Pincus

I was listening to Gun Nuts Radio a couple Tuesdays ago. (You DO listen, don't you) and they had Rob Pincus on as a guest.

Guns! Nuts!

That's Marko's picture. Mmmm, walnut... Buy Marko's book. It's coming out soon. I'm gonna. Probably review it here someday, if you are hesitating to get it without knowing anything about it.

The man does lots of training of other people, and has done lots of self-defense training himself, so I wanted to re-listen to the show.

He sorta makes a dig or two at Jeff Cooper, and that sets my defense mechanism off. Til I realize, and Tam tells me, that he trained under Cooper at Gunsite "Back when the Colonel had his Tactical Tricycle." And his digs aren't really digs. They are elucidations. Clarifications. They are no skin of Cooper's back.

Example: Rob Pincus, quite diplomatically, knocks Cooper's color code system of alertness. Or so you think at first hearing. But he's actually telling us gun-toters to not rely on color code as a force field of invulnerability. Don't fetishize the code. Following it isn't like some sort of cargo cult, where the immune-from-bad-guy plane will land with gun goodies just because you made a facsimile of landing gear and a radio set out of coconuts. Just because your situational awareness went from Code Yellow to Code Orange doesn't mean you are safe from the bad guy you noticed. It's a helpful mindset. It helps you, individually, keep alert to your surroundings at an appropriate level. Alertness might, might, make you a less attractive target. Or it might make a determined bad guy change his tactics from direct boisterous confrontation to one with an ambush. Maybe when you go to code Orange you need to skeddaddle rather than think about where your CCW is on your hip. Maybe while you were at code Yellow half an hour before you should've decided to avoid that area you are now code Orange in before it goes all Red and you don't notice the ambush coming from 3 sides to your rear. Don't take stuff for granted.

The Color Code is a good start. It gets you thinking about mindset. But don't STOP thinking about mindset and situational awareness just because you memorized the code.

Another example: Many gun types, including Cooper, repeat a trope. "Only hits count." If you miss well you've given the bad guy his chance to take you out and you are dead meat. Pincus said, "well, misses count too..."

What?!!! What balderdash is this?! It goes against all conventional wisdom! Is Pincus trying to get me killed? Does he think a miss is as good? That's insane! Are we to lay down suppressing fire or somethng?!! Madness.

Well, when you think about it, a miss does have some value. Would Pincus prefer the good guys always hit the bad guys, TWICE, in the sinuses, turning them out like a light? Of course he would. But hits aren't guaranteed. And in a stressful self-defense situation you are more likely to miss. He's not saying you should TRY to miss. But if you do, you have raised the stress level of the bad guy adversary a whole bunch of notches. There is some value in that, sometimes. Yes. A missed shot can help, rather than hesitating and waiting for the ideal shot. Waiting for a bad guy to act most like a paper range target is not good for your longevity. Get good at hitting, and don't be paralyzed by a fear of missing. Don't be casual about your shots, by any means.

He makes me want to take his training course, after re-listening, Rob Pincus does. And check out his book.

And listen to Gun Nuts. Dammit.

[update... i was apostrophe crazy on this post...]