Adequacy

Sometimes I feel surprised at how old I have become. I am not sure when I aged. I was too busy to notice it happening, but here I am. Waiters and clerks ask me if I get the senior discount. I do: But at least they are asking not assuming.

One of the things to astonish me is that the "Modern Technique of the Pistol" is now antiquated, at least in the eyes of marksmen priding themselves as au courant.  When I learned the technique, Col. Cooper and his methods were state of the art, and very influential upon police and military training programs.

I feel a bit old fashioned when I put one foot forward, raise the pistol in a two-handed push-pull grip and catch view of the front sight as the gun rises.  Here is the thing, though. It still works. Because I am habituated to the process, it is probably what I will do if I need my pistol in earnest. About the only thing I do that is not Antiquated Modern Technique is that I now prefer guns without external safety catches to manipulate: auto pistols of the plastic kind, or else revolvers.

Along the way from there to here, I have tried, at least briefly, many other ways of shooting a pistol: Isosceles, Fairbairn-Sykes shoulder point, Israeli crouch, one-handed bullseye, and even the weirdly logical Center Axis Relock method.

Every one of those methods will do everything it was designed and intended to do. Any of them can be used to life-saving effect. Some are better than others, but none is inadequate to the particular types of challenges around which it was framed. The Fairbairn-Sykes method, for example, is none too precise. As taught in bygone days, it had a rather minimal accuracy standard for qualification, 50% hit ratio, and hits anywhere on the silhouette target counted. That, though, was deemed sufficient at the time, and a reasonable tradeoff for the method's simplicity and speed in close range encounters.

If you have a proven method, one that has shown itself to work for what you are trying to do with it, well and good, whichever method that is. Your method is adequate. It makes no sense to say another method is more adequate, for a thing is adequate or it isn't. It is silly to argue the case to anyone who has seen his preferred method used to deadly effect, or so used it himself, or gotten after-action reports that it worked.

I well recall the polite disinterest with which American shooters greeted the Israeli Instinctive Method when trainers tried to introduce it to these shores. We already had the Modern Technique ingrained as a habit. It looked to us as if the Israeli experts were doing several things wrong. No one could argue with their good results against very serious terrorist threats, but what they were doing didn't quite look right, somehow. One may suppose we looked rather like that to them as well.

I suppose my perspective, looking down the hall of years, is that you should have a method. You should practice it and ingrain it, and not worry about what sort of fashion statement it makes on the range.