Quote:
"You know, that's kind of hard to quantify. I had been reading voraciously about firearms and firearms training, and the history of firearms use in this country since I was an early teenager. Memphis -- it's gone now I'm sure -- Memphis at one time had a technical library in the public library system, and considered shooting a technical skill, which it is, and so there are actually quite a collection of the older books a lot of people today don't realize that a lot of the professional gunmen of the 1920s, 1930s, people who had an awful lot of experience gunfighting, wrote books and they were available. And I had already read a lot of those long before I got out of high school. People like Askins, McGivern, history of people like Hamer, others, quite a few -- Hatcher, and many many others.
So I had a pretty good idea of what might be involved, and then when I got my initial training, I just realized that these people aren't preparing the trainees to go out and do anything realistically, we're just checking a bureaucratic box basically, which is what unfortunately most instutitional firearms training comes down to. If they teach you to do anything it's to pass the qualification course, well, which is not preparing you to do much out in the real world. I guess the word would be it offended me. You're sending young people out to do a job without any preparation whatsoever that would be relevant to the job.
I had the good fortune of meeting Jeff Cooper pretty early in my career. We started corresponding while I was still in high school, actually. He was my mentor, and I got to Gunsite pretty early in its career, like a year after it opened, and got to see what actual effective training looked like, and that just made it even worse, they just really fired me up to say that 'Somebody's got to carry this back to my side of the country.' Now, Gunsite's a long way from Memphis and the rest of the South, which has got long tradition of really low-end training, if any training at all. Not necessarily Memphis, the Southeast. If you'll notice, every year, if you look at the Officers Killed summary some, more officers killed in the Southeast than any other of the three regions put together. And part of that is just a total lack of training. A lot of states in the Southeast, you can be commissioned as a police officer for up to a year before getting any training.
One year about oh, probably about 1980, I was attending a Calibre Press Street Survival seminar, which I did a number of times on my own. But the table in front of me had four or five officers from Mississippi and I could overhear their conversations, and they had all cycled through the same half-dozen police departments a year at a time -- they worked for this one for a year, and that one for a year, and that one for a year -- and they had been on the streets for six or seven years and had no formal training at all except what they got going themselves to something like the Street Survival seminar. They hadn't set foot in the academy yet and they just moved at the end of each year to a different agency. And in the Southeast that's unfortunately fairly common. So I just wanted to provide an opportunity for these people to get some kind of training that was relevant, and useful, and might actually be of some value to them if they found themselves in a bad spot."
