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Notes -
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.
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.
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.
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