Dry-fire — practicing with an unloaded firearm — is a universally recommended and extremely valuable form of training and practice. You can work on marksmanship, visual processing, weapon manipulation, movement, and much more. And you can do it all at home, without shelling out for the astronomical cost of ammunition these days.
At its core, all you need is your unloaded firearm and some dedication. Once you secure a safe training area with no live ammo in the vicinity, you can manually cock your weapon, obtain a sight picture on your practice target, and drop the hammer. Then, rinse and repeat.
Honestly, it can start to feel like a chore, leading many to slack off on their regimen. Fortunately, there are many products available to make dry-firing more effective, convenient, and fun. In CONCEALMENT 9, we covered many of them, including accessories to reset the trigger on semi-auto guns, laser cartridges, reactive targets, computer software, and replica training guns from companies such as Laser Ammo and Next Level Training (SIRT).
While the technology underlying guns tends to move slowly, smartphones improve at a lightning pace. Processors, screens, and cameras get better every year. Why not take advantage of that for training?
In this article, we’ve pulled together a selection of dry-fire systems that use that supercomputer in your shorts to make practice and training effective and fun, each taking a different approach. All of the apps offer a trial or free mode, so you can test them out for yourself.
Almost all of these apps rely on a laserbased system to paint a splash downrange where your shots
