Weekend Reading #46

Some longer and more involved reading for weekend:

• Jon Low has a new Defensive Pistolcraft Newsletter. Right at the top, he begins with a series of articles on what the author terms "home defense thresholds"--literal deadlines--legally and defensively sound points at which to use deadly force. The first article discusses several examples: for instance, a man who fired blindly into a darkened garage killing a thief versus those who called police and didn't take any action until a criminal forcibly broke into the home, crossing a threshold. Related to that discussion, Jon links to a 3-part article on the case of Byron D. Smith who, it was alleged, had specifically engineered a situation to lure two repeat burglars into his home where he executed them. He was convicted of murder. Some other notable links:
• On the issue of preventing burglaries, Jon has a lengthy quote from  Joe Shahoud with some burglary statistics, simply advice on dissuading burglars, and a couple security product recommendations (a security system and a quick access gun safe).
• Jon links to several articles on situational awareness and weapons retention (if you are carrying a firearm there is an overlap between these two topics) and includes this quote from Stephen Wenger: "... if the assailant has a gun, it may actually be the easiest 
  gun for you to access, if you know how to take it from him." There are some pistol disarming techniques that end with you in possession of the firearm. 
• Jon links to a lengthy piece entitled "The Final Category Problem" discusses our different memory and learning skills (with a focus on firearms/self-defense skills) with the author noting: "The vast majority of what our eyes and brain need to do during gunfights is not done AT ALL during most firearms training and is completely excluded from all qualifications that we are aware of." Jon also outlines the steps to better learning (applicable to both firearms classes and other types of classes and training). 
• I also liked this bit:

Jeff Cooper gave us the Combat Triad:  mindset, gun handling, and marksmanship.  Three legs that support the entire structure of armed defense.  What makes the presentation from concealment so critical is that it does not live on one leg of that triad.  It touches all three.  The decision to act is mindset.  Getting the gun out efficiently is gun handling.  And establishing a solid master grip during the presentation directly affects the marksmanship that follows.  If the presentation falls apart, the entire triad is compromised before we ever press the trigger.  

     Nothing else we train matters if the gun never comes out.  Or if it comes out too late.

     That is not a ranking of skills or an argument that the draw is more important than shot placement or decision-making.  It is simply a logical reality.  Everything downstream of the presentation depends on it happening.  An efficient, automatic presentation is the gateway to everything else we need to do in a fight.   

• Greg Ellifritz at Active Response Training has a new Weekend Knowledge Dump.  Some notable links:
• A couple shotgun posts: (i) a review of a 20-gauge tactical semi-auto shotgun from Beretta; and (ii) why No. 1 buckshot looks good on paper but is actually inferior to 00 Buckshot. 
• An article on common semi-auto pistol malfunctions and how to clear them.
• A piece discussing some research on why or how someone might shoot the wrong person. One key point is this: "What I find compelling here is that it appears that shooting speed and the ability to stop a response appear to be genuinely separate mechanisms - not two ends of the same dial. That has real implications for how we think about selection and training, because you can’t assume that getting faster makes someone more likely to shoot the wrong person, or that working on restraint slows them down." Greg also comments: "You should also be training yourself to STOP SHOOTING quickly as well.  I would argue that practicing stopping shooting quickly is more important than taking .03 seconds off of your shot-to-shot split.  Very few people are training that skill."
• A link to a piece from Shooting Illustrated entitled "How to Adjust Your Rifle Setup for Body Armor." While this may be more theoretical than practical for most home defenders, there are a significant number of civilians that own Kevlar vests and/or rifle plates and, if the political situation continues to deteriorate, I could see the number of civilians getting body armor increase. 
• Some hard truths about knife fighting and defense against knives. I don't have the statistics to show whether I'm correct or not, but I seem to be seeing more articles about knife attacks--particular mass stabbings--rising in the United States.
• An article on selecting the right weapon light for a handgun. However, Greg relates: "I have a light on my bedside pistol.  I haven’t carried a gun with a light on it since I retired from my cop job more than five years ago." I'm in the same situation: I have a light on my nightstand pistol but none on my carry guns.  
• "How to Take the Best Photos of Your Firearms"--Guns & Ammo.  This article is intended for the general gun owner, not a professional photographer--someone maybe wanting some photographs for purposes of an advertisement to sell a firearm or sharing a firearm on social media. As such, it assumes you will be using a cell phone or basic digital camera and have no other specialized photographic equipment. As such, it discusses in detail how to use a table lamp or natural sunlight to take photographs, some simple DIY methods to diffuse and reflect light, composing the scene, etc. As such, it is longer than your typical gun magazine articles. 
• "Thoughts on our ruling class monoculture" by Glenn Harlan Reynolds. An excerpt:

    Our ruling class is particularly vulnerable to mind viruses for several reasons.  First, it is a monoculture, so that what is persuasive to one member is likely to be persuasive to many.

    Second, it suffers from deep and widespread status anxiety – not least because most of its members have status, but few real accomplishments to rely on – and thus requires constant reassurance in the form of peer acceptance, reassurance that is generally achieved by repeating whatever the popular people are saying already.  And third, it has few real deeply held values, which might otherwise provide guard rails of a sort against believing crazy things.

    In a more diverse ruling class, ideas would not spread so swiftly or be received so uncritically.  People with different worldviews would respond differently to ideas as they entered the world of discourse.  There would be criticism and there would be debate.  (Indeed, this is how things generally worked during the earlier, more diverse, era described by Codevilla, though intellectual fads – lobotomy, say, or eugenics – spread then, too, though mostly through the Gentry/Academic stratum of society that now dominates the ruling class.)

    Also, a society in which people hold firm beliefs on important moral and ethical issues is less vulnerable to rapid swings in many areas.  “Guard rails,” as I said.  ...  

• "The Camp of the Living Dead"--Postcards From Barsoom. A review and commentary on Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, which has been re-released in English. The author believes that this novel would have been more influential--at least in the English speaking world--if English language editions had been available, writing:

One of the reasons that The Camp of the Saints is not actually all that widely read is that the book has been suppressed in the English-speaking world. The book was a bestseller when the first translation was published in 1975, after which there were a few reprintings, but it has been effectively out of print since the mid-90s. This meant that if you wanted to read it, you either had to track down a bootleg pdf (and who wants to read an entire novel in pdf), or pay extortionate prices on Amazon’s secondary market. You’d think that the publisher would see the insane prices used editions were going for and conclude that there was money to be made from unmet demand but, you see, The Camp of the Saints is a xenophobic, racist, sexist diatribe that good people need to protect impressionable minds from reading lest they acquire bad opinions and become bad people. This kind of copyright-squatting is how books are actually de facto banned in the Western world, by the way; those prominent displays of ‘banned books’ assembled by your local libtard bookseller more or less uniformly consist of softcore porn that some school board in the Bible Belt decided were a bit much for the resource library in the elementary school. When the cathedral wants to ban a book, it simply buys up the rights to it, refuses to publish it, and then buries it in obscurity by refusing to talk about it.

The rest of the piece is a review and analysis of the book, comparing it to the zombie genre, and the spiritual ennui that has fallen over the West such that it cannot bring itself to protect Civilization from the hordes coming to its shores.