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C HAPTER O NE The Defensive Combat Handgun: An Overview

It is an honor to have been asked to write this edition of The Complete Book of Combat Handgunnery. Whomever steps into this authorship has several big pairs of shoes to fill.

This topic has been, literally, a life-long study for me. I grew up around guns, in part because my father was an armed citizen who survived a murder attempt because he knew how and when to use a handgun. He had learned that from his father. My grandfather, the first of our family to come to this country, hadn’t been on these shores long when he had to shoot an armed robber. I grew up with a gun the way kids today grow up with seat belts and smoke detectors. It was simply one more commonsense safety measure in a sometimes-dangerous world.

The day came when what I had learned from my forebears, in terms of having defensive weapons and learning skill at arms, saved my life, too, and the lives of others I was responsible for protecting. I passed the skill on to my daughters. My eldest got her license to carry concealed when she was 18. A year or so later, the Smith & Wesson 9mm in her waistband saved her from two would-be rapists. She represented the fourth straight generation of my family in the United States to be saved from violent criminals by a lawfully possessed firearm.

Life takes us down unexpected paths. If, during my somewhat rebellious teen years, you had asked me what I was least likely to become, I would probably have answered, “Cop or teacher.” Before long, I had become both. Pausing for a 25-month breather in the early 1980s, I’ve been a police officer since 1972, and have been teaching about guns during that entire time. My first article in a gun magazine was published in 1971.

There have been a lot of books and thousands of articles under the dam since then, and enough training to fill seven single-spaced résumé pages. Competitive shooting has been good to me; I’ve earned several state championships, a couple of regional wins, two national champion titles, and three national records. Only a couple of state championships still stand today. I’ve spent 15 years as chair of the firearms committee for the American Society of Law Enforcement Trainers, a few of those also as a member of their ethics committee, and a couple of years as co-vice chair of the forensic evidence committee for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

We live in interesting times for armed citizens. On the one hand, our rights to protect our loved ones and ourselves are constantly attacked by people, often rich and powerful and articulate, who just don’t have the first clue. On the other, so many states have passed “shall issue” concealed carry laws that more law-abiding citizens can carry hidden handguns in public today than at virtually any time in the last century.

Researching these things, studying how they happen, and how to prevail and survive if they happen to you, has become my life’s work. I founded the Lethal Force Institute in 1981, and it has been a labor of love ever since. The on-scene management of violent criminal threat is a life study, and a multi-dimensional one that goes far beyond the gun itself. We cannot cover them all in one book. No one can. The laws that encompass these things and more, are all dynamic and fluid and subject to change.

The purpose of this book is to transmit a working knowledge of the current state-of-the-art of defensive handgun technology and its corollary topics, of how to effectively use them and how to find out how better to use them and more importantly, when to use them. Every effort will be made to explain where certain recommendations and trends came from.

Our guns, ammunition, and holsters are better than ever. So are state-of-the-art techniques that have been developed from modern and “post-modern” studies of what happens to the human mind and body under life-threatening stress. Better than ever also is our understanding of courtroom dynamics as they apply today in the often terrifying aftermath of the justified use of deadly force.

These skills are needed today. Since September 11, 2001, many experts believe they will be needed more than ever. The continued ability to choose to develop these skills, and exercise them if we must, is constantly under attack. It will be a long, hard fight, perhaps a never-ending one, but in the last analysis, that is the nature of the human experience.

I hope you find this book useful. If something seems new and radical compared to older “doctrine,” try it yourself before you decide. I can promise you that there is nothing recommended in this book that has not been proven where it counts.

Stay safe.

Massad Ayoob Live Oak, Florida 2007