The section on deadly force, situational awareness and situational evaluations and knowing the rule of law is a CRITICAL part of the equation which some may not consider...but should.
In my case, you're preaching to the choir here....
Not much on Mr Wenger's site was new to me, in fact it has been up for at least a couple of years, expanded now from what I recall a couple of years back. But being familiar with the material I could appreciate how carefully it is packaged, all the way down to the photos of the effects of flash from the cylinder gap when practicing some of the shooting from close to the hip techniques.
When you're writing about something as critcaly important as self-defense with lethal force ya gotta be very careful of what you say and how you say it.
..and speaking of those low shooting hand postion techniques, since both Fairbairn and Wenger emphasize them, I expect I'll start. Putting your handgun out in front of you in every instance is likely the wrong thing to do... sometimes.
Although I expect the practice of any method where any part of your body is in front of the cylinder gap and especially the muzzle oughtta be approached with extreme caution.
Back to the original topic, it is interesting to compare the attitudes of our CQB crowd to the shooting fraternity when it comes to Sykes and Fairbiarn.
Those involved with the practical application of the martial arts, especially as it applies to military training, readily acknowledge a huge debt of gratitude to those two men for ushering in what is essentially the modern rea.
Acknowledgement for the same from the firearms crowd seems lacking, generally going back as far as Cooper, Weaver et al. in California in the 50's and 60's, and possibly as far as Applegate when pushed.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and state, since I still observe my fellow countrymen to some degree as a foreigner would, one of the character flaws common to many Americans is a sort of cultural egocentricism, I expect this is especially true of the handguns crowd.
Looking at Fairbairn and Syke's pioneering handgun tome, it is all at once concise, accurate, and his conclusions and methods have stood the test of time remarkably well.
The sum total of, and the circumstances of where those guys accumulated their experience and expertise is astounding, and indeed we are unlikely to see their like again.
Birdwatcher
