To the world you may be just one person, but to one person you may be the world. An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.
G. K. Chesterton
[Survival Arts resumes its regular service with the publication of Mark Quon's first article on this blog. Welcome, Mark! - editor]
Last Friday 23 May 3003 I completed the 5 Day Combatives Skills Courses taught by Gabe Suarez, which I found to be one of the most enlightening, comprehensive, high speed/low drag defensive shooting classes that I've ever had the privilege of attending.
For those of you who are unaware, Gabe is the author of numerous excellent books on the tactical employment of all the major small arms weapons platforms. I bought his first book The Tactical Pistol back during its initial release and found it to be the definitive book on the subject of fighting with a sidearm. Since then I have gone on to obtain every new title authored by Mr. Suarez as soon as it's released and consider his works to be among the most invaluable reference books in my firearms library.
Needless to say, I was looking forward to taking my first class with him and was quite pleased with the results.
DAY 1 Tactical Marksmanship Enhancement
On the first day, we started off with a review of all the fundamentals of combat marksmanship. Stance, firing grip, the "3 Secrets", follow-through and the presentation were all reviewed in depth along with some helpful hints on fine tuning and improving our present skill levels. This was basically the type of stuff that other schools would cover in a two or three day entry level course condensed into an eight hour session. In addition to being a skill building course, the secondary intent of this class was to help Gabe gauge the present skill level of all those present and bring those who were lagging up to speed for the rest of the week's curriculum.
DAY 2 Combative Shooting and CQB Skills
On day two, we began to learn the combative applications for our newly honed core skills. Subjects such as shooting on the move, addressing threats from around the compass and CQ retention shooting were all covered exhaustively as well as a session of low light shooting. Since it does not get dark in SoCal at this time of year until well into the night, we were not able to do a lot of low light drills. However, I did learn a new and improved version of the Harries Technique - one that isn't as tedious to use - as well as numerous tips and techniques on using the shooting flashlight in a tactical environment along with some neat modifications to make the Surefire light a bit more user-friendly.
DAY 3 Team Tactics, Team Movement, and Advanced Shooting Skills
On the third day, the subject of moving and shooting with a partner was addressed. We were taught the principles of moving with a partner, utilizing both verbal and nonverbal communications and mutually supporting fire in the early part of the course. The later part of the day, we learned numerous wounded operator techniques, which entailed a lot of ambidextrous shooting - both one and two handed - and having the students shoot each other's weapons (to simulate a scenario where we might find it necessary to fight with a bad guy / partner's dropped weapon) as well as firing from atypical firing platforms e.g. supine etc.
Day 3 ended with a lecture on Tactical Emergency First Aid given by Suarez International Staff Member Jeff Mayberry. This is not to be confused with ditch medicine or emergency war surgery type subjects which require a comprehensive course of their own. Rather, this was a lecture on what to do to keep yourself alive long enough to reach medical first aid if you're stabbed or shot in the course of a fight. Of course, all this is predicated on the fact that you need to neutralize the threat first. But beyond the bare minimum of first aid techniques presented, the main focus of this lecture was the attempt to inculcate in the students the need to cultivate a Never Say Die mentality and mindset so crucial to winning a lethal force encounter where the Good Guy (or gal) may have sustained injuries. Personally, I found this to be one of the most critical and rousing lectures I've heard in any self-defense course.
DAY 4 Vehicle Defense (Fighting From, Around, and Inside Vehicles)
The objective of day four was to train us in deploying weapons in and around vehicles along with plenty of other related subjects. A lot of the drills we were taught could also be adapted to respond to an immediate threat from the seated position. The latter part of the day involved the students testing various carry ammo on car doors, windshields and such in order to gauge the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of our ammo of choice on such media. The results were astounding, to say the least.
The day ended with another thought provoking lecture given by Gabe on the aftermath of a shooting. This lecture also encompassed discussions on pre-shooting preparations and dwelled on post shooting problems and the most feasible ways of dealing with such contingencies. Very practical knowledge to have.
DAY 5 Weapon Retention / Alternative Force / Weapon Disarming
The final course blends empty handed combatives with the handgun. We were taught various methods of retaining control of our pistol - both in holster and hand - as well as disarming our adversaries and using the handgun as an alternative force impact weapon. I found the techniques presented to be simple, easy to learn/master, low maintenance, and brutally effective. An added bonus for those of us with previous training in martial arts is that our prior training makes actually enhances these techniques.
For those of us who have had some training under our belt, a big plus in training with Gabe is that most of the stuff he teaches is concept-driven rather than based upon rigid doctrine (which would be ineffective outside of the controlled enviroment of a square range). A lot of what Gabe teaches is based on his experiences and observations as a seasoned gunfighter: during his decade and a half as a peace officer with the Santa Monica PD, he was involved in over a half dozen lethal force situations with urban street predators. So, the student knows that what he's learning is based upon stuff that works in real time against flesh and blood threats rather than the musings of armchair warriors. This is not to say that one cannot learn to be technically proficient with firearms from the strict theorists, but I do believe that in order to attain the necessary mindset to prepare for a life-and-death encounter - along with technical proficiency - one should seek out an instructor who has Seen the Elephant.
All in all, I found this five day course to be a most rewarding experience. My classmates were a highly motivated and competent lot who were all extremely eager to learn and I felt honored to be training among such a hard charging crew. Both Gabe and Jeff were superb instructors. They were thoroughly knowledgeable on the given subjects, willing to answer any and all questions and sincerely interested in imparting said knowledge to us. I truly feel like I got more than my money's worth and I highly recommend Gabe's classes to anyone who's serious about the business of gunfighting.
I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws… if I can write its economics textbooks.
Paul A. Samuelson
My own enjoyment of the books aside, what I see in the whole Harry Potter argument is simply more proof of an argument made recently by best-selling author Orson Scott Card about Tolkien's books; to wit: Serious "LitCrits" hate the Lord of the Rings because the public loves LoR. This is because the public is still quite unashamed to enjoy stories while the LitCrits had that trait wrenched, I mean, trained out of them in the universities. For the serious student of Great Literature, stories are for the uneducated; real intellectuals deal with what stories mean.
Thanks to my friend Steve Pegram for passing along this incredibly interesting thread on the AR15.com Forums: "USMC after-action gear assessment". Pay particular attention to the reports on the adequacy of 5.56mm vs 7.62mm carbine/rifle ammunition, and the spectacular satisfaction of operators with their M16 & (especially) M4 carbines.
Especially interesting is a point I've known all along: a lot of issue military gear quickly gets replaced with individually selected commercial "sporting goods" equivalents, e.g. Panoptx goggles replacing the awful issue crap.
Another interesting point: the M9 pistol still sucks. It should be replaced with the Glock or whatever the individual soldier wishes to otherwise carry.
The only thing that separates successful people from the ones who aren't is the willingness to work very, very hard.
Helen Gurley Brown
Government is like a baby: an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
Ronald Reagan
It's going to be a few weeks before I get back into the swing of posting. I'm in the process of switching careers, and am attending to priorities... blogging is one of the lower ones (priorities, that is).
On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind.
Thomas Jefferson
It is fortunate for this community that I am not a criminal.
Sherlock Holmes, from "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans"
Arthur Conan Doyle
It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon the supposition he may abuse it.
Oliver Cromwell
The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.
Walter Bagehot
I then went on, beginning with the rise and progress of the primitive religions, and coming down to the various religions of the present time, during which time I labored to show Queequeg that all these Lents, Ramadans, and prolonged ham-squattings in cold, cheerless rooms were stark nonsense; bad for the health; useless for the soul; opposed, in short, to the obvious laws of Hygiene and common sense. I told him, too, that he being in other things such an extremely sensible and sagacious savage, it pained me, very badly pained me, to see him now so deplorably foolish about this ridiculous Ramadan of his. Besides, argued I, fasting makes the body cave in; hence the spirit caves in; and all thoughts born of a fast must necessarily be half-starved. This is the reason why most dyspeptic religionists cherish such melancholy notions about their hereafters. In one word, Queequeg, said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.
Herman Melville
Moby Dick, Ch. 17, The Ramadan
Fox's Bill O'Reilly just now finally proved to me he's an arrogant, know-nothing populist asshole: he just called the (libertarian) Reason Foundation "a left-leaning organization". This, after last night's treatment of radio talk show host Neil Boortz, convinces me that O'Reilly has no understanding of the term "constitutional republic".
We're told cars are wasteful. Wasteful of what? Oil did a lot of good sitting in the ground for millions of years. We're told cars should be replaced with mass transportation. But it's hard to reach the drive through window at McDonald's from a speeding train. And we're told cars cause pollution. A hundred years ago city streets were ankle deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever at nine?
P.J. O'Rourke
It is one of the Christian delusions that Christianity brought charity into the world. It did no such thing. There were plenty of agencies for taking care of the poor and helpless long before Christianity was heard of, and even before Judaism. Both Christianity and Judaism have converted charity into a sort of pious racket. The alms-giver, in return for a trifling expenditure on this earth, will be rewarded with an infinity of bliss post-mortem. This purely selfish note is struck with great clarity by Judaism, and only less clearly by Christianity. It appears also in the other religions of the East. Thus religion has not really promoted charity, but debased it.
H. L. Mencken
One of the most irrational of all the conventions of modern society is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. ...[This] convention protects them, and so they proceed with their blather unwhipped and almost unmolested, to the great damage of common sense and common decency. that they should have this immunity is an outrage. There is nothing in religious ideas, as a class, to lift them above other ideas. On the contrary, they are always dubious and often quite silly. Nor is there any visible intellectual dignity in theologians. Few of them know anything that is worth knowing, and not many of them are even honest.
H. L. Mencken
Sean Gabb announces today the publication of "All the Way Down the Slippery Slope: Gun Prohibition in England and Some Lessons for Civil Liberties in America" by Professors Joseph E. Olson and David B. Kopel; an excerpt from this long and well footnoted article:
Is it possible for a nation to go from wide-open freedom for a civil liberty, to near-total destruction of that liberty, in just a few decades? "Yes," warn many American civil libertarians, arguing that allegedly "reasonable" restrictions on civil liberty today will start the nation down "the slippery slope" to severe repression in the future.[3] In response, proponents of today's reasonable restrictions argue that the jeremiads about slippery slopes are unrealistic or even paranoid.[4]This Essay aims to refine the understanding of slippery slopes by examining a particular nation that did slide all the way down the slippery slope.(p.400) When the twentieth century began, the right to arms in Great Britain was robust, and subject to virtually no restrictions. As the century closes, the right has been almost obliterated. In studying the destruction of the British right to arms, this Essay draws conclusions about how slippery slopes operate in real life, and about what kinds of conditions increase or decrease the risk that the first steps down a hill will turn into a slide down a slippery slope.
Sean Gabb, of the UK's Libertarian Alliance, has himself written a number of superb essays on the RKBA over the years. After reading the piece above, visit the LA's site and look for his work.
The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.
Friedrich Nietzsche
At the bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique human being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Here's something you don't see everyday: "Rare Mid to Late 19th Vampire Killing Kit", on auction at gunbroker.com, the original 19th century text from the enclosing wooden box:
Vampire Killing KitThe accoutrements for the destruction of the Vampire
This box contains the items considered necessary for the protection of persons who travel into certain little known countries in Easter Europe where the populace are plagued with a peculiar manifestation of evil, known as Vampires... Professor Ernst Blomberg respectfully requests that the purchaser of this kit carefully studies his book. Should evil manifestations become apparent, he is then equiped to deal with them efficiently... Professor Blomberg wishes to announce his grateful thanks to that well known gunmaker of Liege, Nicholas Plombeur, whose help in compiling of the special items, the silver bullets,etc., has been most efficient. The items enclosed are as follows...
1. An efficient pistol with its usual accoutrements
2. A quantity of bullets of the finest silver
3. Powdered flowers of garlic (one phial)
4. Flour of Brimstone (one phial)
5. Wooden stake (Oak)
6. Ivory crucifix
7. Holy Water (one phial)
8. Professer Blomberg's New Serum
Just had a nasty thought (one of many), trapped watching commercials on the Fox News Channel while eating lunch. A Keebler cracker commercial was airing, with the usual annoying, cloying Keebler Elf motif.
The thought was this: I am certain that someday soon, these commercials will have a 10-15 second urgently and legally worded postamble to the effect of "no, elves don't exist, there is no Magic Oven, don't believe everything you see on TV" because sure as hell some loser is going to try suing the Kellogg Company for all the money in Battle Creek, Michigan because of their eventual disillusionment & resultant psychological distress.
Stupider things have happened. I'll bet something like this happens.
Then again, maybe they should be sued for this "Elfin facts" claptrap I see scrolling in my browser's status bar courtesy of the page's embedded Javascript:
Excuse me while I dig an airsickness sack out of my flight bag...
Sean Gabb reminds me of this fact in a recent mailing announcing this Libertarian Alliance piece by Dr. Jean-Louis Caccomo, a lecturer in the Département des Sciences Économiques et de Gestion at the University of Perpignan, France; an excerpt:
The tendency to confuse the rhetoric of racism and exclusion with the functioning of the market economy is a disturbing sign of deep intellectual regression and mental manipulation. The moral and philosophical foundation of market individualism is not a smug cult of blind egoism, but rather a commitment to judge individuals without regard to attributes such as skin colour, ethnic origin, religion, socio-economic status, or sex. An individualistic society refuses to consider people on the basis of such attributes, insisting that before one is a man or a woman, a peasant or a professor, black or white, blue or white collar, one is an individual.
A brave statement from heavily Islamic France (where I've spent a good deal of time myself, incidentally):
Let’s take the example of a restaurant owner who refuses to hire a girl because she wears an Islamic scarf. As an individual, I might be shocked by such a decision and I can decide to boycott this restaurant, yet I have no right to ask the State to compel him to hire the girl. Actually, freedom of expression means the government should not forbid any idea, any political party or newspaper but this does not mean the government should fund the press or political parties. If I find this or that TV program stupid or shocking, I can switch the channel or stop watching TV but the government must not censor any program.
Excerpted from "Affirmative Action, Social Terrorism, and Trades Union Freedom: The Failures of the Fallacious Concept Of ‘Social Justice’".
The earth is the cradle of humankind, but one cannot live in the cradle forever.
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, 1896
My friend David sent this; indeed, truly amazing...
Ralston was hiking Saturday when he became pinned by the boulder. He ran out of water on Tuesday and on Thursday morning, he decided that his survival required drastic action... ...using a pocketknife, Ralston cut off his right arm below the elbow and applied a tourniquet and administered first aid. He then rigged anchors, fixed a rope and rappelled 60 feet to the canyon floor.
If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile-driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time – a tremendous whack!
Winston Churchill
