With the increased shortage of ammunition nationally and internationally, what is everyone doing to continue training? Are you budgeting more money to pay for more expensive ammo? Are you investing in non-live fire devices to train? Are you spending more time dry firing? I'm curious because
I have been dealing with this down in South Carolina. I have been pushed to the point of getting to my local outdoor store in the morning and asking if they have any ammo in. Some days I get it, other times they are dry for days. Either way, I can only get one box per customer so I'm not getting big loads. More just box of 50 5.56 or a box of 9mm.
I think that what is important now is to prioritize your calibers. Some people like to run the NATO route, 5.56, 9mm, 7.62x51 and 45. This can help you dial down purchases and what weapons to train with. The hope with NATO being that in normal times, America makes and shelves these more readily. There is an argument for Russian or a different construct. Its up to what weapons you use the most right now. There were 80 million new gun owners last year. People are fear purchasing anything they can get. Hopefully you have enough for your property and family protection.
Training for me has dropped down to alot of dry-fire drills, misfire and malfunction drills like I did in the Marines before the rifle range. You can get cool items for in house dry fire relatively cheep. Snap caps and bore laser set ups with a dot on your wall work if you need a visual training a new shooter or are trying something new for yourself. This at least gets you to a point where if you have to push rounds down range you maximize every round and its value add to your comfort with your plat forms
Hey. For those who are looking for ammo prices and where to find it, I was recently turned on to ammoseek.com Type the caliber you are looking for into the search bar and it will return you results by low to high price per round. It will also let you know if there are limits on how much you can purchase and how old the info is.
I've increased my dry practice and started shooting some of my other calibers, like .45 and .38. Trigger time is trigger time. I haven't had to resort to airlift yet, but that might be coming!
Dry fire is underrated. So is practicing your draw with a pistol or presentation with a rifle. I'm guilty of not doing enough.
You can never go wrong with dry fire. Working on you draw, and putting your sites on target in a timely manner is a perishable skill. Get to know your trigger and how much slack you can get out of it before it goes bang. So when your pistol comes out of the holster, and your raising it up, you can begin to squeeze the trigger during that process and by the time you're on target, you're that much closer to eliminating the threat. You can also work on transition drills between rifle and pistol in the meantime, as well as reload drills! Combat reloads and tactical reloads are money! A good rule of thumb, a combat reload is when you're in the middle of a fight and you go empty, you are now reloading on the enemy's time. At that time you don't need to worry about magazine retention. A tactical reload is when you fired off a few rounds and there's a lull in the fight and you want to replace your magazine with a fresh source of ammunition. During this time, I grab a magazine from the hardest to reach spot on my gear, insert it into the weapon, and retain that magazine that you just took out of the weapon incase you need those rounds for a later time.
Great suggestions! I have stuck to my usual dry fire and manipulation drills (reloads, jams, etc...), while conserving as much ammunition as possible. On top of that I've added the MantisX system to my toolbox.
I've been using it for about a month now and at least with the drills in the system, it appears I'm improving. The real proof will come when I decide to run full live fire drills on the range.
The biggest issue I find with any of the dry fire training drills is the lack of ability to simulate multi-shot strings and compensate for recoil.