In honor of John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America, I am keeping my eyes open for clues about America’s gun cultures as Sandy and I travel from our home in North Carolina to Yellowstone National Park and back. My inaugural post on this series can be found here.

I haven’t taken a legitimate vacation in years, but the combination of meeting up with my sister and brother-in-law in Wyoming and the poor cell service/wi-fi in Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks forced me to lay off the computer for about a week.

It was nice to get away from work for a bit. But sometimes you go in search of America’s gun cultures, and sometimes gun culture finds you where you least expect it.

One day our traveling party ventured up from Fishing Bridge Campground through Hayden Valley, the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, and Lamar Valley out the northeast entrance to the park into Cooke City, Montana. Year around population 77.

I was excited to visit Cooke City because the moderator of the Vail Symposium Conversation on Controversial Issues that I participated in before this trip, Clay Jenkinson, said his family has some roots there. So, we stopped for lunch, a stroll down the main street, and a visit to the general store.

On our way back to our car, Sandy was going to walk behind another car parked on the street. I didn’t want her to get backed into, so I told her to follow me in front of the car. When I looked back at Sandy I saw sitting inside the car two familiar faces: Tom and Lynn Givens.

Now, these names may not be known widely outside of Gun Culture 2.0, but inside the defensive gun training industry, they are legendary. I’ve posted about a dozen or so times about Tom Givens and Rangemaster, including the Rangemaster (Polite Society) Tactical Conference. I don’t really need to add more to what I already say in those posts.

Although Tom did suggest he may need an order of protection against me stalking him, I PROMISE that it was just serendipity or fate that brought us together in the most out-of-the-way place imaginable.

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In Episode 9 of “Light Over Heat,” I argue that guns are indeed tools, but they are not just tools. They are tools that are by design dangerous.

As the smart guys at Open Source Defense say, this is a feature, not a bug. And as gun training old head Tom Givens puts it, “if they weren’t they wouldn’t be useful to us at all.”

Also mentioned in this week’s video, gun trainer Gabe Suarez and a reporter from Forbes Magazine who spent a year on the gun beat.

Please surf over to my “Light Over Heat” YouTube channel and SUBSCRIBE to follow, RING THE BELL to receive notifications, and SHARE so others can learn about this work.

However, restricted does not mean “never done.” Reflecting on his time as a police officer in Tennessee in the 1970s, gun trainer Tom Givens said it was so common for people to carry guns in their cars that when he pulled someone over he did not ask, “Do you have a gun in your car?” He asked, “Where is the gun in your car?”

The existence of laws against some behavior is not the same as people following or officials enforcing those laws. This is especially true when there is a strong motivation to engage in the prohibited behavior (think “Prohibition”). So, if the late 19th century was part of the restricted era, it was also in the words of historians Lee Kennett and Jules LaVerne Anderson, “a gun-toting era.”

Here I excerpt some interesting passages about this gun-toting era from Kennett and Anderson’s 1975 book, The Gun in America: The Origins of a National Dilemma.

Reminiscent of events of 2020, Kennett and Anderson report:

In the wake of the Chicago Riots of 1877, the Tribune reported that “every man who could beg, buy, or borrow a revolver carried it,” with total disregard to the local ordinance against concealed weapons.

p. 147

The authors continue:

If sudden outbreaks spurred mass arming for the moment, there is evidence of a steady increase in the general tendency to go armed. . . . Over the years it was reduced in bulk and became easier to carry concealed. The pocket pistol became a popular item, with none more diminutive and deadly than those of Henry Deringer.

p. 147

At the same time concealed carry bans were spreading through the rural southern states, the desire to carry concealed was growing in the urban North:

The pocket pistol was essentially the weapon of a more civilized and urban community, where danger came in close quarters and was part of the society itself. The general tendency to keep arms or carry them on the person may well be linked to what has been called the “urban explosion” that transformed American cities in the period 1820 to 1860. Its mechanism of everyday law enforcement did not keep pace with its growth, so the inhabitant felt an increased need to fend for himself in this regard. The sense of personal insecurities in the face of crime probably did more to foster the trend toward personal armament than anything else, with sporadic outbreaks of mass violence accelerating the process from time to time.

p. 148

Of course, as in today’s shall issue gun-toting era, only a minority of gun owners carry in public:

It is doubtful if anything more than a small minority of Americans went constantly armed. It was estimated in 1877 that one Chicagoan in ten would be found with a pistol concealed on his person.

p. 157

Of course, whether 10% of Chicagoans carrying concealed pistols is a low or high proportion is a matter of expectations and judgement.

Kennett and Anderson quote a book published in 1875 with a remarkably contemporary title: The Pistol as a Weapon of Defense in Its Home and on the Road. How to Choose It and How to Use it (New York: Industrial Publications Co.).

Writing in 1875, the anonymous author of a guide to the purchase and use of pistols hardly dealt with a controversial subject. He called the pistol a superlative instrument for self-defense, since it “renders mere physical strength of no account, and enables the weak and delicate to successfully resist the attacks of the strong and brutal.”

p. 157

The reasons concealed carry bans were hard to enforce are similar to the reasons people give for liberalizing concealed carry laws in the contemporary era:

There was a difference between laws passed and those enforced. Jordan has stated: “Three dynamic, viable factors thwarted the law. First, men liked weapons, wanted weapons, enjoyed the power that weapons lent them, and insisted on having and using and caring and handling them as they please. Second, a good many gentlemen of one kind or another – some jurist and some vagrants were disciples of a religion known as the ‘higher law.’ Third, personal weapons, upon occasion, were urgently needed for self-defense.” For these reasons laws involving the regulation of concealed weaponry were difficult to enforce.

p. 160, quoting Philip D. Jordan, Frontier Law and Order (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), p. 7

And, as with today, when seconds count, police are just minutes away:

The [New York] Tribune’s survey of 1903 also indicates quite clearly that honest citizens often went armed. Those who traveled at night or with sums of money felt much safer with revolvers in their pockets. … Most felt they needed them for self-defense, holding that the public guardians of the peace could not always be relied upon to protect life and property.

p. 179-80

Reading Kennett and Anderson’s book is a good reminder to me that, even thought the center of gravity of gun culture has shifted over time toward self-defense, self-defense has always been an important part of American gun culture.

Links below are in reverse chronological order (newest to oldest) (up to date through 11 April 2020).

• Thoughts on Broadening the Gun Culture Tent
• Taking Gabe White’s Tactical Success with Technical Skills Class at 2018 Tactical Conference
• Exploring the Frontiers of Defensive Gun Culture at the 2018 Tactical Conference
• 20th Anniversary Rangemaster Polite Society Tactical Conference, 2018
• Stalking William Aprill – In a Totally Non-Threatening Way
• Tom Givens on Designing Training Programs for Reality
• Rangemaster Polite Society Tactical Confernece (Lost Reflection on 2014 Edition)
• 20th Anniversary edition of the Rangemaster Polite Society Tactical Conference
• Contemporary Private Citizen Gun Trainers – Like Dwarfs on the Shoulders of Giants?
• How Rangemaster Put the “Certification” in the Instructor Development and Certification Course
• Observing Tom Givens’s Rangemaster Instructor Development and Certification Course
• Tom Givens on Training Parameters for Civilian Gun Carry
• Tom Givens: “Where is the gun in your car?”

When I attended the 16^th annual TacCon in 2014, 140 individuals – including me and my wife – paid $249 to join 22 presenters in Memphis. Significantly, it was the last year the TacCon would be held at Tom and Lynn Givens’s Rangemaster facility.

Each day there were four two-hour time slots from 8:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., with 30 minutes for lunch between the second and third slots. In each time slot, three sessions ran concurrently in the classroom, airgun range, and upstairs room, for a total of 12 sessions each day. Because some sessions repeated, there were 25 unique sessions in 2014. The only live fire during the 2014 TacCon was the pistol match, out of which the event itself was born in 1988.

For its 20^th anniversary, over 200 people paid $370 to attend TacCon at the Direct Action Resource Center (DARC), an expansive facility in a swamp on the outskirts of the outskirts of Little Rock, Arkansas.

I paid my registration in September of 2017, six months early, and the event sold out not long after that. For the modest increase in fees, attendees availed themselves of 43 unique sessions spread over three classrooms, a “med bay,” three live fire ranges, and the shoothouse (plus a dedicated range for the pistol match).

Someone who played their cards right could attend sessions on urban rifle with John Farnam, snubby skills with Claude Werner, legal self-defense strategies with Massad Ayoob, tactical treatment of combatives casualties with Caleb Causey, escaping restraints with Greg Ellifritz, violent criminal actors with William Aprill, and an experiential learning lab with Craig Douglas. Those sessions alone without amount to a substantial education in self-defense.

In doing so, this hypothetical attendee would also MISS three times as much education by not making sessions with Darryl Bolke, Wayne Dobbs, Vicki Farnam, Tom Givens, Chuck Haggard, Randy Harris, Marty Hayes, John Hearne, John Holschen, Spencer Keepers, Ernest Langdon, Larry Lindenman, Steve Moses, Karl Rehn, Paul Sharp, Lee Weems, Gabe White, and others.

It’s actually staggering to think if a bomb was dropped on the Tactical Conference which self-defense trainers would go straight to the top.

Early in its history, it occurred to Tom Givens that many of the attendees of his Polite Society pistol match were self-defense trainers who could offer blocks of instruction to others when they were not shooting. “Thus was born the Tactical Conference,” Givens says. At my first TacCon, I distinctly remember attending up-and-comer John Hearne’s session on “Performance Under Fire” and finding myself sitting next to one of the founding fathers of armed citizen self-defense, John Farnam, as well as conference presenters Kathy Jackson, Chuck Haggard, Darryl Bolke, and Claude Werner.

Even today, many non-presenting attendees are gun training industry insiders. I had the opportunity to meet for the first time a number of people I know of, like Bob Mayne, Melody Lauer, and Paul Carlson. But more and more attendees are like me, regular Joes who know an amazing training value when they see one.

That said, for me a significant difference between the 2014 and 2018 Tactical Conferences was I am better known now. Or, more accurately, my work on Gun Culture 2.0 is better known now. At the 2014 event, only my wife knew who I was. By 2018, I felt much more like an insider.

Next year’s TacCon will be held at Nolatac Training Center outside New Orleans, Louisiana. Fees have increased modestly to $389, and the event is already sold out.

I won’t be attending the 21^st annual Rangemaster Polite Society Tactical Conference, as far as I know. But I will be posting a couple more reflections on the 20^th incarnation to close out 2018. As always, stay tuned.

PART 2 of 3

DEFINING THE BATTLEFIELD

Looming large throughout Ford’s book is the point that “developing a coherent and effective weapon is greatly complicated by the way in which different constituencies within armies first think about and describe the battlefield problems they face and then use their power to carve out their particular interpretation of battle” (p. 27). In short, what “battlefield” problem are we trying to solve?

This is actually a common theme in many of the civilian gun training events I have attended. When I first heard Tom Givens present at the 2014 Rangemaster Tactical Conference, it was on “Defining the Threat, Designing Training Programs for Reality.” He began the presentation by asserting: “One cannot find a correct solution until one defines the problem.”

The “battlefield” faced by armed citizens – criminal assault – is not the same as that faced by .MIL or LEO. Givens connects this to gun training, but we could also think about it in terms of the weapons that armed citizens should be carrying.

How different conceptualizations of the battlefield affect weapon selection is a point made often by Gabe Suarez. Suarez begins his Pistol Gunfighting School with the problem it addresses, and uses the board game “Clue” as an analogy to drive home his point. For Suarez, defensive firearms instructors play a game of “Tactical Clue” in training their students.

In 1997, “Tactical Clue” was most often solved with: “Thug in the parking lot with a screwdriver.” That was the problem defensive firearms instructors trained students to address. 2017 America poses a new problem for armed citizens. “We live in a time of war,” Suarez tells his students, and the winning solution to Tactical Clue in 2017 is “Mustafa with a rifle in a mall.” Or a husband and wife with guns at a Christmas party. Or a domestic abuser with an AR-15 in a small town church.

Solving the 2017 battlefield problem requires the armed citizen to do more precise shooting in proactive situations and at longer distances. This necessitates a different sort of weapon system, perhaps pistols with red dot optics like those sold by Suarez International?

“We stand on the shoulders of giants. That’s why we are able to see so far.” – Tom Givens

As I noted in an earlier post, part of which is repeated here, Givens is drawing on an aphorism commonly attributed to Sir Isaac Newton who said: “If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

The version of this saying attributed to Newton is actually a modification in substance and meaning from the original. In his Metalogicon (1159), John of Salisbury attributes the original saying to Bernard of Chartres:

“Dicebat Bernardus Carnotensis nos esse quasi nanos, gigantium humeris insidentis, ut possimus plura eis et remotiora videre, non utique proprii visus acumine, aut eminentia corporis, sed quia in altum subvenimur et extollimur magnitudine gigantea”

“Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.”

In the original, the emphasis was on the contemporary being a drawf in relation to the giant size predecessor, while the Newtonian version accents more the contemporary’s superior vision.

Either way, in the gun training industry, the giant upon whose shoulders contemporary pygmies stand is Col. Jeff Cooper. In my travels among gun trainers, I routinely hear the prefatory clauses “As Col. Cooper said…” or “According to Col. Cooper…”

While at Gunsite Academy last year observing the contemporary incarnation of Cooper’s 250 Defensive Pistol course, I watched a video recording from 1981 of Cooper delivering his “Mental Conditioning for Combat” lecture. Several ideas presented by Cooper in that lecture live on today in the gun training industry, including in Tom Givens’s instructor development course.

This way of thinking about private citizen gun training stresses its communal nature, rather than the competitive dimension emphasized by the term I frequently use, gun training industry.

Thought of as a community, there are analogies that can be used to describe private citizen gun trainers other than as standing on the shoulders of giants. “Roots and branches,” for example, is a common way to describe traditions of thought and practice. From a common root, many different branches sprout and grow.

Last year, The Cornered Cat Kathy Jackson posed a question on her Facebook page: “What firearms instructor(s) have had the deepest / best impact on you as a shooter (and perhaps as a person)?” It generated a list of over 100 names. With enough of that sort of information, we could create a very interesting picture of the roots and branches in the gun training community.

Of course, the “roots and branches” analogy is very similar to another analogy: the “family tree.” This way we can think of Cooper as father of the civilian gun training industry and the many children he has spawned, and their children, and so on. Younger trainers that Tom Givens has mentored like John Hearne, Tiffany Johnson, and Lee Weems are, in this sense, Jeff Cooper’s grandchildren.

Of course, if Cooper is the father of the civilian gun training industry, then he too has ancestors. I am not an historian of shooting, but Karl Rehn has been working through historical shooting instruction books in preparation for teaching an historical handgun course. (Editorial aside: I MUST TAKE!)

Rehn has already found that a lot of what is said about shooting today has been said before.

Like Bernard of Chartres said, giants and pygmies. Or more generously, following Newton, on the shoulders of giants.

Near the top of my list of sessions to attend at the 2014 Rangemaster Polite Society Tactical Conference was host Tom Givens’s talk on “Defining the Threat, Designing Training Programs for Reality.”

Tom Givens’ bald head, stout mustache, and steely expression give him a commanding presence befitting his years of experience as a police officer and trainer. When he speaks, especially about the fine line separating life and death and how to stay on the right side of that divide, he compels attention.

Givens is dressed up for his presentation, wearing a sport coat over a black shirt (no tie), slacks, and dress shoes. Standing at the front of the room and speaking without notes, Givens begins his talk at the beginning. “One cannot find a correct solution,” he states plainly, “until one defines the problem.” [Update: a point I have made recently about gun training.]

The problem faced by armed citizens – criminal assault – is not the same as that faced by soldiers or law enforcement officers. Training needs to be modeled on the reality of criminal assault, not vice-versa. The reality of the criminal assault paradigm that Givens preaches is based in large part on the experience of his 60-plus students who have used their guns in self-defense.

It suggests the typical event faced by an armed citizen will be from three to five yards distance and involve four shots fired.

Learning to jump out of helicopters, run carbines, and other forms of “edutainment” or “edutrainment” in the training community only serve to confuse students into hesitation – hesitation that in a criminal assault can be fatal. Instead, the training program Givens promotes emphasizes fast, reliable access to a concealed handgun and reliable hits with the first and successive rounds.

This event was special for me not only because it opened up the world of high level trainers, but also because my wife and I were married the day before the conference, at the Crystal Shrine Grotto inside the Memorial Park Cemetery in Memphis.

So we honeymooned by day at the Tactical Conference, and around Memphis at night.

 Lost Reflection on Rangemaster Tactical Conference, 2014

When Tom Givens became a professional defensive firearms instructor in the mid-1970s, he could count his peers on one hand: Col. Jeff Cooper, John Farnam, Chuck Taylor, Massad Ayoob. Forty years later, gun training is a cottage industry. As there is no overarching professional association of trainers, it is impossible to know how many people earn all or part of their living as instructors. The existence of a professional group started in 2008 on LinkedIn called Firearms Instructors is suggestive, though. By 2014, the group had grown to nearly 6,000 members. [Update: As of November 2017, the group has over 10,000 members.]

Givens hosts an elite selection of these trainers at his annual “Polite Society Tactical Conference.” The Tactical Conference began in 1988 as an indoor pistol match, held in the winter for those who could not shoot outdoors. As the match evolved, it occurred to Givens that many of the attendees were self-defense trainers who could offer blocks of instruction to others when they were not shooting. “Thus was born the Tactical Conference.” (The pistol match continues.)

For the 16^th annual Rangemaster Tactical Conference in 2014, 140 individuals – including me and my wife – paid $249 to join 22 presenters in Memphis. Even though the cap on enrollment has grown the past couple of years, at least 35 people were turned away after the conference reached its maximum registration. Conference attendees drove or flew in from as far away as Alaska and Florida, and as close as Arkansas and Mississippi. A number of Memphians were also in attendance.

When we arrived in Memphis from North Carolina the night before the event, we were greeted by a violent storm, including a tornado warning that triggered emergency alert systems and alarms throughout Shelby County in Tennessee, as well as eastern Arkansas and northern Mississippi. The darkness and violence of the natural environment that day mirrored the social environment. Signs of a struggling city were everywhere – from the moment we landed at Memphis International Airport (which currently has no international flights) amid abandoned Delta Airlines gates to the crumbling factory buildings and boarded-up houses we passed on the drive to our downtown hotel. The city’s unemployment rate doubled from 2007 to 2010, and in the summer of 2013 it had the highest rate in the country. Even the valet at the Sheraton Hotel lamented to us, “You know, we are going to be like Detroit soon.” He made this comment in the time that it took us to get from the lobby to our third floor room. Considering the fact that the Memphis statistical area ranked 4^th out of 49 metro areas for unemployment in December 2013, two places ahead of Detroit, it already was.

Of course, Detroit is not only characterized by economic struggles, but by crime as well. Here again Memphis lives up to its reputation as “the Detroit of the South.” As I was settling into bed Thursday night and reviewing the course schedule for the first day of the Tactical Conference, the 11 o’clock news was reporting breaking stories of various shootings around the city. By Saturday, the Memphis Commercial Appeal began to catalog the events: “Two women shot at Classic Soul club,” “Woman found shot to death in home,” “Trio of shootings occupy officers,” “Ambush shooting leaves teen dead.” According to the website neighborhoodscout.com, which compiles crime data from the FBI and 17,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide, Memphis scores 2 out of 100 in terms of overall safety. The odds of being a victim of a violent crime in Memphis are 1 in 57 (compared to 1 in 155 in Tennessee). Considering both the 11,500 violent and 42,000 property crimes annually, the odds of victimization in Memphis increase to 1 in 12. It’s hard to imagine that 2 percent of the cities in the United States are worse than this, but if you cross the Mississippi River from Memphis into West Memphis, Arkansas, you enter one of the most dangerous cities in America: 0 out of 100 on the neighborhoodscout rating scale, 1 in 40 chance of being a violent crime victim, crime rates five times the national average, and on and on.

So, while Memphis’s central location in the United States makes it a convenient location to which to travel for a conference, its social geography makes it an excellent choice for a convocation of civilian self-defense trainers and enthusiasts. It reinforces the sense that threats to personal safety are ever present, lurking around every corner, and need to be addressed through the carrying of a concealed firearm. In his presentation at the conference, Givens declares firmly that “people who say the chance of needing a gun is one in a million are wrong.” The lessons Givens wants his audience to take away are built not only on his reputation as a gun trainer, but as a gun trainer who has had more than 60 of his students use lethal force in self-defense. This is the significance of meeting in what Givens, and others at the conference, call “Mogudishu on the Mississippi.”

Friday morning, the first day of the Tactical Conference, we drive 20 minutes from our downtown hotel to the east side of Memphis, alongside some of the most aggressive drivers I have ever encountered (and I learned to drive in California and have driven in 48 states). Rangemaster is located in a nondescript, tan rectangular pebble dash building, framed by independent car dealers and adjacent to massive power lines. Inside, the building is spacious and functional. The facility hosts the University of Memphis’s air rifle team – including 2005 NCAA National Champion Beth Tidmore – with a state-of-the art range and electronic targeting system. Also on the ground floor is a clean, well-lit classroom, an indoor pistol range, and a pro shop selling guns, ammunition, holsters, safes, t-shirts, hats, books, and DVDs. Upstairs is a large, open multiuse space.

The Tactical Conference runs over three days, Friday through Sunday. Each day there are four two-hour time slots from 8:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., with 30 minutes for lunch between the second and third slots. In each time slot, three sessions run concurrently in the classroom, airgun range, and upstairs room, for a total of 12 sessions each day. Because some sessions repeat, there were 25 unique sessions in 2014. Every year the presenters are a who’s who of self-defense trainers, and this year is no different. Some experts are best-known by their aliases. “Southnarc” – Craig Douglas – is a pioneer in the area of managing conflict and contact with potential threats for civilians. The “Cornered Cat” – Kathy Jackson – is a leading teacher of and advocate for women in the world of defensive firearms. “Doc K” is a Green Beret and combat medic who does not use his real name because he is still on active duty. Others are recognizable just by their last name: Farnam, Higginbotham, Werner. And some are likely to be the leading lights of the next generation of trainers.

The doors of Rangemaster opened at 7:30 a.m. Friday, and by the time we arrived at 7:35 the main parking lot was already full. After parking our rental car in the overflow lot, we made our way inside and signed in. Seeing a growing crowd in the classroom for Shane Gosa’s session on “Developing, Maintaining and Proper Use of the Mental Trigger,” I grabbed a stray open seat in the 8^th of 10 rows. By the time Gosa began his presentation, a standing room only audience of 75 people had filled the classroom. Although not every session over the weekend was SRO, every session was well-attended. Even the presenters took the opportunity to play the role of students when time permitted. During a session on “Performance Under Fire” by up-and-comer John Hearne, I found myself sitting next to one of the founding fathers of armed citizen self-defense, John Farnam, as well as conference presenters Kathy Jackson, Chuck Haggard, Darryl Bolke, and Claude Werner.

Although many attendees – two-thirds by host Tom Givens’s account – were trainers only of themselves, family, and friends, there was a still a professional development seminar feeling to the conference. During breaks between sessions, people gathered in the classrooms to make or renew friendships and acquaintances, to “talk shop,” and in some cases to literally share war stories. Often issues raised in the sessions spilled over into the common areas. Waiting in line to buy a hamburger from the vendor set up outside, I overheard a police officer (Greg Ellifritz), civilian trainer, and self-defense enthusiast break down the mistakes made in an incident where an armed citizen stopped to intervene in a situation that appeared to be a man assaulting a woman on a highway median, but turned out to be a plainclothes police officer detaining a suspect.

Throughout the Tactical Conference I attended in 2014, if there was one figure who was ever present but not actually in attendance it was Col. Jeff Cooper. No person in the firearms self-defense community is quoted more often or reverently than Col. Jeff Cooper. Gun trainers mentioning his ideas sound like Jesus’s disciples quoting the Messiah: “According to Col. Cooper. . .” and “To quote Col. Cooper. . .” And there is no stronger credential for a gun trainer than to have sat at the feet of the Master and learned from him. Or, if that is not possible, then at least to have had contact with one of his early disciples: Chuck Taylor, Louis Awerbuck, Bill Jeans, Ken Hackathorn, Manny Kapelsohn, Clint Smith, and even Tom Givens and John Farnam themselves, and many others I am surely (and unjustly) leaving out.

According to The American Rifleman (5/18/2011), “John Dean Cooper – ‘Jeff’ to one and all – stands alone and unchallenged as the most influential ever to hold forth on small arms doctrine and technique.” The techniques he developed were adopted in all branches of the U.S. military as well as law enforcement agencies “from the FBI Academy to Mayberry RFD.” And through his American Pistol Institute/Gunsite Academy and the many trainers influenced by it, he continues to exercise an enormous influence on civilian firearms training. Just as the Rangemaster Polite Society Tactical Conference does today.

Registration is $349 plus an additional $20.19 (5.8%) for the convenience of registering on-line. As in 2014, Wake Forest University is subsidizing my attendance as this research will become part of my book on Gun Culture 2.0. (Recall my recent series of posts on the civilian gun training industry.)

If you don’t know what it’s all about, Tiffany Johnson of Rangemaster and the Front Sight Press blog has made a short video teaser.

Unfortunately, Tiffany doesn’t say which conference attendee’s booty is going to go clap per the audio track in the teaser. I will definitely be watching closely for that.