Originally Posted by Rastoff

Your malfunction was not caused by using your gun for dry practice. In fact, you probably gain a lot of improvement by doing dry practice.

While the striker should last much longer than 3K rounds, they do break sometimes. In fact, nothing is impervious to failure. I have 2,427 rounds through my M&P45 and at least 20 times that in dry presses. My striker still looks fine.

In your case, it's probably just one of those things. Stuff breaks sometimes.

You're right to send it to S&W.

Just a note about terminology: the Shield has a striker rather than a firing pin. They serve almost the same purpose though.