I had grown up reading about Ray Chapman, the man the late, great Jeff Cooper called “the maestro” of practical handgun shooting, and got to meet him in Los Angeles in 1978 during a practice session for the National Championships of IPSC, the International Practical Shooting Confederation. I was running a particularly difficult stage, and since he was watching I asked, “Mr. Chapman, could you give me any pointers?” He replied that I should start the stage with my toes pointed in a slightly different direction, and should slap the barricade (the second firing point of the stage) with my support hand when I reached it.
I remember thinking “Wow, big deal…the World Champion’s only advice is move my toes and slap some wood.” But I tried it…and cut a significant few seconds off my time on the next run. The slight change in foot angle had saved me a turn as I started the run, and the slap on the wall brought me to a stop and into firing position on the barricade much more quickly. Ray Chapman had just given me my first preview of his extraordinary coaching ability.
I got to his Chapman Academy advanced pistol school in Columbia (actually adjacent Hallsville), Missouri a couple of years later, and wound up teaching with him for many years. Trained as an engineer, Chapman brought an engineer’s analytical eye to teaching the gun, and I learned more from him than from any of my many other mentors over the decades of my shooting career.
Ray’s retirement and subsequent death were sad chapters in firearms training, as was the temporary shutdown of the Academy program. 2012 is a banner year in that Chapman Academy is now open for teaching again, at the same famously well-equipped facility! Head of the program now is Rich Greiner, one of Ray’s protégés. There is no doubt in my mind that Rich will continue Ray’s successful approach of starting with accuracy and building to speed.
I’m delighted to see Chapman Academy open again. What you learn there can cut years off a trial-and-error learning curve in making you a fast, accurate shooter. Info is available at http://www.chapmanacademyofpracticalshooting.com/. I’m proud to be a Chapman Academy alumnus, and believe me, you will be, too.
The Chapman Academy is open again…
…in the picturesque Missouri heartland, on the same great facility that has hosted the Bianchi Cup since 1979…
…and now headed by Rich Greiner, one of Ray Chapman’s proteges.
Fortunately, before mayhem could ensue, an armed parishioner took him at gunpoint. This was not what the violent intruder had come for; he surrendered, and a mass murder was averted.
These things don’t always have such happy endings. For a number of reasons, houses of worship are disproportionately likely to be the targets of mass murderers. Across the spectrum of the faiths, clergy and church management have taken to heart the words attributed to Jesus Christ: “If thou hast not a sword, sell thy cloak and buy one.” (Luke 22:36)
Yeah, it’s Sunday. Some of you are religious, some are not. I once gave that quote to a friend who happens to be an atheist, who replied with a puzzled look, “Whose screen name is Luke twenty-two thirty-six? What forums does he post on?” Well, if you don’t read the Bible, you’ll find the same principle in Ethics 101. There is such a thing as a responsibility to protect the innocent from evil. This is why so many houses of worship now provide discreet armed security for their members in attendance.
One such was Jeanne Assam, an ex-cop working volunteer security at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado on December 9, 2007. In the wee hours of that morning, a crazed young man had shot multiple people at an affiliated church in a suburb of Denver. The same monster showed up at the Colorado Springs facility with an AR15, a couple of handguns, and a backpack with more than a thousand rounds of ammunition. He opened fire in the parking lot, killing two and wounding two more. Entering the church, he found himself facing Ms. Assam…and his own mortality.
Disregarding her own safety, Jeanne Assam moved in on the heavily armed gunman, firing her Beretta 92 FS with deadly accuracy, and cut him down in a hail of 9mm bullets. Some say that at the last moment he put a fatal bullet into himself, but that wouldn’t change the fact that he died only after Ms. Assam disabled him with multiple solid hits, and stopped a rampage that could have claimed dozens of lives.
We are a nation that seems driven to tear down its heroes, and Jeanne Assam became a target of the mainstream media and other forces thereafter. You can read her compelling story in her own words. Her book “God, the Gunman, and Me” is available for $14.99 plus $5.00 postage from http://www.jeanneassam.com/jeannes-book .
From the brave man in Spartanburg to the courageous lady in Colorado Springs, we have logical testament to the fact that if you’re going to refer to those folks in the pews as “the flock,” and their spiritual advisor as “the shepherd,” it makes a lot of sense to have some sheepdogs around, with good sharp fangs.
Teaching people how to shoot well has been how I’ve made much of my living for many years. Shooting lessons, I remind the students, include the lessons about life that shooting teaches us. I just realized that I’d lost sight of that a bit myself of late.
One point I make is that an Unconscious Competence level of skill, the ability to do something well on auto pilot, is a wonderful thing but not attainable on demand. When performance on demand is of the essence, I recommend ratcheting down to Conscious Competence and taking an instant to think about what you’re doing.
I change guns often. Partly because testing different ones is another thing I do for a living, partly because my students all have different guns and I have to be familiar with all of them, and partly because I simply like to do so. A few months ago I decided to forsake my ballistic promiscuity and stick for a while with one particular style, a polymer-framed pistol I’ll call Brand A. For the most part, that plan has worked, fulfilling the advice most of us give that if you stay with one “platform” you’ll become better and more reflexive with it.
There’s another side, though, that I’ve been reminded of in the last ten days. Testing polymer-framed pistol Brand B for a gun magazine on Saturday the 3rd at an IDPA match in Jacksonville, FL, I managed to take First Master and top score overall in the Enhanced Service Pistol division with Brand B. On the weekend of the 10th and 11th, I took Brand A to Clearwater for the Florida State Championships…and absolutely tanked.
I’ll tell you right now, it wasn’t a “brand versus brand” thing. I consider the two guns equal in quality and inherent accuracy and “shootability,” model for equivalent model. The first match was smaller, 122 shooters compared to roughly 300 for the second, a deeper pool with bigger sharks in it, but as the guy behind the sights and the trigger both times, I have a pretty good idea why I shot quantitatively worse with the more familiar pistol.
With the less recently familiar Brand B gun, I was focusing on its subtleties. Its grip to barrel angle was slightly different than what I’d been lately habituated to, as was its trigger reach and length of trigger reset. I was running Conscious Competence pretty much every shot. With Brand A, the old familiar extension of the hand, I found myself going auto pilot and taking overconfident liberties. There were stages where I KNOW I relaxed my grip, where I pointed rather than aimed, where I rushed instead of pressed the trigger.
Where I took my familiar gun, and my supposed skills with it, for granted.
We do that with people, paying more attention to the new folks we want to impress than we pay with our familiar loved ones. It hurts us in the end. Life lesson. We drive our friend’s new Corvette Sting Ray with more care than our own casually-handled Impala, and it does us no good at the end of the day. Same, same.
That’s why I say that shooting – like some other sports, and other seemingly casual undertakings – can reinforce for us the more important lessons of Life.
H2H – hand to hand defensive skills – is an absolutely vital component to personal safety. Back in the days when I wrote regularly for Black Belt and some of the other martial arts magazines, I had the pleasure of writing the first cover story on Jim Arvanitis. It was not to be the last such story on him: Jim has long since become hugely famous in the martial arts world world.
An American of Greek descent, Jim was quite the street brawler in his younger days, and his quest for dominance there led him into the formal martial arts. He studied them both widely and deeply, and also rediscovered Pankration, the ancient Greek “all powers” fighting art that encompassed grappling, striking, and even biting. Some theorize that Karate developed in Asia from Pankration brought by the soldiers of Alexander the Great. Jim single-handedly revived Pankration in modern times, in my opinion, and now it’s much the rage among mixed martial arts practitioners. It is significant that Jim achieved that feat in the 1970s and ‘80s when most martial artists didn’t “mix.”
Arvanitis has recently completed some new projects, two books and two training DVDs. From Black Belt Books (www.blackbeltmag.com) comes the volume martial artists will want to read, “The First Mixed Martial Art: Pankration From Myths to Modern Times.” It’s a fascinating study of the history and the philosophy of the art. The best “video accompaniment” to this Arvanitis book is probably Jim’s 350-minute, 2006 video from Paladin Press (www.paladin-press.com), which graphically explains and demonstrates the vast repertoire of Pankration techniques. The video’s title is “Secrets of Pankration.”
But for the average person concerned with self-defense, as well as the dedicated martial artist, we have “Battlefield Pankration” in both book and video form, from Paladin. This book is subtitled “Lethal Personal Combat for the Street,” and the reader should take the title seriously. While there are some takedowns and other techniques that could restrain an attacker without physically harming him, Jim often goes on the assumption that you could be in a fight where you face fatal, crippling, or disfiguring injury if you don’t render the opponent wholly incapable of attack. The book shows you how to crack skulls, break necks, and empty eye sockets.
Jim’s hallmark since I’ve known him has been an extremely deep understanding of human kinesiology. He excels in teaching how to generate power, whether it’s peeling off an attacker who has you down and is strangling you, or delivering your own punch or kick with bone-breaking, organ-crushing force.
Most self-defense books will say something like “gouge his eyes out” or “hit him here as hard as you can,” and will leave the advice at that. In “Battlefield Pankration,” Jim teaches everything from exactly how to perform that eye-gouging to precisely how to set your body to throw a punch or kick with your full weight behind it that will have a good chance of ending the fight.
In a world rife with phony self-defense instructors, I can say with some authority that Jim Arvanitis is One of the Real Ones…and, among those, one of the very best. I definitely recommend all four of the above works to martial artists and legitimate self-defense instructors, and the “Battlefield Pankration” book and video both to those experts and to ordinary citizens who want to learn more about surviving when someone tries to take their life, and they have only bare hands with which to fight back.
On January 8, the Brady Bunch suggested a lighting of a candle as a protest to gun violence.
Awww…how sweet.
The 8th, of course, was the one year anniversary of the grotesque mass murder in Tucson, Arizona by Jared Lee Loughner. His most famous victim, left brain-damaged for life, was Arizona Congressman Gabby Giffords. She was clearly his intended target.
The gun-banners made much of the fact that Representative Giffords was shot with a Glock 19 9mm pistol. They neglected to mention that Gabby Giffords had, prior to the shooting, proudly stated that she owned and had a license to carry a Glock 19 of her own. The mass-murderer was put to the ground and captured by courageous citizens, including ARMED citizen Joe Zamudio, who was carrying a pistol of his own at the time, a Ruger P95 9mm.
But lighting a candle will prevent the Jared Loughners of the world from carrying out their monstrous deeds? Good Lord…it’s like the candlelight vigils from the Take Back the Night Movement.
It’s nice to know that people care. Hell, I care. I’ve spent an adult lifetime learning how to ward off monsters such as Loughner, and sharing that knowledge with others.
Some pro-gun bloggers got together and did their own January 8 counterpoint to the Brady thing. I wish I had contributed more to that: all I did was take a picture of some strong women with candles and nine millimeters at a Glock match in Clearwater, Florida on the 8th. (Great match, by the way, and kudos to the Wyoming Antelope Club in Clearwater for putting it on.)
The decades have taught me that women won’t take back the night by marching with candles. They’ll take it back when those who prey on them learn – some the hard and final way – that their intended victims can be more dangerous to them, than they are to their intended victims.
Those you see below have it right.
If some monster tries to rape or murder a woman I care about, I don’t want him to see the flickering light of a candle.
I want him to see a muzzle flash, from the front.
I hate to paraphrase Al Capone, but a candle and a Glock will earn women more safety than just a candle. From left: Gail, Kitty, and Lisa Marie of the Alabama Holster Company’s all-girl pistol team, January 8, at Glock match in Clearwater, FL.
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