Weekend Reading #72

Some longer or more involved reading:

• Jon Low has a new Defensive Pistolcraft newsletter.  Jon notes, correctly in my opinion, that:   

      De-escalation only works if the other guy is willing to calm down.  

     My father would always tell me that "You can always walk away."  But, I learned that's not true.  

 It must have been a generational thing because my father essentially said the same to me. Some other points:

• I found this interesting. Jon quotes the following from an article entitled "Police handgun qualification:  practical measure or aimless activity?"  by Gregory B. Morrison and Bryan J. Vila:

    "The authors’ own conclusion is that qualification, as American departments practice it, is not a valid measure of gunfighting ability.  It tests an officer’s capacity to shoot a fixed number of rounds at a clearly defined target at a known distance, with set time limits, and clear and arbitrary threshold.  None of that mirrors what happens in an armed confrontation, and none of the prevailing doctrine, technique, or threshold-setting was developed by looking at field-shooting data or evaluated against it after the fact.  Their words:  “the rote firing of time-honored courses and their derivatives produces well-practiced range marksmen, but it does not assess their ability to perform in gunfights.” "   

 That sounds like a lot of our (speaking of civilians) training and practice. 

• Jon links to low light readiness challenges and targets to use.  The link to the article takes you to some instructions, but the full instructions are in an embedded video. It looks fun.
• Make sure to go down to the section on "Techniques" as Jon has linked to some good material on concealed carry as well as adding his own thoughts and tips. He also has some pointed comments for those who insist on open carry:

     Open carry is an act of criminal stupidity.  Don't do it.  

     The element of surprise is the difference between life and death.  

     There is no advantage to open carry.  You will be mistaken for a policeman or courier of high value items.  In either case, you will be shot first in any criminal scenario.  

     Your pistol is a high value item.  Criminals and crazy persons will attempt to steal it from you.  And then they will kill you and everyone around you.  Actually, there are a lot of documented cases.   

I remember something I read from Massad Ayoob years ago about a store owner who always open carried to make sure that thieves would know he was armed and not rob the store. The thieves, indeed, did know. And so he was shot through the glass window at the front of the shop before he ever knew there was a problem.

• Also check out the articles and videos in the "Medical" section.
• I have recently posted some links and had some comments about DA/SA pistols. I don't mind DA/SA pistols that much, probably because I have a fair amount of experience shooting double-action revolvers and I tend to do more dry fire practice with the DA/SA pistols (it is nice not to have to rack the slide every time you want to practice a trigger press). But Jon has some valid points against using the DA/SA pistol which are worth noting:

     I think double action only (DAO) pistols are fine, because every trigger press is the same.  

     I object to double action / single action (DA/SA) pistols, because they have two very different trigger presses.  Which means the shooter must have practiced two different trigger presses.  (2000 correct repetitions to make the trigger press automatic.  Thus, 4000 correct repetitions to make the DA/SA automatic for both trigger conditions.)

     I think this over complicates the manual of arms.  I think every trigger press should be the same.  

     First round hits are critically important.  (because if you can stop the fight with one shot, you eliminate the possibility of collateral damage with the subsequent shots)  So, the first press should be the easiest, not the hardest.  Making the first trigger press long and heavy is not conducive to accuracy.  Accuracy is more important than safety when in the process of engaging 
an enemy.  

     The reason the DA/SA shooter had to fire more than one shot is because he missed with the first shot.  Because the first shot had a long heavy trigger press that he could not stage, that he could not control as well as the single action trigger press.  

     Docent also points out the the first shot in a DA/SA pistol has a much longer reach (pull length).  Some people can't reach the trigger for the first shot.  

     Handicapping yourself because you fear shooting yourself or having a negligent discharge is wrong.   

I will point out, however, that I give greater weight to the safety issue than does Jon. I specifically chose a DA/SA pistol for my "night stand" gun because I wanted a weapon where that first shot was because I wanted to take that shot, not because I tripped over something or was startled by the cat or one of my kids when investigating the proverbial "bump in the night". On the other hand, I can remember that the first DA/SA pistol I owned had such a long trigger reach and so heavy of a trigger pull that it was unreasonably difficult to shoot in double action mode. So test it out before you buy.   

• And there is a lot more in the newsletter, so check it out. 

•  Greg Ellifritz also has a new Weekend Knowledge Dump posted at Active Response Training. Some links of note:
• A look at handguns versus bear spray. The article's information is accurate, but not really complete. For instance, the statistics on the use of handguns involve actual attacks, while the studies on the bear spray include incidents where the spray was used to drive off curious bears, not just attacks. Thus the actual effectiveness of the bear spray against an attacking bear is much lower than what the article makes it seem. 
• An article on "Sinister Studies"--i.e., shooting with the left hand, which has a lot of tips for the left-handed shooter. 
• An article at American Cop looking back on the DAO (double-action only) semi-auto pistols from Smith & Wesson.
• SHTF Armorer discusses cleaning and maintaining your magazines.
• An article on the history of the M1 Garand as well as detailed instructions on field stripping and cleaning this rifle.  
• The Organic Prepper has a piece on black markets. Greg comments: "This is an important concept to understand.  I’ve been to actual black markets in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Paraguay, and Argentina.  They are coming to the USA eventually."  
• And a "how to" on zeroing the red dot for a shotgun. I learned a lot from this article. And while it seems obvious in hindsight, I truly hadn't thought of starting out with zeroing it with slugs before testing the pattern of the buckshot.  

•  "To Shatter Men’s Souls"--Postcards From Barsoom. The author writes about the Pitești Prison Experiment which ran from 1949 through 1951, in the small city of Pitești in Romania, while under Communist rule. The article begins with a lengthy semi-fictional account describing the torture inflicted on the prisoners, then explains why he made such a graphic account:

    When comparing the record of atrocities left by the twentieth century’s ideologies, it is easy to get lost in simple numbers. Communism was worse than fascism, many on the right will say, because communism’s body count was so much higher. Hitler might have killed millions, but communists killed a hundred million. The pyramid of skulls is incomparably heavier, and weighs down the scales of justice decisively on the side of communism being by far the greater evil.

    But as Stalin is reputed to have said, one man’s death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic. Raw numbers do not communicate raw horror. Statistics leave the heart unmoved.

    When challenged on the relative body counts of National Socialism and Communism, leftists will usually reply that the Bolsheviks, Marxist-Leninists, Maoists, Afro-Marxists, et al. may well have killed far more people than Hitler, but that Hitler’s einsatzgruppen and death camps were still uniquely horrifying, because the Nazis targeted people for their race rather than their ideology or social class, while doing so with a bloodless mechanical efficiency that utterly dehumanized their victims.

    The implication that the communists did not also do these things is tendentious – they were not at all above exploiting ethnic divisions, indeed they did so routinely – but the true reason that it is beyond the pale to wear a t-shirt emblazoned with a hakenkreuz, while a display of the hammer and sickle is unexceptional to the point of being unremarkable, ultimately comes down to emotional programming.

    No one cares how many millions were killed by this dictator or that warlord. These are mere numbers, the output of cold equations, processed by a part of the brain that has nothing to do with emotions. What matters is that, for decades, our media have produced an endless stream of lurid histories, novels, movies, documentaries, and television shows depicting the horrors of the Holocaust. These images have burned themselves into people’s minds. Small children are traumatized with them at an impressionable age – made to watch Schindler’s List or read Elie Wiesel’s Night or study The Diary of Anne Frank as part of their education. The victims of the Holocaust become, not mere numbers, not decontextualized names listed on a memorial somewhere, but real people, human beings with faces, hearts, souls, dreams, families, friends, lovers, and quirks of personality ... they become, in people’s minds, friends who were abused and murdered. Thus the Nazi who murdered them becomes the ultimate beast, not a mere villain of history, but a personal enemy.

    The horrors unleashed by communism, however, are never talked about in such terms.

 And it is because the Left and its media allies won't tell these stories, won't even bother to learn these stories. Because they sympathize with the Communists. The article ends:

    Thousands of young men were fed through Pitești. The numbers were not so large. The duration was not so long – the experiment was shut down after two years, not because the communist leadership were bothered by it in the slightest, but because rumours of what was happening in Pitești were circulating and threatening to cause unrest that might destabilize the fragile new regime (the experimenters themselves, including the prison warden, were later tried and executed – someone had to be thrown to the wolves).

    What it lacked in scale and duration, Pitești more than made up in psychological sadism. It plumbed infernal depths that I have never encountered elsewhere in the history of mankind. The communists sought not merely to break the bodies of their subjects. Nor was their goal only to shatter their minds. Their objective was to smash men’s souls, to strip them of absolutely everything – faith, nation, family, will, self-respect, identity – that made them individual human beings. They sought to scratch out the Imago Dei.

    When you think of communism, don’t think of bread lines, famines, anemic economic growth, clunky consumer goods, or ugly buildings built with substandard concrete. Don’t think of fucking statistics.

    Think of Pitești.

    Pitești reveals the spiritual essence of communism in is purest, most distilled form.