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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4903 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 10, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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A big part of it is that they don't know what they don't know. Violence is memetic, and they have received a particular set of memes that deliver these particular results.

Think about it. The individuals in question are part of a very particular form of gun culture: they live in areas where guns are de facto illegal, and where all the firearms use they've ever heard of or experienced is criminal. That means there's no range time, no formal training, no places to do the training, no people to teach. The high turnover from prison and fatalities means there's little to no institutional culture to build on, no accumulation of knowledge. What you get is lowest-common-denominator stuff. Actual training takes significant time and effort to deliver results even for things as simple as basic marksmanship under stress; where is a gangbanger going to get a thousand rounds of ammo and ten hours of range time? I've been in the gun culture my whole life, and I only recently learned about dry-fire as a training tool; where are they going to hear about it? How are they going to learn to mount a scope or zero a rifle, much less learn more elaborate and esoteric ideas like small-unit tactics?

Gangbangers appear to think of gunfights the way they think of fistfights: an act of raw imposition of will on another. They see using a gun in terms of chunky primitives: you shoot, they die, rather than the specific mechanics involved: situational awareness, contact, identifying targets, aiming, firing, reloading, cover, clearing malfunctions and so on. They don't think of guns as specific tools with specific capabilities that can be optimized for, they're super-knives that stab from range. The memes they've received shape their intentions and their methods decisively.

It's worth considering that, from the perspective of the gangbangers, what they're doing works. They've almost certainly seen multiple friends and acquaintances killed by the time they're old enough to participate, so they know that their forms of combat do actually kill people. Their form of violence is reasonably effective, derives them benefits in the form of honor, and the significant decrease in mortality is probably a feature, not a bug, since it generally increases survivability for all involved. Gangbangers generally are attempting to assert dominance or to make a point, not to annihilate the opposition like John Wick.

This.

Seconded, or perhaps thirded.

I only recently learned about dry-fire as a training tool;

I have always been told that dry-firing (most?) guns is bad mechanically because certain pieces aren't meant to hit together repeatedly (hardened firing pins on non-brass surfaces?). Maybe more modern designs account for this? Or are you using dummy training rounds?

I'm definitely not an expert on this, so I'd be curious to hear more from someone who knows.

Maybe more modern designs account for this? Or are you using dummy training rounds?

Yes. Most modern guns can be dry fired no problem. If you're very worried about your striker or have an older/rimfire gun, a snap cap will fix you right up.

You can just get dry-fire snapcaps for this.

I had the same understanding, but there was a post here from one of our commenters with significant experience in the services, who pointed out that dry fire is in fact superior for training the mechanics of marksmanship. The way he put it is that dry fire is the study, and live fire is the test; I believe he recommended something like a 10:1 ratio. Given that dry fire is free in terms of money and maximally cheap in terms of effort (no getting your gear together, driving to a range, paying range fees, cleaning and maintenance afterward, etc, etc), this seems pretty reasonable. The idea, as I understand it, is that you practice acquiring and maintaining a sight picture while squeezing the trigger. There's no muzzle blast or recoil, so you see all the flinches and shakes and disruptions as they happen, and can work to get your process as smooth and fast and precise as possible. Then you switch over to live fire, and practice maintaining those good habits under real firing conditions.

This is roughly the standard in western army basic training. It's particularly useful for movement and engagement exercises that aren't directly related to marksmanship. Now that I think about it, weapons handling seems vastly more important than marksmanship in training to engage an enemy.

"Snap caps" are recommended for rimfire guns of any kind, and older guns; what extent they matter for modern semiautomatics is somewhat controversial. It's plausible that even new centerfire gun designs will still have increased forces on the firing pin or its surrounding structure when used with an empty chamber but attempts to experimentally demonstrate the matter haven't been able to show clear and obvious results, and modern firing pins are also cheap to replace.

For rimfires, the tip of the firing pin can hit steel on the breach face, as part of the design, and the difference between steel-on-steel and steel-on-compressable-brass is huge: people have experimentally demonstrated damage in <100 uses. There's a small number of rimfire revolvers that avoid this failure mode through some really clever design, though. Some rimfire rifles (such as the popular 10/22) claim that they've eliminated the problem with a firing pin stop, but that's only really true for relatively small counts, and heavy dry fire practicers have found out the hard way that this just moved the problem to a bent firing pin stop.

Older centerfire guns sometimes had similar issues, mostly pre-1970. GLOCK still recommends snap caps for very heavy dry fire use, and people have very rarely shown breach-face problems when not using snap caps, but they almost always are also the sort of people sending hundreds of rounds of very sketchy ammo through their guns.

You can get cheap all-plastic or plastic-rubber snap caps for common calibers at most reputable gun shops, but they're usually specced for 500-1000 uses, so if you're really into dry-fire drills, splurging for spring-based ones can be worthwhile.

Snap caps are also useful for ammo failure and clearing drills.

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