Massad Ayoob's Blog, page 87

RETRO MONTH IN RETROSPECT

“The Guns of August” were, for me, retro; see earlier August blog entries here.  It’s August 31, and tonight I’ll regretfully clean my classic old Smith & Wesson Model 19s and put them back in the safe.

Some of the students asked if I didn’t feel disadvantaged carrying something that only held six cartridges.  You know, I can’t say that I did.  At any given time, I had a speedloader or two. The very fast, very reliable Safariland Comp III looks bulky, but it rides with amazing comfort and discretion in the cell phone pocket of cargo pants, or one of the pockets in a photographer’s vest.  You may not get to where YOU can reload a six-gun faster than YOU can reload an auto pistol, but you can damn well get faster with a revolver than the average street mope with a stolen autoloader:

Or view the video here.

I usually have a Bianchi Speed Strip somewhere on my person, too. Very easy to carry, so flat and discreet you can hide one in the watch pocket of a pair of jeans, but certainly slower than a speedloader:

Or view speed strip video here.

And, for that matter, I usually have another whole damn gun, anyway:

Or watch the video here.

One of the main reasons I tried a revolver for the four 40-hour classes on my August teaching tour was that a double action six-shooter allows the student to better see the distributed trigger pull: they can watch the revolver’s long trigger pull through both retraction and return, they can watch the uninterrupted cylinder rotation, and they can see the rise and fall of the hammer.  By the end of the month, at the wonderful Harrisburg Hunters and Anglers’ club in Pennsylvania, there were three of us staff on the line with revolvers and I told the class, “If any of your coaches this week told you that you were jerking or mashing the trigger, watch the revolver shooters. And do something else: bring your empty gun hand up in front of your face as you’re watching, and run your index finger at exactly the same pace as the shooter you have in view.”  That gave them sixty repetitions of running that trigger finger before they shot their own qualifications…and their own qual scores, including some new shooters, averaged about 97%. Roughly half the class said that demonstration helped them with their own trigger pulls when the pressure was on.

I think I might be onto something with this revolver as teaching tool business. I’ve said for decades that some quality time running a revolver in double action mode will teach you to better control the trigger of your semiautomatic pistol.

My September has a vacation week in it, and one all-classroom CLE program, with two 40-hour MAG-40s that include live fire. As it happens, I have gun magazine assignments to write up a couple of Polymer Parabellum Pistols, so my teaching guns will be 9mm autos, the new Gen5 Glock and the almost-as-new FN 509.  I’ll have a wheel-gun along, though, if only for demonstration purposes.

 

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MIRROR IMAGE SHOOTING

When I say “mirror image” shooting, I mean the right-handed shooter running the gun left-handed in every respect, and the southpaw shooter doing vice-versa.  It’s useful for a number of reasons.

An injury to anything from eye to hand may, someday down the road, force you to shoot this way. It would be nice to know how to do it beforehand, and not have to learn it while suffering through a recuperation period.
For defensive shooting, particularly with a rifle or shotgun, if vertical cover must be used mirror image shooting will give the practitioner minimum exposure from behind the cover.
For those of us who teach, how will we teach a student with opposite-side dominance to shoot if we can’t teach ourselves to do it?
Many professionals and serious users carry a backup gun on their non-dominant hand side, in case they ever have to shoot weak-hand only. One should be prepared to do so, no?
I ask my staff instructors to teach a class, compete in a match, or at least shoot a qualification once a year “mirror image.” It’s my insurance that they continue to master the techniques they teach, and aren’t overcoming bad technique with physical strength or constant repetition. (Either of the latter can eventually work for an individual, but they don’t lend themselves to transmission to students.)

In the latter vein, I got in my own mirror image run while shooting the pace-setter for my third MAG-40 class of August, and it being a “retro month” for me, I did it with a Smith & Wesson Model 19 revolver drawn from a left-handed High Noon thumb-break holster.

It brings you back to basics, the “conscious competence” level of performance where you are thinking about what you are doing.  Yes, we all seek the zen state of “unconscious competence” – perfect performance on auto pilot – but it’s not something any of us can achieve on demand 100% of the time.

Managed to finish with a 300 out of 300, on the ASAA (American Small Arms Academy) target used by our hosts in Connecticut, Defense Associates. The group measuring about five inches.  That’s a bit sloppier than last week’s, shot right-handed on an IDPA (International Defensive Pistol Association) target in South Dakota, which tells me I could stand a bit more southpaw shooting time.

 

Southpaw Model 19 gave 300/300 in approx. 5″ group.

 

This pace-setter was author’s “mirror image” run for the year. Left-handed holster by High Noon.

 

The Connecticut MAG-40 class, August 2017.

 

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HYPOCRISY in re: CHARLOTTESVILLE

The recent violence in Charlottesville, culminating in the death of a young woman and the injuring of several more people at the hands of an apparent racist has triggered grief, outrage, tribalism and…hypocrisy.

I’ve written about American tribalism before, here.  The recent Charlottesville experience splashed a huge bucket of kerosene onto that particular fire.  And with it, came vast quantities of self-contradiction on both sides, enough to trigger the bullshit alert built into anyone who practices critical thinking.

Here’s the deal:

If you’re a self-styled Antifa (anti-fascist) and you advocate violence with slogans like “Put your fist in a fascist’s face,” and you use physical force and intimidation to shut down voices you don’t want to hear, you’re practicing fascism yourself and you’re a damned hypocrite.

If you’re a Southerner and ready to fight to keep people from pulling down statues memorializing Confederate soldiers like your great-great-grandfather who perceived themselves to be fighting for state’s rights, you have a point and I’ll listen to you.  But if you do it while wearing a swastika or any other Nazi regalia and are chanting anti-Semitic Nazi-born rhetoric while doing so, given that your father and grandfather fought and bled to defeat the Nazis in World War II, you’re a God-damned hypocrite.

If you excoriate President Trump for saying there was fault on both sides, your black and white view of things constitutes at least partial blindness.  Just as many of the good people marching in protest against racial supremacy were not there to harm others, even though they marched alongside ready-to-fight provocateurs, it’s hard to believe there weren’t also a few well-intentioned townsfolk who were there to preserve their memories and memorials of Charlottesville past. If there hadn’t been earlier violence and civil disruption on the part of Antifas, I suspect a whole lot of people would not have been motivated to march with the supremacists. Until lately, the American neo-Nazis and the KKK had been underground, festering like anaerobic bacteria but not manifesting themselves as a serious social illness; I don’t think there’s any question that high-profile Antifa violence provided them at least one step in the stepladder they used in Charlottesville to pull themselves up out of their well-deserved place in the dustbin of history and into the media spotlight they sought.  Hypocrisy in there? Oh, yeah.

Some of us who’ve dedicated our lives to teaching judicious use of force have advised that if your car is surrounded by a crowd of vicious, violent, out-of-control humans who are dragging innocent people out of the vehicles and savagely stomping them, you are justified in shooting them to save your life and the lives of your passengers, and equally justified in putting your car in low gear, laying on the horn, and driving slowly but steadily away.  If those intent on harming you and your passengers are willing to die by deliberately blocking your escape from their unwarranted violence, if they go under your wheels the history of the law says that their death or injury is on them, not you.  But if you try to twist that into saying that it’s justifiable for someone not under physical attack to drive their car full speed into a group of protesters who have offered you no harm save inconvenience, you’re not only a hypocrite, you’re a vicious lying SOB who has just sacrificed his credibility.

Yes, it’s complicated.  A spirited discussion on the matter is going on in the comments page here.  However, I think the blog entry you’re reading now is the best place to carry on the discussion, and as always, your comments are welcome.

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RETRO MONTH: A MID-MONTH REPORT

Coupla weeks ago, I posted here that August was gonna be a “retro month” for me, and I intended to teach the four August 40-hour classes with a double action revolver. (http://backwoodshome.com/blogs/MassadAyoob/2017/08/01/going-retro/)   With two done and the third coming up, here’s where the experiment stands.

Top, Reichard-tuned 19-4 with green front sight and Pachmayr Grippers; below, round butt 19-3 with Pachmayr grip adapter.

Because my teaching gun is also my carry gun on these sojourns, I didn’t want anything humongous, so being a K-frame (medium frame) size guy, I chose the K-frame Smith & Wesson .357 Combat Magnum with four-inch barrel.  Introduced in the 1950s at the behest of one of my mentors, Bill Jordan of the US Border Patrol, it’s a target grade revolver famous for beautiful workmanship.  The ones I took with me were “P&R” as S&W connoisseurs say: pinned barrel and recessed chambers.

As primary I chose a Model 19-4 worked over by my friend Denny Reichard at Sand Burr Gun Ranch (www.sandburrgunranch.com), complete with recoil-absorbing Pachmayr grips and a front sight painted bright green to show up well for fast shooting.  For backup, I took a bone-stock 19-3 in a rare configuration Smith & Wesson made only on special order and never put in their catalog, four-inch barrel and round butt.

At each class just before the qualification, I and the rest of the staff shoot a “pace-setter” to demonstrate the police-style course of fire to the students who will have to shoot the same thing immediately thereafter. At the first class of the month in New Jersey, I used the 19-4, which Denney had tuned for me four or five years ago… and wound up shooting a 298 out of 300. The Evil Princess looked at me piteously, and reminded me that it was the first time I had dropped below 100% on one of these this year.

Mas explains to class in NJ how to score the 60 shots they’re about to fire in timed qualification. He is still in therapy over his 2 hits outside the center rectangle of IPSC target.

Aauugghh! Was I losing my revolver mojo?  My vision has been problematic for a while: I was diagnosed with cataracts last year, and the doc tells me it won’t be time to carve them out until the end of this year.  The green front sight had been awfully hard to align in the notch of the black rear sight against the brown target, and at the farthest distance two bullets had drifted to starboard out of the center ring of the IPSC target. (Maybe I should have blamed the wind…if there had been any wind…)

In South Dakota, Mas was able to shoot a clean score on demo run with the round-butt 19 on this IDPA target. Group was 4.5″.

The second class was in South Dakota, hosted by Paul and Susan Lathrop of the Polite Society Podcast, and with similar brown cardboard targets (IDPA this time, with tougher, smaller center zone than the IPSC), I decided to go with the plain sights on the backup Combat Magnum.  It has the usual smooth S&W action of its period, if not as sweet as a Reichard Custom. With both front and rear sight being the same gunmetal color, alignment was easier, and I got back to 300/300.  Whew!

 

I’ve also gone to this round-butt gun for daily carry: less bulge. In a Bianchi #3 inside the waistband holsters from the late ‘70s, it hides like a six-shot snub-nose .38, but is loaded with the Federal 125 grain .357 Magnum hollow point load that proved so effective on the street, Kentucky State Troopers dubbed it “the magic bullet” and Texas State Troopers spoke of its “lightning bolt effect.”

In New England now, and feeling confident with my “old school” gear.

 

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REPORT FROM BEHIND ENEMY LINES

I recently had the pleasure of teaching another class in New Jersey (or, as some of my colleagues in the gun owners’ civil rights movement elsewhere might put it, behind enemy lines.)  There are few places left in America where the gun laws are more Draconian than they are in the Garden State.

The class had been arranged by my usual host in that state, Anthony Colandro, a tireless fighter for gun owners’ rights.

NJ is a classic example of why egalitarian “shall issue” permitting is so important, and why more than a dozen states now have followed the Vermont Model in which no permit is required to carry a loaded handgun concealed for protection in public.  New Jersey is one of the relatively few remaining states which requires the applicant to show that they customarily carry large amounts of cash, negotiable securities, etc., or have already been attacked or received serious death threats, to have any hope of getting the permit.  This “may issue” policy has, predictably, resulted in a situation where practically speaking, only the rich and influential are likely to get the permit to protect themselves and their families in public.

Not surprisingly, NJ does not recognize carry permits from any other state.  Moreover, the lucky few who do have permits to carry there are forbidden to load with hollow point ammunition, though the state attorney general’s office has supposedly approved expanding bullets with nose caps (Hornady Critical Defense, Federal Expanding Full Metal Jacket, Cor-Bon Pow’rBall). Yet another reason to hope for the passage of national reciprocity.

There are a few bright spots. Governor Chris Christie seems to have given up on BS gun control theories and has repeatedly granted amnesty to innocent people who were licensed to carry and got jammed up because they didn’t realize that, unlike their marriage licenses and drivers’ licenses, their licenses to carry were not recognized in New Jersey.

Fortunately, gun owners’ groups like NJSAFE continue to be voices of reason, with positive activism as manifested here.

As I told my students there, “Pennsylvania accepts refugees!”  That said, though, I admire the determination of those who have decided to stay in New Jersey and fight for their civil rights.  Their mission is a righteous one.

The beautiful South Jersey Shooting Club

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REFLECTIONS ON OLDITUDE

Having recently entered the last year of my seventh decade, I am feeling my age.  The good news: every day, there are more younger women.

I love my job.

 

The bad news: there ain’t much opportunity for men my age to take advantage of that. Unless the  younger women are, oh, 67 or 68.

 

Here is how guys my age like to think younger women look at us…

Ida Mae Astute/ABC via Getty Images

 

Or like this

 

But here is how I think younger women actually perceive a relationship with someone my age.

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SHOTS FIRED

I just finished reading “Shots Fired” by Joseph Loughlin and Kate Clark Flora. It will be available in the fall from Skyhorse Press. They are, respectively, a retired assistant chief of the Portland, Maine Police Department and SWAT team commander, and a renowned true crime writer. Their book is a police-eye view of law enforcement use of force issues today, seen in the macrocosm of social issues and the microcosm of what it’s like to be the cop who has to pull the trigger.  At the core of the book, we hear in their own words from law enforcement officers who have “been there.” These include several of the officers who faced down the bullets and thrown explosives of the Boston Bombers.

 

Here’s an example of the authors’ perspective: “It has unfortunately become the norm, in our fast-paced, media-driven world, that use of force cases and particularly deadly force cases, are routinely misreported. Far too often, when there is a deadly event in an officer-involved shooting, irresponsible reporters, misinformed advocates, and publicity-seeking politicians exacerbate the situation by writing stories or taking public positions prior to receiving any solid information. As a result, the public understanding is based on a dis­torted view rather than careful investigation and fact-finding.”

 

“Shots Fired” is educational for anyone who reads it with an open mind instead of a political identity agenda. Here, the authors explain why it may seem to the general public that courts “take the cops’ word” for things:

 

“The Supreme Court has stressed the importance of recognizing the judgment of the individual officer in the situation: ‘when used by trained law enforcement officers, objective facts, meaningless to the untrained, [may permit] inferences and deductions that might well elude an untrained person.’”

 

They continue, “In practice, when a court evaluates the conduct of an officer, it ‘must avoid substituting our personal notions of proper police proce­dures for the instantaneous decision of the officer on the scene,’ and, ‘When a jury measures the objective reasonableness of an officer’s action, it must stand in his shoes and judge his actions based upon the information he possessed.’”  — United States v. Cortez, 449 U.S. 411, at 418 (1980).

 

“Shots Fired” by Loughlin and Flora is a valuable addition to the literature of use of force, and a breath of fresh air and common sense in the current debate.”

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GOING RETRO

A decade or so ago, I was teaching at a conference of ILEETA, the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association.  They liked as many of us as possible to show up in uniform for the first day, for “Kodak moments” with the press.  I was so accoutered, with a Smith & Wesson Model 65 .38 Special revolver on my right hip. That same day, I sat on a panel discussion and was seated next to a gun-savvy police chief who looked down at my wheelgun and said with a smile, “Going retro, huh?”

Sigh…

It should be noted that the chief in question was carrying a customized, cocked and locked Colt .45 automatic (Model of 1911) on his hip, and the guys carrying Glocks might have said the same of him.  Oddly enough, the reason I was carrying it was because I was scheduled to go from there to the Midwest Regional Championships of the International Defensive Pistol Association.  At the time, I was a “sponsored shooter,” and the sponsor wanted team members to win as many gun divisions as possible. We had other Master-class shooters registered in Enhanced Service Pistol, Stock Service Pistol, and Custom Defense Pistol.  The team needed someone to shoot Stock Service Revolver, and since even then I was the oldest on the team and had the most experience with six-shooters, I had become the Designated Dinosaur with the old fashioned gun.  The Model 64 is a direct descendant of the Smith & Wesson Hand Ejector Model of 1899, also known as the Military & Police model.

I’m proud and happy to say I won the Stock Service Revolver Championship at that match.

Fast forward to now. I’ve decided to use a double action revolver for the four MAG-40 defensive handgun/judicious use of deadly force classes I’ll be teaching in August, even though I know most of my students will be shooting semiautomatic pistols.  There are several reasons why.

One is that bad shooting is often the result of poor trigger manipulation more than anything else.  With the short trigger stroke of most semiautomatic pistols, the students can’t really see how the instructor is running the gun.  With a revolver they can more easily observe the long stroke of the double action trigger and the smooth uninterrupted rise and fall of the hammer and rotation of the cylinder, and much more quickly grasp the concept of distributing trigger pressure, no matter what the speed of fire or length of trigger press.

Higher ammo capacity has been the big selling point that made the semiautomatic pistol dominant in the armed citizen sector and almost universal in the police sector.  I get that.  At the same time, I’ve never needed more than six shots to put down any living thing I needed to shoot. “Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum” is almost as comforting to my generation as “Colt .45 automatic,” and more so to some. And if for any reason six does not turn out to be enough, well, it ain’t like that four-inch barrel Model 19 will be the only Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum I’ll have readily at hand…

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ANOTHER VICTORY FOR SELF-DEFENSE

I love good news.

The District of Columbia was recently found to be out of line in requiring special reasons to fear crime as suitable grounds for issuing a concealed carry permit.  Read the decision here.

Civil rights advocates will recall when the Supreme Court of the United States ruled, in Heller v. District of Columbia, that DC was out of line in prohibiting its residents from owning handguns for self-defense. Thus began a long and fascinating chain of litigation; I expect you’re all familiar with that, and I won’t bore you by recounting it here.

As I and others predicted, DC put up enough red tape to constitute a concertina wire to keep its citizens from carrying guns to protect themselves. One element of that was the District’s requirement for the applicant for a carry permit to show that they had already been violently attacked, or at least, were more likely than the average person to suffer such a thing.

The states break down into “may issue” (translation: we can give you a permit if we feel like it) and “shall issue” (we have to give you the permit or show just cause why not, just cause being that we have sound reason to believe you’re a criminal, you’re nuts, or you otherwise would be even more of a danger to society if you were armed.)

Logic cringes at the thought.  You have to have already been attacked by someone trying to unlawfully kill you, before you can have a permit to protect yourself from that? Um, duh, how do you survive that first attempt long enough to apply for the permit in hopes of warding it off the second time?

Those who know me, know that for decades I’ve pointed out the fact that the defensive firearm is a direct analog to a fire extinguisher.  Each of those items is an emergency safety/rescue tool, whose purpose is to allow the ordinary citizen who becomes the first responder to ward off death or great bodily harm until the designated public safety professionals can get there to help. The gun doesn’t make you a cop and doesn’t mean you don’t need cops.  The fire extinguisher doesn’t make you a trained firefighter and doesn’t mean you no longer need firefighters.  “Emergency safety/rescue tool…first responder…the one there on the ground when the conflagration breaks out, and the one right now positioned to be the best candidate to stop something horrible from happening.”

Duh.

How would the American public react if they were told they could only have a fire extinguisher in their home or car if they had already gone through the horror of a full-blown house fire?  That’s what the Bloombergs of the world are asking for when they demand “special reason” to carry a firearm in self-defense.  Just a different type of life-threatening danger, is all.  But with one stark and important difference:  No fire ever stopped by itself because the victim picked up an extinguisher, but a HUGE number of violent attacks are broken off by the criminal as soon as he realizes he has met armed resistance, without a shot being fired.

Thanks to Alan Gura, the rock star of pro-armed-citizen litigation these days…and to the Second Amendment Foundation, which hired him to bring this case to its currently successful conclusion.

And, by the way, thanks again to all here who voted for a President who put one more pro-gun, pro-self defense Justice on the Supreme Court.

I’ve been on the Board of Trustees of the Second Amendment Foundation for many years. I’ve been proud of that.  I’ve never been prouder than now.

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CHARLTON HESTON AND THE PRICE OF DEFENDING RIGHTS

Charlton Heston knew Martin Luther King, and marched alongside him for the civil rights of African-Americans.  Sadly, the American Left was blinded to that when he became a spokesman for, and later president of, the National Rifle Association.

I recently picked up the excellent biography “Charlton Heston: Hollywood’s Last Icon” by Marc Eliot.  In his acknowledgements, Eliot writes, “Grover Norquist gave me an overview of Heston’s involvement with the NRA and a frank assessment of what he thought about the ostracism that followed.” Yes, ostracism seems to be the correct word.

Writes Eliot, “On April 10, 1989, an (NRA) advertisement appeared in Newsweek that pictured a smiling Heston.”  It was his first “outing” as a supporter of gun owners’ civil rights, via the NRA. Eliot: “The fallout was immediate and mostly negative in Hollywood, as he suspected it would be.”  Heston, who had served for two years aboard a B-25 bomber during World War II, had been extremely proud of his high position with the American Film institute.  Eliot continues, “Not long after (the Newsweek blurb appeared), he called Jean Firstenberg. Here is how she remembered that call. ‘He was still on the masthead of the AFI as (a former) president and it meant a great deal to him, but that day he said to me, ‘Jeanie, if you want to take my name off the masthead, I understand.’ How thoughtful of him, knowing there was going to be a political backlash (because of the ad) and not wanting to hurt an organization he cared so deeply about. I never took his name off the masthead.’”

But, the biographer continues, “Most of Hollywood took him off theirs. The only real work he was able to get was a TV film…”

In 1998, the Left became even more choleric against Heston when he was elected President of NRA.  Prominent anti-gunner Josh Sugarmann poured vitriol on Heston and noted, “Whether Mr. Heston does the talking or not, the National Rifle Association remains the same extremist organization that blocks sensible gun laws and markets guns to children.” Heston continued with the NRA, living long enough to be sandbagged as a frail old man with developing Alzheimer’s, by that caricature of journalists, Michael Moore.

Charlton Heston passed a little more than nine years ago. Impartial historians will remember him as a fighter for civil rights, with Dr. King (himself a gun owner, by the way) and with the NRA.

He paid a high price for his ethics and his commitment to civil rights.  How many hear have suffered ostracism – in the neighborhood, in the family, in the workplace, or elsewhere – for the same thing?  You are invited to share your experiences here.

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