Jeff Cooper - To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth

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Table of Contents

To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth

by Jeff Cooper

Copyright 1998 by Jeff Cooper

ISBN: 978-1-0983566-8-2

FOR

JANELLE

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Several of the chapters in this book have been previously published in the periodicals of Petersen Publications, to whom the author owes thanks for permission to include them in this collection.

I wish to thank my client and friend, Paul Kirchner, for the various appropriate drawings he contributed to this work, and my niece, Austeene Cooper II, for the frontispiece.

And I wish gratefully to acknowledge the expert assistance of Nancy Tappan, who put the project together.

FOREWORD

Delightful task! to rear the tender thought, to teach the young idea how to shoot.

James Thompson

1700-1748

The Seasons, Spring

Fighting Handguns was published in 1955. In it are pictures of the author, a young Marine named Jeff Cooper, demonstrating what was at that time the proper stance for pistol combat: knees bent in a combat crouch, gun held in one hand below the belt line, eyes on the target. Viewing that photograph today evokes the same embarrassed amusement as seeing ones own baby pictures. Yet it tells an important story.

Jeff Cooper is famous as a soldier, writer, handgunner, rifleman, philosopher, and scholar, but most of all, as a teacher a guru. His impact on the theory and practice of handgunning is immeasurable. It is probably safe to say that, were it not for Jeff Cooper, there would be no International Practical Shooting Confederation. If it were not for Jeff Cooper and his American Pistol Institute, we would still be shooting one-handed from a combat crouch, and missing. But for Jeff Cooper, we would spend our weekends at the range shooting 38 Special wadcutters from a one-handed target stance, with the off-hand in the trousers pocket and thinking we were adequately prepared to defend ourselves.

Psychologists define learning as a change in behavior. If you see current photographs of Jeff Coopers contemporaries, men of the same age and background, you will note that they still shoot one-handed from the hip. Only he was open-minded enough to try new and different ideas, until he eventually developed the Modern Technique of the Pistol. These days, it is generally acknowledged that the correct way to use a pistol is with both hands, ateye-level. (There are still a few die-hards, of course, but there is still a Flat Earth Society, too.) And so it turns out that the acknowledged worlds greatest teacher of pistolcraft is actually the worlds greatest learner of pistolcraft.

Jeff Cooper has written many books since 1955. Cooper On Handguns is the basic text on the subject, and Principles of Personal Defense should be required reading for anyone who proposes to call himself an intelligent adult. In his Fireworks anthology, Cooper proved himself to be a fine writer, instead of merely a gun-writer. With subjects like automobile racing, and bullfighting, and love, and nature, he displayed his astonishing skill at storytelling.

I remember a night when we solved the problems of the world in front of his fireplace. We discussed politics, history, guns, the meaning of life, and other topics suitable to what the Spaniards call a tertulia. For our entertainment, he recited W.W. Jacobs The Monkeys Paw. Though I had heard it many times, my hair stood on end. You will see what I mean when you read his account of a German soldiers escape from a Russian P.O.W. camp. If that one doesnt set your blood afire, then you need to check your vital signs.

This new collection will delight those who thought Fireworks didnt have enough gun stuff. There is gun stuff galore in these pages, and the ideas are new, and thought-provoking, and exciting. Naturally, they are also beautifully written.

Mark Moritz

April, 1988

THE TITLE

To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth. This was the ancient law of youth. These lines were cherished by Theodore Roosevelt, one of Americas two greatest presidents and her dozen or so great men. I thought the verse was American in origin until I went into the matter and discovered its ultimate source in Herodotus.

According to The Father of History the precept originated at the court of the great kings of Persia, where wealth and power were so concentrated as to produce a style of life conspicuously unsuited to the upbringing of a young nobleman. Luxury and authority are not good for a young man, and if he enjoys such things in his adolescence he is most unlikely to develop into a man of character.

Therefore, as soon as the sons of the great were old enough to do for themselves, they were farmed out to the households of minor chiefs on the frontiers of the empire. Their masters were told that the boys were to know no soft beds, no fine raiment, no rich food or wine, no philosophical complexities, no slave girls, and no money. What they were to learn was to ride like Cheiron, to shoot like Apollo, and above all to speak only the truth. With these three attributes they were deemed fit to return to court at the age of eighteen. What else they needed to know in order to become princes could then be imparted easily and quickly by their seniors.

This is certainly an antique notion, but what is newer is not necessarily better nor, looking around us, even usually so.

There is little in this book about riding, but there is a lot about various aspects of shooting, an art which has been notably diminished in this twentieth century in which it has become most needful. By my great good fortune I happen to know much about shooting, both technically and tactically, and in what follows I speak the absolute truth about it, insofar as God has granted me the ability to do so.

This book, therefore, is not for the trepid, the faint of heart, the soft, nor the overcivilized. It is, on the contrary, for those who aspire to command of the unruly environment in which they now find themselves.

Jeff Cooper

Gunsite, July 1988

I. THE PRESENT

HOLD! ENOUGH!

Is life so sweet, or peace so dear, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God!

Patrick Henry

W hy do you suppose the creeps of the world have declared open season on Americans? Are we not the posterity of Patrick Henry and George Washington and Nathan Hale and Buck Travis and George Custer and Teddy Roosevelt and George Patton?

How do they dare?

We seem to have changed, and not for the better. The Fathers won the country with sweat and blood. The sons seem to think that gives them a free ticket to the fat life a life without fighting. Now where do you suppose the idea arose that a man can make it without fighting? It was certainly not prevalent in the 1920s or 1930s. It is new, but it is now almost universal. And it is sick. It delivers up the soft to the wicked. It makes the American the laughing stock of the age.

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