Massad Ayoob's Blog, page 100

MY PREFERRED CANDIDATE

As the most bizarre Presidential campaign of my relatively long life continues, I find myself longing for the elusive Ideal Candidate.

If you’ve been reading this blog for enough years, you know my ideal candidate is Condi Rice. She was a vastly better Secretary of State than Hillary Clinton.  Dr. Rice is a self-made success: brilliant, indomitable in debate, respected throughout the world, embodies gravitas, and not incidentally is a strong supporter of individual Second Amendment rights.

I’m not the only one who thinks so.  See this, from Michael Gerson in the Washington Post.

Who thinks it’s time for a Draft Condi movement?

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WELL…DARN

Today brought sad news from the print magazine world.

For many, many years I wrote the “Self-Defense and the Law” column for Harris’ Combat Handguns magazine, and the occasional feature article. I wrote the “Off-Duty” column and, until now, the “First Responder” column for their Guns & Weapons for Law Enforcement.  From the early 1990s ‘til a couple of years ago I also wrote their annual Complete Book of Handguns. (Yes, semanticists out there, I know that every year’s edition was completely different from the previous, but I inherited the “Complete Book” title.)

I also found it amusing that Harris’ music magazine, Revolver, was always placed in the gun magazine section instead of the music section of the racks at my local WalMart.

For nearly 40 years, the Harris gun magazines put a lot of great material out there.  The changing paradigms of electronic vis-à-vis dead tree media are no secret.  I’m glad that Backwoods Home is still surviving quite well. Three print gun magazines I write for, Guns and American Handgunner on the newsstands and the professional journal Shooting Industry, all seem to be flourishing despite the rise of the electronic media.

My heart goes out to the many good people in New York who worked so hard and so long, full-time, for the Harris titles.  They were always professional, and I wish them luck.

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LESSONS FROM ROGERS

One of the rare stars who’ve shot a perfect score on the legendary Rogers test is Gabe White, the only one to have done so from concealment. He used a Glock 34 9mm with an inside the waistband holster in the appendix position. He told Glock Annual, “The Test itself is a real marathon—125 possible points on moving, disappearing plates, with four freestyle draws, eight strong-hand-only draws, two freestyle reloads, one strong-hand-only reload and two support-hand-only reloads. By my count there are at least 142 chances to screw up.”

In five days, it felt like I screwed up most of those 142 possibilities at one time or another. Having been shooting for very long time, my biggest problem was wrapping my head around Rogers’ techniques and getting away from the ones I’ve used so long myself. It seemed counter-intuitive when Bill said, “Pin the trigger back after you hit your target, and keep the sights right there, and don’t move the pistol until the next target pops up.” But it works.  Before I figured that out, I blew more than one target that popped up when I was scanning elsewhere and had to double back with the sweeping gun, and it had disappeared before I got there. Remember, exposure time on Rogers targets is as little as half a second.

My biggest problem was following instructions. I’d run a few stages of the test perfect, a few more pretty good, and then completely blow one. Most often, I’d shoot out of sequence. Rogers demands “near to far” for tactical reasons, and I tended to shoot the one nearest to the sights on multiple targets; even if all subsequent shots were hits, they were invalidated for score by the procedural penalty.  I finally managed to do what I tell my own students: turn off the auto pilot we all seek, and go to manual override.  Conscious competence instead of unconscious competence. Think about what you’re doing, if only for an instant. When I managed to do that nine demanding stages in a row, I passed the Advanced score.

In my first blog entry in this particular series, , I wrote, “If you aren’t good at taking orders, you probably won’t be good at giving them…” Good Lord, little did I know when I wrote those words that I would live the lesson at Rogers’.

There were numerous stages where we had to reload one-hand-only with either hand. Rogers teaches doing that with the pistol in a “V-block” between thighs and knees. For decades I’ve used and taught a different technique for that, and more than once found myself starting to do my own method, catching myself, and then having to switch to Bill’s. That “oops, check, back, start over” ate up enough time that I’d lose three to five of those briefly-exposed targets by the time I got the gun back up. (Bill told me later, “If you’d asked, I would have let you used your own technique, so long as it’s safe.” My fault for not asking, but I was there to ingrain his stuff, not mine, and it all reinforced a valuable lesson for me.)

A tip of the hat to Bill Rogers and his wonderful staff: Major Adam Smith, Sergeant Kyle Armstrong, and Billy Lumpkin, late of DEVGRU. They all did a wonderful job.

One more Rogers instructor deserves notice. I hadn’t seen Ronnie Dodd since he took the Advanced OfficerSurvival course from Ray Chapman and I at Chapman Academy in Columbia, Missouri thirty years ago. He went on to an honorable retirement, during which he taught armed concealed carriers in Tennessee how to stay alive on their own. Ronnie was visiting after prevailing over a bout of throat cancer that would have put most people under.  He kicked its ass – living proof of the survival attitude that he, and the other instructors Bill Rogers surrounds himself with, share with their students.

I haven’t taken their Basic class, though it gets rave reviews, but I can tell you from a week of intense personal experience that I give five stars and big thumbs up to the Intermediate/Advanced program at Rogers Shooting School.

 

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BUSMAN’S HOLIDAY COMPLETE

Whew! Coming back from the Rogers Shooting School Intermediate/Advanced Course in Ellijay, GA  the Evil Princess and I agreed that it was the most fun week we’ve spent together so far this year. We both met our goals…and we both had to work like hell for it.

When it was over, we had each put thousands of rounds of spent brass on the ground. We had also picked them up at the end of each day: this ain’t tennis camp, and you clean up your stuff and leave the place as you found it, just like in the woods.

There are lots of AARs (After Action Reports by students) to be found on the Internet for any shooting school, including Rogers’.  The classic one is the series by the late, great Todd Green, eulogized in these pages last month.  In one class of heavy hitters I read about, only one shooter actually earned Advanced rank in the demanding 125-target high-speed test.  In ours, about a third of the 18 students made Advanced.  Bill and his staff told us that was an unusually high percentage.

Gail and I are used to running with the big dogs. In this class, some of those big dogs were more like a wolf pack. The pressure was ON!

In the decades that the Rogers School has been a beacon for SEALs and other high-speed, low drag professional trigger-pullers, you can count on your fingers the world-class shooters who’ve shot a perfect score. Bill Rogers himself, of course, and guys like Manny Bragg, Rob Leatham, and Gabe White. (Google will tell you who those folks are.) No perfect scores were shot last week, but we all watched Rogers himself demonstrate the test and shoot a score in the 120s out of 125 possible, with a Gen4 Glock 17 with duty trigger pull weight and hot NATO 9mm ammunition. Witnessing Bill’s performance was almost worth the price of admission by itself.

Top shot in the class was an 18-year-old kid whose name I can’t use, but it’s a name I expect you’ll be seeing on the match-winners’ lists in International Practical Shooting Confederation championships in years to come.

Yeah, I made Advanced, but by the skin of my teeth and I had to work for it.  There are lessons in that, and I’ll discuss those in some detail in the next entry in this blog.  In the meantime, feel free to order on DVD Bill’s training vid on what he teaches and why.  And, here’s one of my runs on the course caught on smart-phone vid by one of Bill’s masterful instructors, Kyle Armstrong. The drill was draw when the first target comes up and shoot it and its six accomplices in turn as they briefly expose themselves, dominant hand only. Then a pause to reload and go to ready position, and do the same non-dominant hand only. The pistol I’m using is a Springfield Armory XDM 5.25, with Blazer 147 grain 9mm plated bullets, and holster is a Comp-Tac.

or Click Here for video.

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BUSMAN’S HOLIDAY CONTINUES

Instructors who are gentle but firm with the students.  Instructors who explain “Here’s why we do what we do here,’ as opposed to “This is the doctrine!!”  Instructors who actually get out there in front of their students, God, and everybody and DEMONSTRATE.  And, in this case, a course of fire so challenging that over decades, you can about count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who’ve shot a perfect score at qualification time.

Yes, the Evil Princess and I are loving the Rogers Shooting School Advanced Course, and looking forward to the two days we have left.

The class is full with 18 people, three relays of six working the half-dozen identical computer-controlled steel plate bays.  While Relay 1 is shooting, Relay 2 is coaching and counting hits and Relay 3 is refilling magazines.  Very efficient, and a great bonding experience. Squads on each position change daily so students can get the experience of coaching, and being coached by, different people.

Class is an interesting mix of cops (mostly firearms instructors), current or former dot-mil, and armed citizens including a couple of physicians and a nurse. I watched the younger of a father-son team pass the Advanced qualification today, only 60% of the way into the course.  He accepted the accolade with a quiet pride beyond his years, and I expect his dad is dancing on air.

With some of the relatively small targets fully “up” to the shooter for as little as half a second, and 125 of these targets presented over the course of nine fast-paced stages (some requiring not only one-handed shooting with each hand, but one-hand only speed reloading) I am definitely getting my daily adrenaline requirement along with my already-predicted annual humility requirement.

Here’s a short video of one stage shot by Chris Edwards, who has already passed the Advanced course requirements, shooting his 9mm Glock 17 on what the Rogers School calls “a blast” of targets. (On point to another recent blog discussion, it kinda validates the whole “high capacity magazine” concept…)

 

Or click HERE for video.

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BUSMAN’S HOLIDAY

Wikitionary (yes, that’s a word and a thing) defines “busman’s holiday” thus: “First recorded in 1893 in the UK. The idea is that a busman, to go off on a holiday, would take an excursion by bus, thereby engaging in a similar activity to his work.”  Whenever I hear it, I channel to the Mark Twain quote I first heard from my old friend and colleague, the great police trainer Ed Nowicki: “If you love your job, you never have to actually work a day in your life.”

The Evil Princess and I are off to Rogers Shooting School in Ellijay, Georgia for the next week, to take their advanced handgun course.  Why? I learned a few things when I was a little kid, to wit:

If you aren’t good at taking orders, you probably won’t be good at giving them…

…if you can’t read, you can’t write…

…and if you don’t learn, you can’t teach, at least not very well for very long.

During first quarter 2016, I was able to spend a week learning at the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association annual conference in Chicagoland, and three days at Tom Givens’ superb Rangemaster Tactical Conference held this year at the Memphis Police Academy in Tennessee.  I taught at both, but at the Rogers school, our only scheduled “training for US” in 2nd quarter 2016, I get to be purely in student mode. We’ve ordered a case of ammo per day for each of us. WOOT!

We’ve been wanting to take Bill’s legendary course and skill test for a very long time, and a confluence of scheduling finally allows it. I’ve known Bill for decades, shot against him in his heyday when he was on the “pro tour,” and don’t remember ever beating him. Those are the kind of people you can really learn from in the given discipline. Ain’t gonna even try to predict how I’ll do, but if I get my Annual Humility Requirement all in five days, well, that won’t be a bad thing either. I’ve always learned more from screwing up than I did from doing things right, and learning is our purpose in going.

What about y’all? Any training plans for this year? Observations on training in general? Discussion is welcome here.

 

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A SAD AND MEANINGFUL ANNIVERSARY

Thirty years ago today – April 11, 1986 – what may have been the most studied gunfight of the Twentieth Century took place in Dade County, Florida. Eight FBI agents on a rolling stakeout engaged two well-armed robbery/murder suspects. Circumstances allowed the bad guys to get the first move, and minutes later, both perpetrators were dead…but so were Special Agents Ben Grogan and Jerry Dove. Ed Mireles, John Hanlon, and Supervisory Special Agent Gordon McNeill suffered wounds that would impair them for life, and Special Agents Gilbert Orrantia and Richard Manauzzi sustained wounds from which they would recover.

The lessons learned from this would profoundly change law enforcement training and weaponry, and to some extent, that of law-abiding armed citizens. For the 25th anniversary of the event I did an interview with survivor John Hanlon, still downloadable from the ProArms Podcast.  A few short weeks after the shootout, I was teaching at the Metro-Dade Police Academy and my old friend Dr. Joe Davis, the legendary chief medical examiner of Dade County, was kind enough to come over and give us all a full insider briefing. As the years went on I was able to interview some of the survivors. My take on it, based on that research, can be found in the “Ayoob Files” archives at www.americanhandgunner.com.

Some of the lessons:

The killer who shot first had a Ruger Mini-14 .223 rifle, which proved to be a terribly efficient force multiplier. He used this gun to inflict every serious wound suffered by the good guys. This incident, probably more than any other, gave impetus to make the .223 patrol rifle the almost universal standard issue for police patrol that it is today. Only two of the agents even had a shotgun, and only one was able to deploy it.
At that time, only the agents assigned to FBI SWAT had semiautomatic pistols; the remainder were armed with revolvers. Two of the good guys, McNeill and Hanlon, were permanently injured while they were hopelessly trying to reload their empty revolvers after having sustained wounds to their gun hands or arms. By the early 1990s, most American police had switched to higher capacity, faster-reloading service pistols from the traditional service revolver.
Early in the fight, a bullet from Dove’s 9mm pistol pierced the opposing rifleman’s arm and into his chest, slicing an artery and inflicting a “fatal, but not immediately neutralizing” hit when it stopped short of his heart. It was after that, that he inflicted most of the deadly damage. FBI subsequently adopted a standard requirement that their handgun ammo penetrate a minimum of 12” into muscle tissue-simulating ballistic gelatin, a standard most law enforcement and many lawfully armed citizens subsequently adopted.
Ben Grogan, said to be the best shot in the approximately 200-person Miami FBI office, would likely have been voted “most likely to dominate the gunfight.” Unfortunately, he was extremely myopic and lost his glasses in the car-ramming crash that preceded the shootout, and this undoubtedly hampered his performance. He died at the scene. Prior to that, this writer had occasionally shot with uncorrected vision; for the last 30 years, I’ve made a point of shooting at least one qualification course a year that way.

There is much more to it, of course, but my space here is limited. Suffice to say that this is a day to remember the sacrifices of the heroes who ultimately won that terrible fight, but prevailed at a terrible cost. May those no longer with us rest in peace, and may the survivors remember that they and their brave colleagues did not suffer in vain that awful Friday morning thirty years ago. We will never know how many lives have been saved in the three decades since because of the lessons that emerged from this incident.

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IGOLD

With the anti-gun stronghold of Chicago, nobody thought the state of Illinois the last holdout against lawful concealed carry would ever pass a shall-issue permit law. Surprise they did!

And Illinois can thank the Illinois State Rifle Association, Illinois Carry, and IGOLD for that.

IGOLD stands for Illinois Gun Owners Lobbying Day. For a decade, these committed Americans have marched in the state capitol of Springfield and made their concerns known … and they changed the paradigm.

This past week, I finally got to an IGOLD and was damn glad I did. It was a recharging of the batteries, a reminder that self-reliant armed citizens come in every color, every gender, and every stratum of what pollsters sometimes call  socio-economic class. We are the most egalitarian of subcultures.

I had the privilege of addressing the gun owners on why Gun-Free Zones are actually Hunting Preserves for Psychopathic Murderers who seek prey who can’t fight back. Illinois law, I’m told, currently prohibits carrying guns in rest stops. Now, a rest stop in 3 AM darkness is to rapists and kidnappers what a watering hole is for leopards hungry for antelope. Yes, that sort of thing needs to be changed. And, judging from feedback, the IGOLD folks have the attention of the legislators…see here.

A nationwide thumbs-up for IGOLD, ISRA, and Illinois Carry! They are inspirations and role models for us all. In the pix you see in the above link, the lady in the lead of the parade marching seven blocks on a walker is Colleen Lawson, one of the named plaintiffs in the landmark SCOTUS decision for armed citizens’ rights, Otis McDonald, et. al. v. Chicago, and with us at the IGOLD gathering were the widow and daughters of Otis McDonald, the lead plaintiff, a man I will be eternally proud to have known.

We can all learn from IGOLD.

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A WHALE OF A TALE…

…and a tale of a whale.  I just finished “In the Heart of the Sea” by Nathaniel Philbrick, an exhaustively researched account of the sinking of the Nantucket-based whaling ship Essex in 1820, the real-life inspiration for Herman Melville’s classic “Moby-Dick.”

The author paints his picture with a detailed brush. We learn much about the unique culture, racial mores, and economy of Nantucket in the early 19th Century, and great detail about whaling.  I had always thought the harpoons were what they killed the leviathans with, but we learn from Philbrick they were merely anchors for harpoon lines that brought the hunters’ boats close enough to stab the quarry with giant spears.  There are many enlightening tidbits about aquatic mammal biology and behavior, how starvation and dehydration affect the human body, and more than I wanted to know about cannibalism.

The whale that seems to have deliberately rammed the Essex was estimated to be 85 feet long and 80 tons. The author notes that sperm whales that size aren’t reported today, and theorizes that selective killing of the more profitable giant whales during this period had an effect on subsequent breeding.  However, he doesn’t think the size was exaggerated, noting that a sperm whale jawbone now in a whaling museum extrapolates to an 80-footer.

Its first strike rocked the ship violently enough to throw sailors off their feet and seriously damage the hull, though the damage might have been repairable.  But the second hit, from a fast running start, was a straight-on head butt which, all survivors confirmed, drove the 238-ton vessel backward and caved in a major portion of the bow.  The monster whale swam off, leaving the ship mortally wounded.

All 20 of the crew got off the ship in one piece, salvaging some provisions, guns, and navigation equipment before the Essex went under. In “Moby-Dick,” that was pretty much the climax of the novel, and sole survivor Ishmael’s rescue was sort of a postscript. However, the aftermath of the Essex’s sinking is really the heart of “In the Heart of the Sea.” In more than three months on the ocean in those little whaling boats, a dozen men died, most winding up in the bellies of the surviving eight.

There are lessons galore in this grim narrative of survival.  There are understandable navigation errors and choices which 20/20 hindsight shows to have been questionable, and in perspective, being led astray by GPS will never seem quite so bad again after reading this. There was also a lesson about hesitation and balancing competing harms: After the initial ramming, the first mate spotted the stunned whale at the stern of the ship, and had a perfect shot to kill it, the great lance in hand. However, he made the conscious decision not to, fearing that in its death throes the huge tail might tear the rudder off the ship.  He would later decide that spearing the beast would have been the lesser of two evils.

Damn. Now I gotta see the movie of the same name, which I hear was well made but so depressing it was not a success in the theaters.

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THIRTY OR FORTY YEARS LATER

A few days ago, I was passing through the Panhandle of Florida and got to spend dinner with a guy I hadn’t seen in 30 or so years, and whom I first met 40 years ago.

I had met “Johnny” Robbins when he was tagging along with his dad Jack Robbins at the first “big money professional pistol match,” the National Shooting League event sponsored by Dr. Bob Burgess in 1976 in Laramie, Wyoming. The following year, we met again at the Second Chance Shoot in Central Lake, Michigan.

Johnny outshot his dad at that match. And me. And everybody else.  He set a record time to come up off a shooting bench on a start signal and stop the timer when the last of five bowling pins were blown off a table 25 feet away.

Johnny was thirteen years old at the time.

You can read about it here: http://americanhandgunner.com/1978issues/HSO78.pdf .

Johnny and Jack hit the Second Chance Shoot every year after, and when the Bianchi Cup came along, they shot that too.  That came to an end in the mid-1980s when Jack, who had never smoked a cigarette in his life, died of lung cancer at 47. Johnny came to Second Chance by himself the year after that, but it wasn’t quite the same, and…he stopped going.

Jack Robbins, you have to understand, worked at Eglin Air Force Base and was the prime mover in the legendary JSSAP (Joint Services Small Arms Project) tests that led to the adoption of the Beretta M9 pistol all-service-wide by the United States military at about the time Jack passed.

As John and I reminisced (while all the shooters called the kid “Johnny,” his father Jack called him John, which is what he has gone by ever since), he remembered that when Jack told Smith & Wesson officials why their guns of the period were failing in the tests, they ignored him, but when Jack told Beretta officials what they’d have to change to pass the tests, they listened. That link from the 1978 issue of American Handgunner has a picture of Beretta’s 9mm circa that period. Compare that to the M9 of today. You can see Beretta listened.  A fuller account is in my book “Gun Digest Book of Beretta Pistols.”

John Robbins is 52 now, a proud dad and grand-dad himself. Still a shooter, just out of competition for all these years; it was something he shared with his dad, and when Jack passed, it lost meaning.  (Gonna try to get him to shoot a match with me now, though.)  Retired from a career as a firefighter/paramedic, John is now a paramedic working with a Florida hospital. He’s carrying on his father’s tradition of taking care of others.

Before we parted, John presented me with his dad’s Milt Sparks custom holster/belt/magazine pouch set for the 1911 .45 he preferred to compete with. “My dad was right-handed like you, I’m left-handed, and besides, he’d have wanted you to have it,” he said.  It’s going to occupy a place of honor in my library/gun room.

Read that old article. Please. It will show you how a fine man raised a fine son with guns. For Jack, the guns – like other icons of adult responsibility – were tools of parenting.

Wherever you are, Jack, know that a lot of us still miss you, and it was great to re-connect with your son.  You’d still be as proud of him as you were when he was younger…and I just want you to know, I was glad I was carrying a Wilson Combat Beretta 92G when we met again. Without Jack Robbins, I’m not sure that fine pistol would still be in production, and the iconic American protection weapon it is today.

 

John and Mas today.

Without John’s dad Jack, I don’t think we’d have today’s cool Berettas like this one, from Wilson Combat.

Jack Robbins’ old Milt Sparks 1911 rig will occupy a place of honor.

Today’s 60-shot pace-setter target, shot in Texas, is dedicated to the memory of Jack Robbins, who did so much to re-design the modern Beretta that was used.

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