Massad Ayoob - Combat Shooting with Massad Ayoob

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DEDICATION

This book is respectfully and appreciatively dedicated to
my brother and sister instructors.
The ones who trained me, and still do
the ones Ive taught alongside
the ones Ive trained
and the ones who came before any of us, but left artifacts to pass
on to us the precious lessons, often written in blood, that they had gathered
for us so we could pass them forward in turn.
Ive put as many lessons from all of them as I could into this book.

Mas Ayoob
June 2011

FOREWORD

I first met Massad Ayoob in 1990, when I invited him to teach a two-day Judicious Use of Deadly Force seminar at a gun range where I worked. Little did I know that this encounter would change my life forever. Having already been trained in use of deadly force as a police officer and also as a police firearms instructor, I thought I was pretty well versed on the topic. Those two days though, where he dissected each and every aspect of the deadly force encounter, opened my eyes to a whole new way to look at the subject of use of deadly force in self-defense; that being to filter each and every aspect of teaching how and when to shoot, through the filter of the likely jury assessing whether or not your act was reasonable under the circumstances.

That year, not only did I take the aforementioned course, but I also took three other week-long classes from him, flying back to New Hampshire to complete the trilogy of LFI-I, II, and III, and along the way being asked by Ayoob to join the staff of the Lethal Force Institute.

When asked to write the foreword to this particular work of his, I must admit I was both honored and a little horrified. He was both my mentor and friend. Would I do him and this book justice? The good news is I dont have to, the work speaks for itself, and speaks volumes.

I asked for a pre-release review copy of the book, and upon reading it, the years of working with him on the range and in the classroom seemed to fly by in my memories. I could hear his words, and came to realize that this book, Combat Shooting with Massad Ayoob, was a compilation of his lifes work to date, a history I am lucky to have shared with him for the past 20+ years.

The five different sections of the book, dealing with mindset, learning combat shooting, men we can learn from, competing as a way to sharpen your skills and choices that need making is a novel, but effective way to communicate the volume of information which an armed citizen should (and in many cases MUST) know before going armed in our society. Invoking the words of Jim Cirillo, Charlie Askins and even Wyatt Earp drives home the point that modern day training for the deadly force encounter shares much of the same techniques and mindset that earlier generations of armed Americans successfully used to succeed in deadly force encounters. We are fortunate to have their exploits to study, and their words to heed.

Over the past decade or so, we in the business have heard the constant drum beat of the crowd who say that shooting in competition will teach you bad habits, and will likely get you killed. I agree with Ayoob and many of my contemporaries who have not only tried to quiet that voice, but also urge others to get involved in competing with a gun in hand. But, there is a point to the anti-competition crowd that is worth considering. If ALL you do is compete, and you learn how to run the gun under stress shooting a sport, then it is likely that under the stress of the gunfight, your body will naturally seek to relieve that stress by using familiar shooting techniques. That is why competition should not be your only training venue, but instead used as a test to see if your skills are honed and your techniques are sharp. Ayoob explains this concept admirably.

As a man grows older (I am in my mid fifties as of this writing), he starts to look back at his life and mentally reviews the worthiness of his many experiences, and plots his course for the remainder of his days. Twenty years ago, I took Ayoob on as a mentor in the business of teaching the how and when of using the gun for self-defense, one of the more intelligent choices I have made. I look forward to the next 20 years to see how the final chapters of this fascinating career play out, and hope to share a good portion of the next two decades with Mas, on the range, teaching, learning and competing.

Marty Hayes
Onalaska, WA

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to these pages, and needless to say, thanks for buying the book. (Hopefully, that will be the only thing I say needlessly here.) The topic is a broad one, and if the late editor Dan Shideler had assigned this book title to a hundred of us who work in the field, hed have wound up with a hundred markedly different manuscripts. If you look at the six editions of Gun Digest Book of Combat Handgunnery that have been published over the years, youll see that Jack Lewis and Jack Mitchell, Chuck Taylor and Chuck Karwan and I, all had different interpretations and ended up writing very different books under the same title. Its a broad subject, and a subjective one.

Thats as much true on the readers end as on the writers. Its not all about mindset, though thats certainly part of it. Only one section on competition shooting? Yep, cause competition shooting is only one piece of the puzzle. Only three famous gunfighters profiled in depth? Yup, because that was all there was room for in a book that wasnt just analytical biography of been there/done that role models. Nothing on how to draw a pistol? Nope, that would be Gun Digest Book of Concealed Carry. What, no catalog of firearms? No, that would be Gun Digest.

Dan Shideler had wanted this to be a thinking mans book, with lots of quotes from thinking men. Ive tried, in his memory, to make it so. An unexpected cardiac event took Dan from us before the book was fully underway, and his premature departure is in my opinion a loss to the entire shooting community. He had been a joy to work with on the first volume of Massad Ayoobs Greatest Handguns, and in his approach I saw his deep understanding of not only firearms, but this thing weve all come to call the Gun Culture. I miss him still, and hope that this book has turned out as he wanted.

I need to thank some other editors for permission to reprint here work I did originally for them. That includes group publisher Shirley Steffen and editor Linas Cernauskas at Harris Publications, which has published my annual Complete Book of Handguns since 1993; Roy Huntington, editorial director of Publishers Development Corporation and editor of