One can read about shooting (or golf, or bowling, or surgery, etc...) all day long.
But there is just no substitution for actually doing it.
I don't think anyone was saying that a book
replaces shooting. Merely that it can instruct, focus, and direct that shooting practice into something useful.
And while it's true that just sending lead down-range will not necessarily make one a better shooter, from what I've seen, the vast majority of folks do improve the more they shoot.
Well, that certainly makes sense. But as is so often acknowledged, practice
doesn't make perfect.
Perfect practice makes perfect. A book on shooting technique would seem a fine way to communicate to the shooter what they should be practicing, suggest dills and skills tests that can help them improve and measure proficiency, and in general transform what is too often a habit of square-range paper-punching or can plinking into something that begins to reflect the kind of skills one might actually need to fight with a sidearm. (Or to win a shooting match, in the case of competition.)
Not to say that hands-on instruction is not far superior in most ways, but unless your own reading comprehension (or the writer's skills) are very poor, many of the principles can be communicated in text, and can make a shooter's practice
better, if not truly as good as it could be with face-to-face training.
A "combat mindset" is something you just cannot get from a book.
IMO, If one buys a book in an effort to develop a "combat mindset" then one is merely throwing their money away.
Okay, but if mindset (and shooting skill sets, apparently) cannot be communicated by written word, what do we bother to come
here for? Why discuss these matters in the Competition and S,T,&T forums here at THR if we cannot learn through sharing of principle and technique written down on a page or screen?
But when it comes to a "combat mindset", the real debate might be why would (or should) a civilian want to develope such a mindset?
Well, "combat" is an overused word, like "tactical." And "combat" generally signifies the strategic goals and sworn duties of a soldier who will kill and possibly die to achieve those goals. That is not perfectly analogous to what the armed citizen is about.
Simply referring to it as a self-defense mindset might be more correct. But the armed defender has to have a strong grasp on why they carry the gun (to defend their life or that of a loved one, with lethal force if necessary), when they will use it (
immediately, the moment it becomes absolutely necessary), and what it means to pull that gun (I accept that I will seriously injure and very probably end the life of another human being if that person forces me to do so or die myself). So there are a few mindset points that not everyone understands, fully comprehends, or fully accepts. A book, or a living, breathing instructor, can communicate those ideals and values to someone who is contemplating carrying a gun and help them to better understand what they must do, must not do, and why.