...I don't care what Jeff Cooper or any other instructor says, I'll take a semi-auto against a manual action rifle every time if I know there's a fight coming.
...it's been decades since I was in an infantry unit and later doing police weapons training, so at my "sloppy civilian" stage of life, "if I know there's a fight coming," I'll be somewhere else when it arrives. :-) FWIW, if Jeff Cooper knew a fight was coming, he wouldn't have chosen a Scout Rifle to defend himself with either.
Regarding the term "scout rifle"--it's not like the term "match barrel" with handguns or "pigeon grade" with shotguns which mean whatever the manufacturer wants it to. Cooper went to extraordinary length to define exactly what it was (or more appropriately what it was NOT). To say that a certain rifle doesn't meet the definition but is still a Scout rifle is like saying that a gorilla isn't a man, but he's still a human being. It's like being a little bit pregnant--it is or it isn't. Unfortunately the term "Scout Rifle" has become to many like the term "series 70" has been bastardized to mean any 1911 without a firing pin safety (which it isn't).
