Ok. It's my thread so I will contribute to the drift...
I think regarding Ayoob, we have to look at him in context.
Let's set the way back machine to the late 70's and early 80's. I was but a wee lad, staying up late at night to read copies of American Handgunner under the covers with a flashlight. There were very, very few avenues for your ordinary average citizen to receive professional level handgun training, geared towards using a handgun in defense of their lives. You could go to an NRA course and learn which end the bullets came out of, and that's it. Your primary source of information about guns, and how to use them, was gun magazines.
Entire Mas, who, was an honest-to-God Police Occifer, who advocated for Joe or Suzy Homemaker to receive training on how to defend themselves with a gun and even (gasp!) carry one CONCEALED out on the street. He started some good dialogues on what that really means, including dealing with the legal aftermath. Much of the defensive info in gun magazines back then was absolute crap, and he raised the bar on that.
I very much appreciate that about Ayoob. He presented questions about the realities of using and carrying a gun, I would have never thought of, and even though ultimately I may have come to different answers than him, that is still valuable.
I think the biggest issue I have with Ayoob is this: he made a substantial part of his living as a gunwriter. The only way to do that is to fill column inches, and lots of them. So he was prolific, but often you could tell he was working hard to fill those column inches. I lost track of the number of guns he advocated for as the ultimate carry gun etc. Sometimes things got a little wonky. One of the biggest examples of this I can remember is an article where he expounded about how while Colt revolvers were great, they could cause an issue in court because they were named after snakes (Python, King Cobra, Diamondback, etc) and that sounds "scary," whilst the numerical models of Smith And Wesson were much more innocuous...
Let's fast forward to today. There are few areas of the United States where you can't drive a couple of hours and receive professional level use of force training. Cops and former cops routinely teach Joe and Suzy Homemaker how to shoot. For that matter, we've got former CAG guys hosting classes that are open to the public. There's alot of crap out there in internet land, but if you are judicious, you can also find yourself soaking up information from people like Craig Douglas and Darryl Bolke.
Honestly, if Ayoob was just getting his start today, he wouldn't be that big of a deal. But I guess I look at him sort of like Freud, maybe we don't cling to many of his conclusions today, but he got the ball rolling.
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Originally Posted by Lester Polfus
