Fred Fuller
Moderator Emeritus
This has been around for a while, at least three years or so. It's been mentioned here on S&T in at least one other thread, as the search feature demonstrates, but I didn't find the full interview posted. I think it's worth reading, even though it isn't exactly 'new news.'
Comments are welcome, mine will follow eventually, though I have to admit in advance they will be biased, as I am a definite fan...
lpl
=======
http://www.louisawerbuckinterviewwithamadman.blogspot.com/
Jeff Cooper once told me that he considers Awerbuck one of the top half-dozen firearms instructors in the world.
Cooper helped Awerbuck immigrate to the U.S. from his native South Africa 25 years ago, and he has been instructing high-level firearms classes full-time ever since. Awerbuck teaches at major firearms training centers around the country under the auspices of his own Yavapai Firearms Academy.
After spending a recent week watching Awerbuck work during a defensive pistol class at Gunsite, I wanted to get him off the range for a few hours and ask him some questions. We met for dinner a few miles from Gunsite at the Little Thumb Butte Bed & Breakfast, a favorite retreat for Gunsite students, where owner/hostess Ann Harrington served us a wonderful home-cooked meal on a private balcony overlooking endless juniper-dotted hills with a river running through them.
Among his other personality attributes, Awerbuck is a very humble guy. If there is a gulf between the way he thinks and the behavior and attitude of society in general, Awerbuck is willing to admit that maybe he’s the one that’s crazy. From what I’ve seen, however, it’s clearly the other way around.
I asked him what the toughest thing was about teaching people to shoot.
“For beginners, probably realizing it’s easier than they think it is. They tend to overthink the problem. For experienced people, trying to correct ingrained habits they’ve had for years. That’s much harder.”
Q: A lot of guys can teach the mechanics of shooting, which is fairly simple, don’t you think?
A: It is extremely simple. It’s sights, trigger, follow-through. That’s all it is, that’s all it ever has been. Once the firing grip, the stance, the shooting platform and that type of thing are worked out. The actual operation of sending a projectile downrange on a steady target is sights, trigger, follow-through. Most people try to shoot too accurately and overthink the problem. They try for 103 percent and wind up with 40 percent. My draw to the game is the psychology of it, the whys and wherefores. It always has been.
Q: I just read your book, Tactical Reality (Paladin Press 1999), and you talk a lot about that. I especially liked your chapters dealing with heart and mind. That’s a pretty deep subject.
A: It’s real deep for a young kid. But none of this is new. This stuff is 5,000 years old. It’s the same mindset as the Samurai, the Ninja, Genghis Kahn, the Romans, the Greeks, the Spanish, you can just keep on going back through the ages. It was always the same thing.
Q: Why do some people not get it?
A: Some of the people who don’t get it are highly professional, skilled people -– like a commercial pilot, a neurosurgeon, somebody who cannot afford to make the slightest slip in his normal occupation, so he overthinks every single thing when he’s firing a weapon. They’ll “what if” things to death. Other people who don’t get it are not really fighting-oriented. From what I’ve seen, I think it’s a societal thing. Let’s face it, in North America you can pretty much buy anything you want. So people tend to think that if you pay a certain amount of money to be taught how to do something with a firearm, the net result at the end of the day is that you will be able to do it. It’s like paying to have your brakes fixed, or paying for an appendectomy. They’re paying for a service and they expect it to be done. They don’t figure they need any ability themselves or that they’re going to have to put some of themselves into it.
Q: What do the non-warriors do when they get in trouble?
A: They will probably have their pistol taken away, because really and truly deep down inside they are not prepared to take life even in defense of their own. So they’ll probably have their pistol taken away, get shot with their own pistol, and then the crook will leave with their pistol and shoot another person with it.
Q: A lot of instructors have told me that their toughest problem is that something like eighty percent of people are not capable of shooting somebody.
A: Not looking into their faces, looking into their eyes from six feet away and doing it. A lot of people will go out and shoot Bambi in the Coconino Forest and not think twice about it but couldn’t bring themselves to do it to a human, who just happens to be an animal walking on his back legs.
Q: Do you see any parallels between defensive pistol shooting and dangerous-game hunting?
A: Sure, as far as the adrenal dump, the chemical cocktail. Bambi is just pipes, wires, meat, bone, gristle, blood, the same as the rapist in the back alley.
Q: But I’m talking about dangerous game. The hunter is not afraid of Bambi.
A: If I’m afraid of you, in fear of my life, I need to do something about it. But we’ve grown up in a society where other people protect us. We expect to make a phone call and somebody will be there. It’s like pulling the blanket over your head to protect yourself from the bogey man.
Q: That reminds me of the story about a cop who draws his gun and empties it into the floor so the bad guy won’t take it away from him. What’s going on there?
A: If you’re talking of the same real-life incident I’m thinking of, that was a gunfight from hell. The cop and his partner went to serve a summons, and this guy had had a problem with his wife the night before or got out of bed on the wrong side or something, and as soon as the two cops walked in he grabbed the woman officer’s gun and killed her with it, right off the bat. So then this gunfight from hell ensued. The officer wound up with two guns, both revolvers. And he drained one into the floor of the house so this guy couldn’t take it and use it on him while he was trying to reload the other one. He reloaded twice, in one room, in a gunfight, it went on for nearly two minutes. He shot the guy through the ribcage, contact work. The guy dropped and then he got up when the officer turned around. The guy got up and hit the cop with a two-by-four.
If it’s the same incident, it wasn’t a case of buck fever. The thing is, in a gunfight you don’t know what you’ve done afterwards, retrospectively. You think you know what you’ve done, and you’ll backtrack everything to the premise to which you want to backtrack it.
It’s like if you advocate what’s colloquially called point shooting and you tag somebody -– you’re in a deadly force situation and you fire one round and hit him right between the eyes at thirty feet -– you are going to convince yourself that you point-shot that round. You may have used sighted fire. You don’t know.
Colonel David Hackworth had a real good expression to the effect that your perception in battle is only as wide as your battle sights. If you take five people involved in one incident and separate them straight after the incident, you’ll get five different stories of what happened. We have no perception of what’s happening when it’s happening.
I’ve seen a guy with a bolt rifle drain four rounds out of it, just running the bolt never pressing the trigger, not understanding why the springbok didn’t fall over. There are people with a semiautomatic in a fight who never press the trigger, run the slide, never press the trigger, run the slide and jack out eight or fourteen live rounds on the floor. It’s called buck fever. That fascinates me, it’s the psychology, it’s all mental.
I’m not God’s gift to shooting, but what does it take to hit a target? A static range target. Sights, trigger, follow-through. So why does somebody go out there and shoot ten rounds and miss after forty years and Lord knows how many millions of rounds? Something goes askew in your head, you just do something stupid like yank on the trigger or don’t follow through with the sights.
There is nothing to taking a neophyte and teaching him how to shoot. The best-shooting pistol class you will ever see is a dozen fourteen-year-old females who have never touched a pistol. Are they gunfighters? I don’t know, but as far as mechanical shooting goes you can’t ask for anything more. A class of fourteen-year-old females will turn out amazing pistol shooters. They don’t have an ego, they haven’t got the prior mistakes, so they don’t know how to miss.
Q: Shooting under pressure -– training or competition –- is as close as we can get to real life. Why does that pressure clarify and speed up the minds of some people but scramble the brains of others?
A: Everybody has a button. The bottom line is, you cannot put pressure on me if I don’t allow you to do it. If I want to subjugate myself mentally to allow you to do something to me on a range that will affect the basic mechanical operation of what I always do, then I’m going to scramble my brain. If you give me a drill, the drill sinks in and I understand what the drill is and I churn it out, that’s what Gunnie Hathcock called “getting in the bubble.”
Jeff [Cooper]’s “Flying M” (a man-on-man shootoff drill) is still being used today. I don’t know when he first used it, but I’ve been with him twenty-five years so I know it’s been around a quarter century. Every Friday afternoon in a 250 class at Gunsite, you have one so-called winner, who’s usually pretty good, and the rest are “also-rans.” But you don’t really have a winner, you have people who beat themselves over and over. The winner of the Flying M is hardly ever somebody who was better than three-quarters of the class, he just kept his feces coagulated, that’s all he did. It’s a three-round draw, bang, bang, speed load, bang, that’s all it is. It’s something ninety-five percent of the people in the class are capable of doing Wednesday afternoon. But at the end of the class, there’s a needle in the head. It’s all a mind deal.
Everybody keeps saying the gun is just a tool. The bottom line is, the gun is just a tool. It’s a piece of metal. How many times are you going to let a two-pound piece of metal and plastic outwit you? We’re not talking about flying a Tomcat here, this is not brain surgery. But it is psychology.
Q: Do you still get a kick out of instructing?
A: Absolutely. Otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it. If I’d wanted to make money in my life, I would have done something else. Because you can’t do this job right and make a fortune out of it. If you make money your priority, or ego your priority, you’ve got a problem. And there’s lot of that, it’s become rampant in this game in the last ten years.
Q: Why the last ten years especially?
A: I have a theory, it’s a personal theory. It’s probably wrong. Once concealed carry came out, pretty much anybody could teach it. You’re teaching it out of a book, it’s primarily law. You go to Gunsite or Thunder Ranch or Blackwater or any of the big-name schools, you take a class as a student and all of a sudden you open your own school and you’re a firearms instructor.
To decide that you know everything about firearms and tactics is about the most pompous thing you can do. A doctor’s got to go to university, an auto mechanic is going to be out of work if he doesn’t get updated training on all this technology in cars today. A weapons instructor just says, Hi, I’m a weapons instructor and I know all about guns and training and tactics and strategy. You look at instructor resumes, and they’ve taken all the classes, but what have they done? They’ve taken everybody else’s lesson plans and put them into a program of their own and they’re teaching it like a parrot.
Q: There’s definitely a proliferation of so-called firearms academies, some of them run by IPSC guys who win a couple of titles and open a school.
A: IPSC guys are very good shooters. Obviously, IPSC has changed from the early days, from what Jeanne-Pierre Denis and Jeff [Cooper] and the original guys set out to make it. The P was meant to stand for practical. The arguments went on in the 80s and very early 90s about whether it’s practical or it isn’t. Finally, IPSC got to a stage in the early 90s where they said, No, we’re not being practical, it’s a sport. But the bottom line is, if you get somebody like Rob Leatham, Jerry Barnhard, guys like that, they’re tremendous mechanical shooters. And if they open a school and teach mechanical shooting, which a lot of them do, I think there’s nothing wrong with that.
Comments are welcome, mine will follow eventually, though I have to admit in advance they will be biased, as I am a definite fan...
lpl
=======
http://www.louisawerbuckinterviewwithamadman.blogspot.com/
Jeff Cooper once told me that he considers Awerbuck one of the top half-dozen firearms instructors in the world.
Cooper helped Awerbuck immigrate to the U.S. from his native South Africa 25 years ago, and he has been instructing high-level firearms classes full-time ever since. Awerbuck teaches at major firearms training centers around the country under the auspices of his own Yavapai Firearms Academy.
After spending a recent week watching Awerbuck work during a defensive pistol class at Gunsite, I wanted to get him off the range for a few hours and ask him some questions. We met for dinner a few miles from Gunsite at the Little Thumb Butte Bed & Breakfast, a favorite retreat for Gunsite students, where owner/hostess Ann Harrington served us a wonderful home-cooked meal on a private balcony overlooking endless juniper-dotted hills with a river running through them.
Among his other personality attributes, Awerbuck is a very humble guy. If there is a gulf between the way he thinks and the behavior and attitude of society in general, Awerbuck is willing to admit that maybe he’s the one that’s crazy. From what I’ve seen, however, it’s clearly the other way around.
I asked him what the toughest thing was about teaching people to shoot.
“For beginners, probably realizing it’s easier than they think it is. They tend to overthink the problem. For experienced people, trying to correct ingrained habits they’ve had for years. That’s much harder.”
Q: A lot of guys can teach the mechanics of shooting, which is fairly simple, don’t you think?
A: It is extremely simple. It’s sights, trigger, follow-through. That’s all it is, that’s all it ever has been. Once the firing grip, the stance, the shooting platform and that type of thing are worked out. The actual operation of sending a projectile downrange on a steady target is sights, trigger, follow-through. Most people try to shoot too accurately and overthink the problem. They try for 103 percent and wind up with 40 percent. My draw to the game is the psychology of it, the whys and wherefores. It always has been.
Q: I just read your book, Tactical Reality (Paladin Press 1999), and you talk a lot about that. I especially liked your chapters dealing with heart and mind. That’s a pretty deep subject.
A: It’s real deep for a young kid. But none of this is new. This stuff is 5,000 years old. It’s the same mindset as the Samurai, the Ninja, Genghis Kahn, the Romans, the Greeks, the Spanish, you can just keep on going back through the ages. It was always the same thing.
Q: Why do some people not get it?
A: Some of the people who don’t get it are highly professional, skilled people -– like a commercial pilot, a neurosurgeon, somebody who cannot afford to make the slightest slip in his normal occupation, so he overthinks every single thing when he’s firing a weapon. They’ll “what if” things to death. Other people who don’t get it are not really fighting-oriented. From what I’ve seen, I think it’s a societal thing. Let’s face it, in North America you can pretty much buy anything you want. So people tend to think that if you pay a certain amount of money to be taught how to do something with a firearm, the net result at the end of the day is that you will be able to do it. It’s like paying to have your brakes fixed, or paying for an appendectomy. They’re paying for a service and they expect it to be done. They don’t figure they need any ability themselves or that they’re going to have to put some of themselves into it.
Q: What do the non-warriors do when they get in trouble?
A: They will probably have their pistol taken away, because really and truly deep down inside they are not prepared to take life even in defense of their own. So they’ll probably have their pistol taken away, get shot with their own pistol, and then the crook will leave with their pistol and shoot another person with it.
Q: A lot of instructors have told me that their toughest problem is that something like eighty percent of people are not capable of shooting somebody.
A: Not looking into their faces, looking into their eyes from six feet away and doing it. A lot of people will go out and shoot Bambi in the Coconino Forest and not think twice about it but couldn’t bring themselves to do it to a human, who just happens to be an animal walking on his back legs.
Q: Do you see any parallels between defensive pistol shooting and dangerous-game hunting?
A: Sure, as far as the adrenal dump, the chemical cocktail. Bambi is just pipes, wires, meat, bone, gristle, blood, the same as the rapist in the back alley.
Q: But I’m talking about dangerous game. The hunter is not afraid of Bambi.
A: If I’m afraid of you, in fear of my life, I need to do something about it. But we’ve grown up in a society where other people protect us. We expect to make a phone call and somebody will be there. It’s like pulling the blanket over your head to protect yourself from the bogey man.
Q: That reminds me of the story about a cop who draws his gun and empties it into the floor so the bad guy won’t take it away from him. What’s going on there?
A: If you’re talking of the same real-life incident I’m thinking of, that was a gunfight from hell. The cop and his partner went to serve a summons, and this guy had had a problem with his wife the night before or got out of bed on the wrong side or something, and as soon as the two cops walked in he grabbed the woman officer’s gun and killed her with it, right off the bat. So then this gunfight from hell ensued. The officer wound up with two guns, both revolvers. And he drained one into the floor of the house so this guy couldn’t take it and use it on him while he was trying to reload the other one. He reloaded twice, in one room, in a gunfight, it went on for nearly two minutes. He shot the guy through the ribcage, contact work. The guy dropped and then he got up when the officer turned around. The guy got up and hit the cop with a two-by-four.
If it’s the same incident, it wasn’t a case of buck fever. The thing is, in a gunfight you don’t know what you’ve done afterwards, retrospectively. You think you know what you’ve done, and you’ll backtrack everything to the premise to which you want to backtrack it.
It’s like if you advocate what’s colloquially called point shooting and you tag somebody -– you’re in a deadly force situation and you fire one round and hit him right between the eyes at thirty feet -– you are going to convince yourself that you point-shot that round. You may have used sighted fire. You don’t know.
Colonel David Hackworth had a real good expression to the effect that your perception in battle is only as wide as your battle sights. If you take five people involved in one incident and separate them straight after the incident, you’ll get five different stories of what happened. We have no perception of what’s happening when it’s happening.
I’ve seen a guy with a bolt rifle drain four rounds out of it, just running the bolt never pressing the trigger, not understanding why the springbok didn’t fall over. There are people with a semiautomatic in a fight who never press the trigger, run the slide, never press the trigger, run the slide and jack out eight or fourteen live rounds on the floor. It’s called buck fever. That fascinates me, it’s the psychology, it’s all mental.
I’m not God’s gift to shooting, but what does it take to hit a target? A static range target. Sights, trigger, follow-through. So why does somebody go out there and shoot ten rounds and miss after forty years and Lord knows how many millions of rounds? Something goes askew in your head, you just do something stupid like yank on the trigger or don’t follow through with the sights.
There is nothing to taking a neophyte and teaching him how to shoot. The best-shooting pistol class you will ever see is a dozen fourteen-year-old females who have never touched a pistol. Are they gunfighters? I don’t know, but as far as mechanical shooting goes you can’t ask for anything more. A class of fourteen-year-old females will turn out amazing pistol shooters. They don’t have an ego, they haven’t got the prior mistakes, so they don’t know how to miss.
Q: Shooting under pressure -– training or competition –- is as close as we can get to real life. Why does that pressure clarify and speed up the minds of some people but scramble the brains of others?
A: Everybody has a button. The bottom line is, you cannot put pressure on me if I don’t allow you to do it. If I want to subjugate myself mentally to allow you to do something to me on a range that will affect the basic mechanical operation of what I always do, then I’m going to scramble my brain. If you give me a drill, the drill sinks in and I understand what the drill is and I churn it out, that’s what Gunnie Hathcock called “getting in the bubble.”
Jeff [Cooper]’s “Flying M” (a man-on-man shootoff drill) is still being used today. I don’t know when he first used it, but I’ve been with him twenty-five years so I know it’s been around a quarter century. Every Friday afternoon in a 250 class at Gunsite, you have one so-called winner, who’s usually pretty good, and the rest are “also-rans.” But you don’t really have a winner, you have people who beat themselves over and over. The winner of the Flying M is hardly ever somebody who was better than three-quarters of the class, he just kept his feces coagulated, that’s all he did. It’s a three-round draw, bang, bang, speed load, bang, that’s all it is. It’s something ninety-five percent of the people in the class are capable of doing Wednesday afternoon. But at the end of the class, there’s a needle in the head. It’s all a mind deal.
Everybody keeps saying the gun is just a tool. The bottom line is, the gun is just a tool. It’s a piece of metal. How many times are you going to let a two-pound piece of metal and plastic outwit you? We’re not talking about flying a Tomcat here, this is not brain surgery. But it is psychology.
Q: Do you still get a kick out of instructing?
A: Absolutely. Otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it. If I’d wanted to make money in my life, I would have done something else. Because you can’t do this job right and make a fortune out of it. If you make money your priority, or ego your priority, you’ve got a problem. And there’s lot of that, it’s become rampant in this game in the last ten years.
Q: Why the last ten years especially?
A: I have a theory, it’s a personal theory. It’s probably wrong. Once concealed carry came out, pretty much anybody could teach it. You’re teaching it out of a book, it’s primarily law. You go to Gunsite or Thunder Ranch or Blackwater or any of the big-name schools, you take a class as a student and all of a sudden you open your own school and you’re a firearms instructor.
To decide that you know everything about firearms and tactics is about the most pompous thing you can do. A doctor’s got to go to university, an auto mechanic is going to be out of work if he doesn’t get updated training on all this technology in cars today. A weapons instructor just says, Hi, I’m a weapons instructor and I know all about guns and training and tactics and strategy. You look at instructor resumes, and they’ve taken all the classes, but what have they done? They’ve taken everybody else’s lesson plans and put them into a program of their own and they’re teaching it like a parrot.
Q: There’s definitely a proliferation of so-called firearms academies, some of them run by IPSC guys who win a couple of titles and open a school.
A: IPSC guys are very good shooters. Obviously, IPSC has changed from the early days, from what Jeanne-Pierre Denis and Jeff [Cooper] and the original guys set out to make it. The P was meant to stand for practical. The arguments went on in the 80s and very early 90s about whether it’s practical or it isn’t. Finally, IPSC got to a stage in the early 90s where they said, No, we’re not being practical, it’s a sport. But the bottom line is, if you get somebody like Rob Leatham, Jerry Barnhard, guys like that, they’re tremendous mechanical shooters. And if they open a school and teach mechanical shooting, which a lot of them do, I think there’s nothing wrong with that.