I'm not aware of the term "Scout Rifle" being in common usage, anywhere, by anyone, until the COL both coined and defined the term, it is what it is, and what you think means nothing. Dogmatic? Ya think? You obviously didn't read much of what Cooper wrote, I suggest you do so in order to appear somewhat less silly in the future.
Well, TAK... it appears that in your estimation no one can discuss the term "scout rifle" unless they accept the Colonel's definition as the final definition, with no further debate as to what the term might mean in a world where guns and ammunition (not to mention tactics!) are continually evolving.
Notice I deleted your reference to the COL's advocacy of Bill Weavers' aberration, so as not to sully his memory.
Now,
that statement truly puzzles me.
A quick review of history shows that
Jack Weaver (not "Bill Weaver") was the first man in the group of competition shooters with whom Col. Cooper slapped leather on a regular basis to use a two-handed stance. The technique was refined somewhat by others, including the estimable Ray Chapman (who I had the great good fortune to take instruction from years later), and Jeff Cooper by his own admission then promulgated the two-handed hold as part of his Modern Technique of the Pistol. How is this an aberration, or a blot on the Colonel's memory?
C.S. Lewis wrote about men who referred to other men as "gentlemen", in the british sense of being genteel, when the word really means a man of property, land, and title. A century ago a man could be, at once, a gentleman and a scoundrel of the highest order. This was the common understanding of that day. Now, the word essentially means nothing thanks to well-meaning folks like your self. Lewis referred to this phenomenon as "verbicide", or the murder of a word. I choose not to engage in this ghastly endeavour and, if you are wise , you will refrain from it.
Well, as much as I admire the history of the development of the English language, I do not regard it as I do Latin or Classical Greek, which are immutable now being dead languages spoken only by scholars. Languages that are spoken in the vernacular, such as modern English, are constantly evolving in both grammar and vocabulary. These evolutionary changes are inevitable and in and of themselves are not necessarily bad.
I have to laugh a bit at your evocation of Mr. Lewis, a fine writer but hardly a philologist (his great friend, Ronald Tolkien, was a philologist and had a very different view of the fluid nature of living languages, by the way). Lewis would have been the first to admit, if his comment on "verbicide" had been challenged (which I am certain it was, and should have been) that his native English is and was a dog's breakfast of words and grammar, an amalgamation of Latin, Gaulish, Germanic, Norse, and French, with a deep underlay of Celtic languages; and that each of these had deep underlayment of other languages themselves.
The word "gentleman", which you evoke as an example, is more than a victim of "verbicide". A gentleman, as generally understood in the England in the 19th century, connotes the word "playboy" in the modern world: a man who doesn't work for a living, but possesses inherited wealth, a sense of style, one who is likely to be seen in the pages of
Town & Country, or perhaps
Esquire or
Vanity Fair magazines. In the modern world, the word "gentleman" is taken by most people to refer to a man who exhibits principle and good manners in his speech and behavior. I think most people would regard this as an appropriate evolution of the word to reflect a meaning that most English-speakers would approve of. Which denotation of the word "gentleman" would you guess those who know you would apply to you, Mr. TAK, if either?
So, let us return to the concept of a "Scout Rifle" in this same manner. Jeff Cooper wrote about the concept 30-some years ago. I have no illusions about the Colonel's imagination or inventiveness, so am fairly safe, I think, in the assumption that his concept did not arise in a vacuum. In other words, he talked about it with his colleagues, and the concept most probably took shape over time. In other words, it evolved. And given the kinds of rifles and actions and ammunition available at the time that Col. Cooper formed his concept of the Scout Rifle, the form it took was shaped by knowledge of those factors. So, on whatever day Jeff Cooper decided to dub his concept "THE Scout Rifle", that's what it was. But that's not what it
is today.
Cooper defined his concept of Scout Rifle in the context of the weapons with which he was intimately familiar, and available to him in 1982 or so: as such, he specified a bolt-action rifle of 7.62 caliber with combat-worthy iron sights, a forward-mounted scope, and a Ching sling. But if we review how
Cooper intended the Scout Rifle to be used, codified its "job description", and then look at the weapons and ammunition available today and see how they are being used in combat, I think we'll find that the spirit of the Scout Rifle is there.
So, to quote the Colonel, a Scout Rifle should be: "... a general-purpose rifle is a conveniently portable, individually operated firearm, capable of striking a single decisive blow, on a live target of up to 200 kilos in weight, at any distance at which the operator can shoot with the precision necessary to place a shot in a vital area of the target."
Now, look at the rifles being used in combat today, and even those being developed for modern combat. It's pretty hard to argue that the M4 carbine, which is in general use by our forces in the Sandbox today, does not meet Colonel Cooper's operational criteria. I think many of us would prefer to see it chambered to use a more robust cartridge such as the 6.8 SPC (which was rejected by the Pentagon despite its strong recommendation by both active service and consultant ballisticians for reasons that were more politically motivated rather than motivated by a desire to arm our combatants with the best possible battle rifle, but that's another story...), but even in the 5.56 NATO chambering with appropriate ammunition it is a formidable weapon more than capable of striking a single decisive blow on a live target up to 200 kg live weight at ranges of 2 to 300 meters, ranges well within the proficiency of an appropriately trained U.S. armed services combat rifleman.
It's not that Col. Cooper's definition was wrong. Like the word "gentleman", which has evolved in the English language to mean something most English-speaking people would consider an admirable term (and, incidentally, something Col. Coooper would certainly consider himself to be) rather than the definition of a toffee-nosed wastrel (which he would not), the concept of the Scout Rifle has been adopted by the tactical community and has been
de fact deployed in combat daily for the past 10 years or more in the form of the M4 carbine. Whether one chooses to adhere to Col. Cooper's definition as the final word on what a Scout Rifle
is, is irrelevant. What is relevant is that men of action, recognizing the wisdom of the "job description" that Jeff Cooper codified, and recognizing its applicability to the theater of operations in which our warriors were and are fighting, made the necessary adjustments to the weapons platform at hand and produced what is for all intents and purposes a fully functional "scout rifle" for them to use.
Thank you for bringing up the word "gentleman" as a wonderful example of how a word can evolve to a better and happier meaning that everyone can enjoy the use of. I consider the happy parallel between the evolution of the concept of what constitutes a "gentlemen" and the concept of what constitutes a "scout rifle" to be an amusing and apt lesson.
