So I watched this whole black and white documentary on training G.I.s for using the Colt 1911 in WW2. Here is a clip of it.
It really is quite good.
Modern gun guys will probably make fun of it, or say it’s bad in many respects, but the reality is most of those guys have no clue about training people in anything, much less firearm use where you get to have each guy get a chance to shoot a grand total of about two magazines’ worth of ammo, that is, less than 20 rounds each. When many of the guys never fired a handgun before.
The point shooting advice of keeping the gun in line with the locked arm and using the shoulder to point the whole arm at the target is an effective way of getting a brand new gun virgin to have some chance of actually hitting what he’s going for.
If you notice the tracer rounds used, most of the guys are really doing quite well shooting out to 50, 25 and 15 yards. In fact I would say most of them do better than your average guy you see at the range who is not a regular but rather an occasional shooter.
The full video is here and I have to say I even got into the VoiceOver and generic attitude of the video. It’s quite entertaining really.
I received an interesting email from a reader of the blog who is also a Kurgan TV member, in it he mentioned how he felt his hand-to-hand skills were probably his weakest link.
It is a sad fact of life (or maybe a divinely good one, it’s hard to tell while we are still roaming the Earth) that as you become older wiser your body begins to tell you that you no longer need to do all that physical stuff quite as energetically. It can tell you this in a number of ways, including failing you in ways that take long to heal.
At some point, I would not want to get into a fight with a half-dozen twenty-somethings with my bare hands.
I did once hold off about 25 “youths” ranging in age from I’d say 12 or 13 to 23 or so. This was in December 2015 so I was 45 already, but I had managed to get myself in a doorway, meaning they could only come at me at most 2-3 at the time and none actually stepped forward. If they had it would have been reminiscent of that scene from a Bruce Lee film. There were no camera in that particular spot of London and as some had bottles in their hands and such, it was likely some might have had knives too. If they had stepped forward I would not have held back with any strike at all and I would not have been concerned about consequences afterwards, as 25 people, even if untrained and pack-like can definitely kill you if you give them any leeway, but inside a gateway that was flanked by solid face-brick columns, I really was not worried. They clearly were as they repeatedly taunted me to try and get me to step out of the doorway, and I taunted them back about being weak little bitches who couldn’t take me even though they were a couple of dozens of them. One threw a bottle at me, which I caught and threw back, narrowly missing his head, but none of them ever stepped forward so after a while I just went through the gate and closed it behind me and went home.
The mentality switches too though, even as your body changes, and as I get older, I think while on one side I’m not as prone to the impatience, and quick temper of youth, and will generally try to avoid issues before they even become issues, if I were forced into a situation now, I would be far less forgiving in my approach. I would be far more concerned with ending the threat as fast and absolutely as possible than whether the other guy would be able to walk or chew solid food again or how badly they might fall flat on the floor and never get up again.
I learnt from 4 decades of martial arts that if I am injured or somehow limited, or scared for others near me, paradoxically, I become far more dangerous than if I am fighting fit and not worried about the confrontation. And an older guy is a bit like a wounded animal. He just wants to be left alone and if you attack him, well, he’s not going to play nice. At all.
If you are only starting martial arts in your fifth decade, you need to approach it a bit differently. Train slower and do a lot more repetitions (ie the “boring” training that the young guys don”t like, but that is really how you develop a skill) and make sure your movements are correct and as perfect as you can get them while you do them at super slow speed in a controlled environment and progress to faster and harder only gradually and always keeping excellent form. A fitness regime to complement your training is also advisable and you need to figure that out yourself on the basis of where you are and what you wish to achieve.
Nothing is impossible, there are 90 year olds doing 20 pull-ups a day, and there are 30 year olds that are obese and will almost croak of heart seizure if they have to run 30 metres.
All that said, my dad, when he was in his 60s stopped an armed robbery. He did karate from a young age and was renowned enough in Italy that when I took a taxi to see his old Sensei in Italy, the taxi driver, knew who my father was by reputation alone. And he’d been away from Italy for over 20 years already. However, when faced with multiple armed robbers in a store, he did not rely on fisticuffs. He used his .45. And he didn’t just wave it about either.
The point being the as you get older you need to adapt to your changing physical circumstances. If you live in a country where it is possible for you to get GOOD combat training with firearms, then do that. And become a regular. Most people, even “trained” ones, completely fall apart under real life scenarios, so your training needs to incorporate high stress and realistic situations within the realms of keeping safety standards too. And no matter how “realistic” training will NEVER get the adrenaline flowing like a real-life live or die scenario, but this is where obsessive repetition under as many different conditions as possible becomes paramount.
These are just some general points. There are, of course, freaks of nature that will take healthy 20-something thugs out while they are in their 70s.
A local man was in the newspaper because he saw two immigrants of African descent harassing a young woman, who was also an immigrant, but of European descent. The man was in his 70s but nevertheless confronted the two thugs, and when they thought they could get physical with the old man, he laid one out with a right cross. he’s been a semi-pro boxer in his younger days. The other thug ran away after he saw his friend hit the pavement cold.
And I am aware of a little old Russian soldier kicking the crap out of two guys that were twice his size and mean, without breaking a sweat. So, while I hope to not have to deal with young punks in my 70s, if I do, I will be taking very much a more Jonah Hex/Punisher approach than a Batman approach.
As those of you who follow the YouTube channel know, I sometimes like to pose “What if” type questions with respect to firearms, and usually in two scenarios: One realistic and one totally blue-sky.
This probably comes from my years of playing RPGs where such choices for your characters sometimes came up. And possibly having worked with a gun for some years too. Anyway… my blue-sky handgun/fantasy weapon is, of course, the .454 Casull revolver with 30mm grenade launcher. I have wanted this as a real firearm (yes, yes, laws be damned, the Apocalypse is coming don’t ya know?!) for years. I mean… if I could have one at the low, low, price of total war… almost worth it.
.454 Casull for Raptors. 30mm Grenade for T-Rex.
But what about a real handgun, for the real world? Only one… Forever.
Yes, it is a very cruel and harsh mental torture. I am not even sure how I would go about it, so, here, with you, I will share my mental process.
Calibre: Almost certainly .357 Magnum. .44 Magnum acceptable too. 41 Magnum would be ok too but the ammo is too rare.
While I generally don’t trust .45 and 9mm, there is a case to be made for the 9mm automatically suppressed Silencerco Maxim 9. It has a high mag capacity and it’s a little bit unwieldy, but not impossible to carry concealed and the quiet aspect is very interesting. I’d say if I decided on a lesser calibre than .357 magnum then the maxim 9 would probably be it.
So as not to disturb the neighbours
However, although the maxim 9 is certainly a contender, and depending on legal requirements (suppressors are illegal in many countries) I am more likely to go for a custom made 8 shot .357 magnum on the base of the Ruger Redhawk, but with a 6″ barrel and custom grips. The image below is tragic in terms of photoshop skills, but it gives an idea.
Yes, I am right and your objections are all wrong.
I can hear the squeals now:
Impractical! Too Big! Too Heavy! Too Slow! Not enough ammo!
Now, listen here, you young, millennial, know-nothing, here is my reasonings:
In a post apocalyptic wasteland: The laws don’t matter, I’d strap it to my leg and woe betide anyone foolish enough to irritate me. There might be faster drawers (not many, I tend to be obsessive when I practice and you bet in such a world any moment I am not actually shooting I’d be practicing) but few would be as accurate under actual life fire and with that revolver, assuming it’s well-built, which it would be, I’d be ok out to 50 metres with a bit of practice. I know because I used to be good out to 50 metres with headshots from concealed draw in 2 seconds. It was some 26 years ago and time is not your friend in such things, and I am out of practice, but the extra 2″ should about make up for it, since I used to have a 4″ .357 Ruger GP 100 back then. And centre-mass is good enough for me these days too. And a .357 magnum in your lung will still spoil your whole day.
As for the not enough ammo, again, unless you’re fighting zombie hordes, 8 shots is plenty. Even if you’re fighting 3-4 guys, you thing they will all stand-and-deliver as their friends’ heads turn into pink clouds? 8 shots is about enough for me to shoot 4 different people and be sure they are hit. And at anything like actual gun ranges, 6 for 8 or even 8 for 8 wouldn’t be all that hard. Keep in mind average gunfights are done at about 6 feet. And if you are fighting a horde, I still think a lot of spray and pray is not as effective as calm and deadly with each shot. Either by luck, genetics, mild Aspergers, a few decades of martial arts, or whatever, in every very serious situation I have been in, I tend to enter what Myamoto Mushashi called “The Void”. I wouldn’t be able to do it consciously mostly, but when the SHTF my brain automatically switches into everything is in slow-mo and my movements become close to perfect. I am not bragging, it’s just how it happens. Always been that way since I was a child. So, as long as I get to keep firing, I am fairly sure each shot would go very much where it’s meant to.
The too big, too heavy criticism doesn’t apply as far as I am concerned, as I have no issue carrying a heavy handgun 24/7. I have big hands too so it’s not too big for me at all.
All-right then but what about in the supposedly civilised world? The only thing that changes then is conceilability. Yes a 6″ revolver is harder to hide than a small semi-auto or even a full sized colt 1911, but, again, not impossible to do if you are careful and actually practice this art as if your life depended on it. This aspect though, does bring into it the slow factor. I agree that drawing a concealed 6″ revolver is probably, for most people, including me, going to take longer than pretty much any full sized semi-auto. So I’ll give you that one, but… we’re talking fractions of a second here. Maybe half a second at the outside. And half a second is a lot, it’s 3 fast rounds from a smaller calibre weapon, but… most people will not hit the side of a barn at 10 feet under combat situations.
More importantly, if you have decent situational awareness, the chances are you can see trouble before it kicks off. If you cannot, your speed of drawing and firing is probably moot anyway since you’ll be shot before you even know something’s up. And if you do have decent situational awareness, then you’re unlikely to be any slower drawing than the bad guy, since, in my case, certainly, I’d already be holding the gun, even if still holstered, in a way you would be unlikely to notice I even have a gun, much less that I am holding it already and am ready to draw and fire.
Other criticisms
Too loud. Yeah, sure. But in a civilised world I am not really planning on offing strangers in silence. And in a self-defence situation, whatever the circumstances, as my dad always says, better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6. And in certain home invasion by multiple attackers, the sonic boom is certainly an advantage in terms of changing the intruder’s underpants, assuming their friend getting sprayed onto the nearest wall wasn’t in their line of sight.
Too much penetration. Eh. If you’re actually ok at real life gunfighting, your general awareness of a backstop is pretty much engrained. It’s not perfect, and shit happens, but the chances are that unless you’re firing in a crowd (why would you?!?) the chances of some innocent bystander catching around that went through a bad guy are not huge. And if you use hydra-shock or cor-bons, most of the energy gets dumped into the target.
So that’s my answer. Please feel free to leave your own version/thoughts/criticisms in a comment.
And this is why I like Country Music
I don’t care if most people don’t. I always liked it.
I figure in some past lives I must have been a pissed off Red Indian, an Eastern Monk, A Japanese Samurai, and a Southern Redneck too.
Y’all my white(ish) Niggers.
Enjoy the lyrics of this song by Corb Lund, they are awesome.
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By G | 13 May 2023 | Posted in Guns, Increasing Happiness, Social Commentary, Zombie Apocalypse