This is a topic that comes up for discussion frequently on the various forums relating to various milsurp rifle types, such as Mausers, Mosin-Nagants, Enfields and such. You have one group of people on one side saying it does not hurt the rifle to dry fire it, and you have another group that says that it can peen the area in the inside of the bolt where the stops are for forward firing pin movement, as when a cartridge is fired the firing pin does not travel quite as far forward as its forward movement is stopped when it strikes the primer of the cartridge deep enough to set the round off.

Some will say that when the firing pin protrusion is measured it can often be seen to be slowly increasing when a rifle is dry fired a lot, due to this internal peening of the firing pin stop inside the bolt. Also the part of the firing pin itself where it meets these stops gets set back a slight bit during dry firing.

Their comments make a lot of sense, but to me, the bolt head, where the stops for the firing pin travel would usually be located are usually made out of hardened steel, so they should stand up to the abuse of dry firing.

I honestly don't know what side of the fence to stand on concerning this issue. Both sides bring up some good points, often quite technical in nature and it is pretty much left up to the user of the particular rifle to make that decision. If I had a rare rifle and one that was hard to find replacement parts for, then I would tend to shy away from a bunch of dry firing. But if it is a rifle that abundant replacement parts are available for, then I would not have any qualms about doing a lot of dry firing.

Another thing to consider is that what we have all come to learn when visiting gun shops. Nearly all of them that I have ever been in take a dim view of someone coming in the store just do tire kicking and looking at the rifles on display and dry firing all them. At one time there was a gun store here where in the afternoons every day around 4pm a couple of boys would come in and handle the rifles in the collection that were in front of the cash register.

After a couple weeks of this happening every day, the store owner got mad at the kids, who appeared to be about ten or eleven years old and told them in a stern voice to get out of his store and never to come back, as all that dry firing was "ruining" all his rifles. The store owner did not realize that the two boys were brothers and were the sons of one of his gun smiths working for him and were told to go to the store after school every day so their dad could take them home when he got off work. This ticked off the employee that his kids were told to stay away from the store and an arguement with the store owner started and the employee ended up quitting on the spot. His parting words to the store owner was that he was fed up with the owner's misconceived ideas about a lot of firearms and he could find someone else to go along with his ideas and would work for him.

That gun smithing business is what kept the store open and the store owner never did find anybody as good as the kids' dad was at gunsmithing. Less than a year later, that store was out of business and closed down. The former employee started his own business gun smithing out of his house and garage and all the former store customers followed him to his private endeavor and he finally retired with a good income from gun smithing for many years.

So there are two sides to the story. Take the one you want to follow is all I can advise.
Curt