar with how to handle a gun when you’re around one is the most important step to keeping yourself and those around you safe.
Practicing Without Ammo
The best way to get yourself familiar with a new firearm is to practice assembling and handling it without live ammo. Doing so removes the possibility of injuring yourself or someone else; it also lets you take your time to get familiar with the gun outside of a shooting range. Additionally, when practicing without ammo, you can use a glock trigger kit or another similar tool to modify the trigger to make firing the gun faster. Modifying the trigger to let you fire faster can be impressive, but it can also be helpful to practice for combat situations. Firing multiple quick shots in a few seconds helps improve reaction time and accuracy. Whatever you decide to do, removing any live ammo from the equation guarantees that no one will get hurt.
Tracking Your Accuracy
Being comfortable holding and firing a gun is not the only important part of keeping yourself safe. When preparing to use a gun in self-defense, you need to make sure that you can fire accurately. Having a gun won’t do you any good if you can’t hit anything with it. Testing accuracy on the range is as simple as firing at a target and then retrieving it, but if you’re practicing in your backyard this may not be ideal. Tracking and improving accuracy when practicing without live ammo requires a kind of laser tracker that will track your aim when you aren’t actually firing your weapon. This allows you to improve your accuracy and prepare for using real ammo, whether in combat, self-defense or just on the shooting range.
Gun safety is simple but requires a level of comfort with firearms that may not come naturally. if you’ve never used a gun before, even just holding one can feel intimidating. Removing live ammunition from your practice allows you to safely get comfortable holding and firing a gun without the possibility of injury or property damage. This way you will be fully prepared the next time you take it out on the shooting range.