Jeff Cooper - Principles of Personal Defense

PRINCIPLES

OF

PERSONAL DEFENSE

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

There are two men who influenced my life more than any other my late father and Jeff Cooper.

I have had the privilege of knowing Colonel Cooper for three decades, during which time he has filled the roles of mentor, teacher, counsellor, and friend. Without the benefit of his teachings I would probably not be alive today and neither would many others.

The greatest testament to his lifes work is the fact that currently there is not one firearms instructor of repute who was not influenced one way or another by his freely passed-on knowledge. A man of honor and integrity, he expects no less of others, and that is why he commands respect. In a day and age when almost anything can be bought, respect is the one quality which still has to be earned and he has earned it.

In the early 1980s, when Jeff and Janelle paid my salary, I was never treated like an employee, and always felt I was working with the Coopers, as opposed to working for them. I was informed what needed to be done to facilitate the smooth running of Orange Gunsite during those Glory Days, and I did it. It was as simple as that, and thats the way it should be.

Of all his prolific writings spanning half a century, including Cooper on Handguns , books on the how-tos of sports car driving, Old West gunfighters, and later works such as Fireworks and To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth , the one which intrigued me more than any other was also the shortest. This was the original Principles of Personal Defense .

When all is said and done as has been stated so many times through history the mind is more important than any mechanical weapon. An armed idiot savant could be a dangerous enemy, but an armed idiot with no savant may as well be unarmed. Hes just another idiot.

And this is the gist of Colonel Coopers Principles of Personal Defense .

It is a classic, timeless work, encapsulated in a clear, concise, and succinct form. And like a twentieth-century Western Civilization equivalent of Musashis seventeenth-century Book of Five Rings , it should be read, studied, and then periodically reread and restudied. No matter how many times you read it, you will always find one more pearl of wisdom that you missed during the last read.

Principles of Personal Defense is the fighting mans guide to mental conditioning plain and simple. And there is no better work on the subject period.

Maybe the Glory Days are gone, and Babys throaty roar no longer rings out over the Yavapai hills, but the wisdom and knowledge are laid out in print for perpetuity. All you have to do is read and learn

Louis Awerbuck

January 2006

PREFACE

It is not common for an author to enjoy rereading something that he wrote a decade previously. Times change, styles change, attitudes change, and most of all people grow, both intellectually and emotionally. It is therefore with gratification and some little surprise that I was able to reread Principles of Personal Defense and to discover that I felt no need to change anything of importance. It stands as it stood, and insofar as it spoke the truth years ago, it speaks it still.

The booklet is essentially a digest of a presentation I developed while working in Nicaragua (before the Communist takeover there). This part of the world has always been turbulent, and the need for individual self-defense has remained fairly constant ever since the departure of the Spanish in the early part of the nineteenth century. Individual conduct in lethal confrontation is not, however, something that is confined to any one locale or era, and if there are principles guiding its conduct and I believe there are those principles do not change according to geography, history, or sociological whim. If a principle exists it must be immutable, for that is what a principle is a truth standing apart from the mood of the times.

If I were to rewrite this pamphlet completely, the only thing I would change would be those few personal anecdotes that appear within it. I would update them to include only those that have taken place within the last year or so. As it now stands, the anecdotes are all at least twenty years old, but the more I look at them, the more I realize that there is no need to change them, because the experiences that have more recently come across my desk, and in which I have lately been involved, simply corroborate what has already been set down. These experiences could be rewritten to include nothing that happened more than one year ago and we would have the same story. Thus it has not been necessary to do any extensive rewriting.

To emphasize this point, however, should mention that only this last week another episode came to my attention that was immensely satisfying in its exemplification of several of the principles set forth in this work. It seems a yachtsman was asleep in his power cruiser docked in the Bahamas. After midnight he opened his eyes to be aware of two intruders in his cabin, one of whom was pointing a Mini-14 at his chest from a range of about eighteen inches. This is a startling situation. This is an intimidating situation. It might properly be termed a terrifying situation. But the man remembered his principles and instantly attacked, with his hands, and won. He personified the principles of decisiveness, aggressiveness, speed, and surprise in a most satisfactory manner.

Stories such as this come to my attention with such frequency that it would take a whole directory to list them. They establish beyond any question that the principles we have taught over the decades (and still continue to teach at Gunsite) are valid beyond any contradiction. Our work here is conducted in order to keep the victims of aggression alive, and the knowledge that it succeeds is our reward.

Principles of Personal Defense has been received with only moderate enthusiasm by the law enforcement establishment. Several departments have adopted it, but only with the deletion of the principles of aggressiveness and ruthlessness. It obviously makes for bad press to have a department known as both aggressive and ruthless. This is quite understandable, but it does not invalidate the principles. In war there is no substitute for victory, and this is equally true of personal combat, which is, after all, a microcosm of war. When a coward is offered deadly violence, his reaction may be to surrender, or cower, or flee, or call for help; not one of these choices is likely to obviate his peril.

But this booklet was not written for cowards.

INTRODUCTION

Some people prey upon other people. Whether we like it or not, this is one of the facts of life. It has always been so and it is not going to change. The number of sociopaths in a stipulated population varies widely, but we can take a figure of one in one hundred, for simplicitys sake, and not be far off. About one person in one hundred will, under some circumstances, initiate a violent attack upon another, in defiance of the law, for reasons that seem sufficient to him at the time. Take the able-bodied male population of your community, divide it by one hundred, and you have a fair approximation of the number of possible contacts who just might take it upon themselves to beat your head in. It is not pertinent to dispute the mathematics of this calculation. It may be wrong for your place and time. But anyone who is aware of his environment knows that the peril of physical assault does exist, and that it exists everywhere and at all times. The police, furthermore, can protect you from it only occasionally.