Flew to Tulsa last Friday from Chicago with Andy Stanford, talking shop all the way. Andy is the founder of the Options for Personal Security (OPS) firearms training school, a former winner of the National Tactical Invitational, author of “Surgical Speed Shooting,” and low-light shooting instructor for SureFire. We were going from the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association (ILEETA) to the National Tactical Conference and Polite Society event. Andy commented that Polite Society had done for private citizens what International Association of Law Enforcement Firearms Instructors, American Society of Law Enforcement Trainers, and ILEETA had done for police in firearms training: exposing folks all over the country to the latest and greatest international research and training in the field.

Another old friend and colleague, John Farnam, put it best in his comments after the weekend was over: “Lots of cops attended, but there were many non-police too and cross-pollination was rampant! We all learned much from each other…much credit goes to Tom and Lynn Givens for organizing and orchestrating this wonderful event.” Despite the economy, the seminar was full, with about the same 150-person turnout as last year.

Tom and Lynn own the Rangemaster training center in Memphis, where Tom tells us the violent crime rate exceeds that of Los Angeles by a little more than double. A former Memphis cop who saw the reality of the streets, Tom went on to train armed citizens to protect themselves. He’s up to 52 of his graduates who have been in self-defense gunfights. All have won. He told us that in 2007, Memphis recorded 32 justifiable homicides in self-defense by private citizens in the city, and only 5 by the police.

Anyone interested in attending next year’s conference, or taking training direct from Tom and his excellent crew in Memphis, can check out his website at www.rangemaster.com. I’ll be doing a 40-hour class for him there next August, and am very much looking forward to it. Congrats to Todd Louis Green at www.pistol-training.com, who won the Polite Society match with a blazing display of combat pistolcraft using a Heckler and Koch .45 drawn from concealment, and ran a great charity side-match. More on that worthy endeavor later.

It was good to see what Brother Farnam so aptly called “cross-pollination” between police and law-abiding armed citizens. Speaking as someone with a foot in each world, I find it a very natural and well-balanced juxtaposition.

Tom Givens lecturing.

Todd Green winning the Polite Society match. Arrow points to spent casing from his HK .45 auto. Note that muzzle is still on target: excellent control.

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This week at the annual conference of ILEETA, the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association, the anti-gun factions were nowhere to be seen. After all, they have nothing to offer the police sector…and, I suspect, they know that. On the other hand, the National Rifle Association was present as usual with a heavily-attended booth that focused on their half-century history of aiding law enforcement training. The United States Practical Shooting Association was present as well, and their booth likewise drew much interest from the criminal justice trainers in attendance. Much of what has been learned in their practical shooting competitions has migrated directly to America’s police academies and in-service training and qualification ranges.  I had predicted as much in this space a short time ago. It is always good to have one’s predictions validated.

The conference was sited in Wheeling, Illinois – the greater Chicago area. Colleen Lawson dropped by from the city to visit. Colleen has been mentioned here in the recent past: she is one of the plaintiffs in the landmark gun owners’ civil rights case McDonald, et. al. v. Chicago, which challenges the city’s long-standing ban on ownership of handguns by its citizens. She was warmly welcomed by ILEETA director Harvey Hedden. ILEETA had submitted an amicus curae (friend of the court) brief in favor of the plaintiffs in the prequel to the McDonald case, Heller v. District of Columbia, and if memory serves submitted such a brief in favor of Lawson and the other plaintiffs in the current case, as well.

Theirs is by no means a maverick position in law enforcement. The state attorney general is the chief law enforcement officer at the state level, and many state attorneys general submitted briefs and opinions in favor of the plaintiffs in McDonald.

All this is good to keep in mind whenever you hear the false blanket statement that “the cops don’t want the citizenry to have firearms.”

This weekend, the superb United States Shooting Academy in Tulsa, Oklahoma will be host to the National Tactical Conference. This conclave was created and is spearheaded by Tom Givens, a retired cop turned trainer who is proud of how many of his civilian students have survived gunfights with criminals. In the intense classroom and live-fire programs, cops will train alongside private citizens in armed self-defense. Later, they’ll compete against one another in a very challenging and realistic combat shooting match.

It is significant that the shooting contest is called the Polite Society match. The term comes from science fiction writer Robert Heinlein’s classic statement that “an armed society is a polite society.”

NRA’s law enforcement division was busy at the police trainers’ conference…

…ditto the USPSA representatives.

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It was an interesting week for gun owners’ rights activists, and this week promises to continue the trend. Last week, the Governor of Arizona signed the legislation that will make that state the third in the nation that allows law-abiding adult citizens to carry loaded, concealed handguns in public without a permit. The law goes into effect this summer, I’m told. (LINK HERE). Vermont has had that system for as long as any living human can remember, and has always had one of the lowest rates of violent crime of any state in the nation – many years, THE lowest. Bad judgment shootings by law-abiding carriers are so infrequent as to be off the radar screen.  A few years ago, Alaska followed with what might be an even better system. I say that because Vermont, never having needed a permit system, has none in place, so the Vermont citizen can get no indigenous permit with which to reciprocate when he or she travels to states that recognize other state’s resident permits. Alaska kept its permit system in place, to allow for its citizens to have reciprocity elsewhere.  This is the model Arizona is following.

Today the Second Amendment March is scheduled to take place in Washington, DC. I expect it to go peacefully, and therefore be largely ignored by the anti-gun elements of the mainstream media. It would not surprise me at all if the turnout dwarfed that of the Million Man March of anti-gunners a few years ago, whose attendance was a miniscule fraction of their eponymous name/number.

This immediate past weekend saw our friends in the Appleseed Project hold their excellent rifle clinics/history lectures all around the country, in celebration of the anniversary of the events at Concord and Lexington that sparked the American Revolution and the birth of this nation. The date for the peaceful march in Washington was chosen for the same reason. Of course, much of the mainstream media will choose to mention instead that it coincides with such anniversaries as the Branch Davidian debacle in Waco and the terrorist McVeigh’s bombing in Oklahoma City.

My buddy Mike Larney tells me the turnout was huge at the Appleseed he helped teach over the weekend. I couldn’t be at one because I was teaching a deadly force class in Wisconsin, hosted by Chief Bill Meloy at his splendid police headquarters in Saukville. Though LEOs were in attendance, the course was geared mainly for armed citizens, and the classroom was full. Like many chief law enforcement officers in Wisconsin, Chief Meloy is comfortable with the idea that Concealed Carry is expected to soon become law in his state, one of only two that currently ban the practice (the other being Illinois). He sees the teaching of firearms responsibility to law-abiding citizens as a natural part of his agency’s public safety and crime prevention mission.

Our nation needs more top cops like him.

Capt. Ayoob, left, thanks Chief Meloy for his commitment to public safety.

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Hey, folks, please accept my apologies for being away from the blog longer than usual. It’s the month from Hell for me: two classes for armed citizens, two for cops, and one for both, plus a couple of trials. One of the latter comes from an officer-involved shooting (OIS) and I’ll be speaking for the officer who fired at his trial later this month; the other saw me speaking for an armed citizen who shot two people to protect himself, his wife, and his special-needs child. It just went to verdict yesterday, after I spent three days at the Public Defender’s Office and in the courthouse in the city where it happened.

The verdict was no verdict: the jury deadlocked. Eight of the twelve voted to acquit in what most trained people would have seen as a clear-cut self-defense shooting. Two voted to convict. And two jurors couldn’t even come to a decision. (Silly me: I always thought that if you couldn’t decide if the defendant was guilty or not, that constituted the very definition of “reasonable doubt” and the vote should be for Not Guilty.)

Since this outcome means the case has not been adjudicated fully yet, I can’t talk about it here. However, I did notice one interesting thing.

At least four cops testified for the DEFENSE of the armed citizen, including at least one lawman who was on the scene immediately after the shooting.

People who are independent by nature and avoid government interference with their lives as much as possible, don’t get to see how government – and the government’s appointed authorities – actually operate day to day. They seem to fear the police. With almost 36 years wearing a badge now, but having been an armed citizen before I pinned on the shield and knowing that I’ll be one when I turn that shield back in – I have a foot in each world. And I can tell you this: the majority of America’s street cops are on the side of citizens who lawfully and righteously protect themselves, with guns or otherwise.

Leroy Pyle, a seasoned street cop who is now retired and can freely say the things he said in support of armed citizens when he was still in uniform – and took a lot of crap for it – has started a new organization that hopes to bring together those natural allies, the law-abiding armed citizens and the police who are sworn under oath to serve and protect them. You’ll find links HERE and HERE.

Next week, I’ll be running two different classes for ILEETA, the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association, at their annual conclave. Several hundred police trainers will attend ILEETA.  The National Rifle Association will have a booth there, and some of their instructors will be teaching.  By contrast, the Brady Bunch and the other anti-gun groups will be notable by their absence.

This, I submit, should tell you something…

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I’ve been aware since I was a junior shooter that the sights sit above the centerline of the barrel, and if there are obstacles between gun muzzle and target, those obstacles can stop the bullet. I was firmly reminded of it in my worst of ten stages in a shooting match last Sunday. The stage was titled “Escape From Haiti” by the creative designers of the Florida State Sunshine Games IDPA match held at Central Florida Rifle & Pistol Club’s welcoming range in Orlando. Since it was deemed too dangerous for shooters to fire from the back of an actual moving truck as they ran a gauntlet of “armed looters,” the targets were arrayed across a broad space, some of them 25 yards from the shooter, and the contestant had to leap onto a board supported by heavy springs to simulate the movement of a “truck.” It felt more like shooting while standing on a raft in high seas. Firing across an arc of almost 180 degrees at half a dozen targets, many partially obscured to represent them being behind cover, the shooter had to engage three of them over a high wooden wall in front of the bouncing platform that represented the truck’s cab.

Well, when I got done, cleared, and unloaded (and checked for seasickness), a review of those six targets showed four of them hit solidly – and two, in the center, missed cleanly. The big green dot of the fiber optic front sight of my S&W Performance Center Model 625 revolver had been on target each time the hammer fell, the rolling shooting platform notwithstanding. I figured it out as I walked back uprange after scoring. Atop the wooden “truck cab” wall behind which I’d fired were two distinct bullet dings. The sights had been high enough that the gun below them obscured the fact that the wood was in line with the bore. The round-nosed full metal jacket 230 grain bullets from my Remington-UMC ammo had hit the wood at 845 feet per second, deflecting upward enough to barely pass over the heads of the targets, according to observers.

Live and learn. In a famous police countersniper incident, a cop on a roof had to take a shot from some distance behind the parapet. His crosshairs were comfortably above the edge of the wall, but his .308 rifle’s barrel wasn’t. The bullet hit the wall in a puff of concrete dust, instead of the gunman it was aimed at. Fortunately, the police rifleman spotted the hit through the telescopic sight, bolted another round into the chamber, and got back to business. One wonders how many deer hunters have tried to thread a bullet through a tangle of branches and into some venison, only to end up saying, “How could I have missed that buck?” Very likely, the same syndrome at work.  Those who use AR15s and M4s, whose sight planes are considerably higher than their bore planes, need to pay particular attention to this. I didn’t, and it cost me a huge point loss. Compared to a police marksman on a roof – or a fighting American in Iraq or Afghanistan – I got off pretty cheap from the mistake.

Live and learn.  Live long enough, and you forget and get reminded.

Shooting from replicated bouncing truck. Top edge of wooden structure at left is below line of sight, but level with bore, and in a moment…

…it will get dinged twice (arrows), deflecting bullets to a point a few inches over the targets downrange.

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