If there are shooters on your shopping list, you know we’re a difficult lot to buy for. Particular shooting sports have very particular (and occasionally, peculiar) equipment. Most of the gear is highly customizable, making it difficult to know what your shooters really want.

OK, ammunition is the most likely “want” these days, but let’s concentrate on gifts that aren’t either disposable or difficult to impossible to source. The best gifts have recurring value.

All shooters require one essential to improve: practice.

From the best professional to the rankest amateur, only practice brings improvement. Tuning your gun, tweaking your equipment and hand loading your ammunition won’t help if you don’t practice.

Unfortunately, today’s supply and demand situation makes live-fire practice considerably more expensive than ever before. But there’s still no substitute for practice.

That realization has created a booming market for dry fire devices.

Before the product information, here’s my mandatory rule before handling any gun at home, and it includes practice, cleaning or whatever. Remove the magazine, verify the gun is unloaded (look and feel), then make absolutely certain there’s no ammunition nearby.

Only after taking that safety measure can you really enjoy any practice system, especially one that turns your actual carry gun into the equivalent of a video game. Never lose sight of the fact that you’re practicing with a real gun. The basic safety rules always apply. All guns are always loaded. No exceptions and no clowning around.

Mantis’s Laser Academy is a full training facility (less your gun and phone/tablet) that can easily come along wherever you’re traveling.

And one dry fire equipment company that’s consistently innovating is Mantis Tech. I first tested one of their basic Mantis units three years ago. Today, there are varieties of the Mantis, but it’s still a solid training/practice aid.

The past two months I’ve been using (it’s incorrect to call sporadic practice training) a couple of their newest offerings. In short, they’ve enabled me to get in reps of basic sight acquisition, trigger manipulation, and follow through (more important than I realized before using their systems) without simultaneously vaporizing dollar bills.

Their new Laser Academy ($149) is essentially a complete training facility in a small carrying case. It uses your phone or tablet (iOS or Android) and their app as both the training center and coach. There’s a caliber-specific laser cartridge (9mm, 40S&W, 45 ACP and .380) that inserts in your pistol. When you break a shot, it fires a laser light beam onto the targets and the app records the result.

Setup (top) isn’t complicated, but the system quickly builds a historical record of your practice (bottom) that gives you a baseline for measuring your abilities.

Shots are recorded and auto-scored, giving a far more detailed training record than I’ve ever had. The archive has allowed me to determine my acceptable baseline performance. Can’t measure improvement if you have no baseline starting point. It’s also proven beyond a reasonable doubt that shooting is indeed a perishable skill.

But being able to quickly setup and train with my carry pistol has certainly helped polish those skills without diminishing either my ammunition or cash reserves. Neither are limitless.

Since we’re talking about gifts, someone who already has an Academy would probably love one of the additional caliber cartridges. At $39.97, it’s a great gift that’s not much more expensive than a box of ammo but has a far longer useful life.

There are four training modes in the free version of the app: Open Shooting-Single Target, Shot from Low Guard/Low Ready - One Shot, Duel- Single Shot, and Bullseye- Five Shot. Those will enable you to get the basics of everything from defensive training to basic bullseye competition.

There are also additional options for Open Shooting- Multiple Targets, Duel- Best of Five Series (think Bianchi’s Colt Speed Challenge with one target), Shot from Guard/Low Ready-Multi Shot, Bullseye-10 Shots, Close Contact from Holster (great self-defense drill that’s not always something you think about training for), Compressed Surprise Break, Holster Draw-Single and Holster Draw-Par Timed, and my favorite: Multiple Shots on Multiple Targets (I call it my “virtual plate rack”). The unlock code for those additional options is included in the $149 Laser Academy kit.

Mantis also makes The Blackbeard, a similar training system for AR-style rifles ($219.00). It’s already in use by the military for training. It’s a unique AR-style system because it makes your rifle absolutely unable to mistakenly be loaded with live ammo. That’s because it is a drop in bolt-carrier group and magazine that works with your existing trigger. If you have a direct impingement and a piston-driven AR you won’t be forced to choose. The system works on both.

The Blackbeard enables you to use their bolt carrier group and magazine in your AR-style rifle and include AR-practice in your Laser Academy sessions.

Using what they call “ a bit of electromagnetic wizardry” it resets your hammer between shots. And it’s so ridiculously easy that there’s virtually no way to screw it up. Take out your bolt carrier group, drop in the Blackbeard, close your rifle, insert the magazine (like your rifle in “real” mode the magazine contains the “go juice”) and begin your dry fire.

They claim up to 10 shots per second, but Jerry Miculek wasn’t available to verify that for me. But it certainly resets faster than I can manipulate my trigger.

There are very few limitations on either system, although the Academy doesn’t work with either Ruger SR or Hi Point pistols.

I’m using both- more than I can say about the at-home exercise equipment sitting in my garage. Gear you’ll use is always best.

We’ll keep you posted.

—Jim Shepherd