Snap Caps, what’s the whole purpose ? Dry Firing? Clearing Malfunctions?
Well, I’ll tell you I don’t see too many directions on the packages and people ask us all the time about them, but I personally find them to be an excellent tool for doing malfunction drills. Sometimes you can just take an empty shell and put it in the chamber so it looks like a stove pipe, but I find it to be better training to actually allow your firearm to close on a dead round, recognize the gun won’t fire by hearing a click, and then just run through the “tap, rack, fire.” It’s an excellent way to teach people to clear malfunctions. I have never allowed someone I taught, to carry a firearm until they learned to clear malfunctions. My reasoning is this, I have often seen less experiences shooters to be prone to limp wristing and because they probable have not trained under stress, they are more likely to see a malfunction which could mean having their gun taken from them or not being able to defend themselves. Also, it’s very common for people to not load their firearms properly in the first place.
Snap caps are available from 17HMR to 22 Caliber and all of the major handgun calibers from .380 snap caps, 38 Special Snap caps, 9mm-45acp Snap caps. I’ve found the 38 Special and revolver calibers to be excellent training accessories for practicing with speed loaders. If you are taking a shotgun course, you can safely practice all of the loading and unloading skills. I would personally recommend Snap Caps over some of the cheap plastic dummy rounds because these aluminum bullets won’t fall apart and put plastic shards in the mechanical parts of your firearm, one of the major reasons I stopped reloading lead bullets was even though they were cheap, I had to practically use a tooth pick to get all of it out, and that one little piece of plastic from a cheaper dummy round could end up in a trigger mechanism or in the action and cause a malfunction.