FEATURED AUTHOR
LOUIS AWERBUCK

Louis Awerbuck is the owner/director and lead instructor of Yavapai Firearms Academy, a mobile small-arms training operation based in Prescott, Arizona. He specializes in training that encompasses gunhandling, marksmanship, and tactics--the three essential elements to surviving a deadly force confrontation.

Awerbuck served in 1 Special Services Battalion in the South African Defence Force before immigrating to the United States from his native South Africa 20 years ago. Today he is a member of the National Tactical Officers Association (NTOA), the International Association of Law Enforcement Firearms Instructors (IALEFI), and the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association (ILEETA). He was employed at the original Gunsite ranch as chief rangemaster until 1987, attaining the title of Shooting Master, and is a senior rangemaster for the current Gunsite Academy.

With three decades of instructional experience, Louis has been a contributory adjunct instructor to the U.S. Marine Corps Security Force Bn Atlantic combat small arms program and an adjunct firearms/tactics instructor for the Central Training Academy, Department of Energy. He has trained extensively in the police and civilian firearms field and has instructed military personnel, including Special Forces units, from various U.S. bases.

Awerbuck has authored four books, The Defensive Shotgun, Hit or Myth, Tactical Reality, and More Tactical Reality; coproduced three videos, The Combat Shotgun, Only Hits Count, and Safe at Home; and is the tactical consultant and a contributing author to SWAT magazine.

The following interview is excerpted from Paladin author Bob Boatman's upcoming book Living with the 1911 (January 2005).

Q&A

BB: What's the toughest thing to teach people about shooting?
LA: For beginners, it’s probably realizing it’s easier than they think it is. They tend to overthink the problem. For experienced people, trying to correct ingrained problems they’ve had for years. That’s much harder.

BB: A lot of guys can teach the mechanics, which is fairly simple, don’t you think?
LA: It is extremely simple. It’s sights, trigger, follow-through. That’s all it is; that’s all it ever has been. Once the firing grip, the stance, the shooting platform, and that type of thing are worked out. The actual operation of sending a projectile downrange on a steady target is sights, trigger, follow-through. Most people try to shoot too accurately and overthink the problem. They try for 110 percent and wind up with 40 percent. My draw to the game is the psychology of it, the whys and wherefores. It always has been.

BB: I just read your book Tactical Reality, and you talk a lot about that. I especially liked your chapters dealing with heart and mind. That’s a pretty deep subject.
LA: It’s real deep for a young kid. But none of this is new. This stuff is 5,000 years old. It’s the same mind-set as the samurai, the ninja, Genghis Khan, the Romans, the Greeks, the Spanish—you can just keep on going back through the ages. It was always the same thing.

BB: Why do some people not get it?
LA: Some of the people who don’t get it are highly skilled professional people—like a commercial pilot, a neurosurgeon, somebody who cannot afford to make the slightest slip in his normal occupation, so he overthinks every single thing when he’s firing a weapon or taking his pistol from the holster. They’ll “what if” things to death. Other people who don’t get it are not really fighting oriented. From what I’ve seen, I think it’s a societal thing. Let’s face it, in North America you can pretty much buy anything you want. So people tend to think that if you pay a certain amount of money to be taught how to do something with a firearm, the net result at the end of the day is that you will be able to do it. It’s like paying to have your brakes fixed or paying for an appendectomy. They’re paying for a service, and they expect it to be done. They don’t figure they need any ability themselves or that they’re going to have to put some of themselves into it. I get civilian classes, especially in California, with a large Oriental clientele. You can see the difference in the mind-set straightaway. A lot sharper, a lot stronger, a lot more fighting oriented, and deeper thinkers. You can see it on the first day of a level-one pistol class. Most of them are not more than second generation, so there’s a survival thing. Somebody scrabbled and did laundry for 80 years on a back street in Hong Kong to get enough food on the table so that the first one could finally go to school, to college, to America, or whatever. They’ve kept that traditional mind-set, and it transfers over to guns on a firing range. Samoans—all of them are fighters. Every one of them. Why would a Samoan who’s been in this country 30 years be a good fighter? His mind-set is stable.

BB: What do the nonwarriors do when they get in trouble?
LA: They will probably have their pistol taken away, because really and truly, deep down inside they are not prepared to take life, even in defense of their own. So they’ll probably have their pistol taken away, get shot with their own pistol, and then the crook will leave with their pistol and shoot another person with it.

BB: A lot of instructors have told me the toughest problem they have to deal with is that something like 80 percent of people are not capable of shooting another person.
LA: If a shooter cannot look somebody in the eye at 6 feet away and be prepared to take a human life, he shouldn’t be carrying a gun. A lot of people think they’re prepared to do it; they can whack Bambi in the Coconino Forest. But when it comes to looking a human—who just happens to be an animal walking on his back legs—in the eyes and delivering rounds, they can’t do it. I think it’s a function of being dumbed down as a society. My God, somebody’s about to shoot and kill me, let me get on the cell phone and call 911. Law enforcement will magically materialize and interject themselves between me and this guy 6 feet away who’s coming into me with a 12-inch knife. It’s the noise in your car engine. If I turn the radio up, the noise in the engine goes away. No it doesn’t. That motor’s going to blow up. Get the engine fixed now or you’re going to be stranded on the side of the highway with your fancy radio. Every silver lining has a dark cloud. I’m not a pessimist, I’m a realist.

BB: Do you see a certain parallel between defensive pistol shooting and dangerous-game hunting?
LA: Sure, as far as the adrenal dump, the chemical cocktail. Bambi is just pipes, wires, meat, bone, gristle, blood, the same as the rapist in the back alley.

BB: But I’m talking about dangerous game. The hunter is not afraid of Bambi.
LA: If I’m afraid of you, in fear of my life, I need to do something about it. But we’ve grown up in a society where other people protect us. We expect to make a phone call and somebody will be there. It’s like pulling the blanket over your head to protect yourself from the bogeyman.

BB: That reminds me of the story about a cop who draws his gun and empties it into the floor so the bad guy won’t take it away from him. What’s going on there?
LA: If you’re talking of the same real-life incident I’m thinking of, that was a gunfight from hell. The cop and his partner went to serve a summons, and this guy had had a problem with his wife the night before or got out of bed on the wrong side or something, and as soon as the two cops walked in he grabbed the woman officer’s gun and killed her with it, right off the bat. So then this gunfight from hell ensued. The officer wound up with two guns, both revolvers. And he drained one into the floor of the house so this guy couldn’t take it and use it on him while he was trying to reload the other one. He reloaded twice, in one room, in a gunfight; it went on for nearly two minutes. He shot the guy through the rib cage, contact work. The guy dropped, and then he got up when the officer turned around. The guy got up and hit the cop with a two-by-four. The thing is, in a gunfight you don’t know what you’ve done afterwards, retrospectively. You think you know what you’ve done; you’ll backtrack everything to the premise to which you want to backtrack it. It’s got four wheels and it’s a Chevy, therefore my truck’s a Chevy because it has four wheels, even though it’s a Ford. You can backtrack anything to a premise.

It’s like if you advocate what’s colloquially called point shooting and you tag somebody—you’re in a deadly force situation, and you fire one round and hit him right between the eyes at 30 feet. You are going to convince yourself that you point-shot that round. You may have used sighted fire. You don’t know. Col. David Hackworth had a real good expression to the effect that your perception in battle is only as wide as your battle sights. If you take five people involved in one incident and separate them straight after the incident, you’ll get five different stories of what happened. We have no perception of what’s happening when it’s happening. I’ve seen a guy with a bolt rifle drain four rounds out of it, just running the bolt, never pressing the trigger, not understanding why the springbok didn’t fall over. There are people with a semiautomatic pistol in a fight who never press the trigger, run the slide, never press the trigger, run the slide and jack out 8 or 14 live rounds on the floor. It’s called buck fever. That fascinates me. It’s the psychology; it’s all mental.

I’m not God’s gift to shooting, but what does it take to hit a target? A static range target. Sights, trigger, follow-through. So why do you go out there and shoot 10 rounds and miss after 40 years and Lord knows how many millions of rounds? Something goes askew in your head; you just do something stupid like yank on the trigger or fail to follow through with the sights.

There is nothing to taking a neophyte and teaching him how to shoot. The best-shooting pistol class you will ever see is a dozen 14-year-old females who have never touched a pistol. Are they gunfighters? I don’t know, but as far as mechanical shooting goes you can’t ask for anything more. A class of 14- year-old females will turn out amazing pistol shooters. They don’t have an ego, they haven’t got the prior mistakes (even in this day and age, it’s usually the son who gets taken out to shoot by daddy), so they don’t know how to miss.

BB: Shooting under pressure—training or competition—is as close as we can get to real life. Why does that pressure clarify and speed up the minds of some people but scramble the brains of others?
LA: Everybody has a button. The bottom line is, you cannot put pressure on me if I don’t allow you to do it. If I want to subjugate myself mentally to allow you to do something to me on a range that will affect the basic mechanical operation of what I always do, then I’m going to scramble my brain. If you give me a drill, the drill sinks in, and I understand what the drill is, and I churn it out, that’s what Gunnie [Carlos] Hathcock called “getting in the bubble.” Jeff [Cooper]’s “Flying M” [a man-on-man shoot-off drill] is still being used today. I don’t know when he first used it, but I’ve been with him 25 years, so I know it’s been around a quarter century. Every Friday afternoon in a 250 [Defensive Pistol] class at Gunsite, you have one so-called winner who’s usually pretty good, and the rest are “also-rans.” But you don’t really have a winner; you have people who beat themselves over and over. The winner of the Flying M is hardly ever somebody who was better than three-quarters of the class; he just kept his feces coagulated, that’s all he did. It’s a three-round draw—bang, bang, speed load, bang. That’s all it is. It’s something 95 percent of the people in the class are capable of doing Wednesday afternoon. But at the end of the class, there’s a needle in the head. It’s all a mind deal.

Everybody keeps saying the gun is just a tool. The bottom line is, the gun is just a tool. It really is. It’s a piece of metal. How many times are you going to let a two-pound piece of metal outwit you? We’re not talking about flying a Tomcat here; this is not brain surgery. But it is psychology.

BB: Do you still get a kick out of instructing?
LA: Absolutely. Otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it. If I’d wanted to make money in my life, I would have done something else. Because you can’t do this job right and make a fortune out of it. You can make a good living, be comfortable, you can eat and have a roof over your head. But if you’re making a fortune in money you’re putting the money as a priority, and I have a moral and ethical problem with that. I’m not saying I’m the world’s altruist. But if you make money your priority, or ego your priority, you’ve got a problem. And there’s lot of that. It’s become rampant in this game in the last 10 years.

BB: Why the last 10 years especially?
LA: I have a theory; it’s a personal theory. It’s probably wrong. Once concealed carry came out, pretty much anybody could teach it. You’re teaching it out of a book; it’s primarily law. You go to Gunsite or Thunder Ranch or Blackwater or any of the big-name schools, you take a class as a student, and all of a sudden you open your own school and you’re a firearms instructor.

To decide that you know everything about firearms and tactics is about the most pompous thing you can do. A doctor’s got to go to university; an auto mechanic is going to be out of work if he doesn’t get updated training on all this technology in cars today. A weapons instructor just says, “Hi, I’m a weapons instructor, and I know all about guns and training and tactics and strategy.” And people pay their money. You look at instructor résumés, and they’ve taken all the classes, but what have they done? To give you the authority, what you’ve done is taken everybody else’s lesson plans and put them into a program of your own and you’re teaching it like a parrot.

BB: There’s definitely a proliferation of so-called firearms academies, some of them run by IPSC [International Practical Shooting Confederation] guys who win a couple of titles and open a school.
LA: IPSC guys are very good shooters. Obviously, IPSC has changed from the early days, from what Jeanne-Pierre Denis and Jeff [Cooper] and the original guys set out to make it. The P was meant to stand for practical. The arguments went on in the ’80s and very early ’90s about whether it’s practical or it isn’t. Finally, IPSC got to the stage in the early ’90s where they said, “No, we’re not being practical, it’s a sport.” But the bottom line is, if you get somebody like Rob Leatham, Jerry Barnhard, guys like that, they’re tremendous mechanical shooters. And if they open a school and teach mechanical shooting, which a lot of them do, I think there’s nothing wrong with that.

BB: But is mechanical shooting what is needed by most people who get their concealed carry permits and want to protect themselves?
LA: How many people who get concealed carry permits do you think are serious about it? How many do you think want to punch a piece of paper so they can legally have a firearm if one day they might need it? Most people buy a gun, take a concealed carry class, buy a box of 50 rounds of ammunition, and the firearm and 50 rounds of ammunition are found in their estate 30 years later. In a drawer somewhere.

BB: Those people need to initiate a thought process more than they need to learn how to shoot well.
LA: I pulled a pendulum clock apart once, stripped the entire thing down and couldn’t get it back together again. Don’t you think that a clockmaker would have said, why is this guy pulling this clock apart? Like we’re saying, why is this guy carrying a gun, why isn’t he serious, why didn’t he go through a thought process? With us it’s firearms strategy and tactics; with somebody else it’s a clock. The only difference is, survival is instinctual. It’s not a learned habit. And these days something strange is happening. Look at a 13- or 14-year-old kid today. He was raised in a world of political correctness—not hitting back, turn the other cheek. He’s lost his self-protective instinct. Look at 9-11. People said, “This is terrible, somebody’s bombed these buildings, this is absolutely horrific, somebody needs to do something about it.” Who somebody? I don’t know because I can’t do it, I’m busy right now. Self-preservation is being bred out of us. It’s cyclical. Every 100, 200 years it happens. Today, if somebody has a power failure for an hour you’ll get stampeded to death at Safeway for a run on candles. You can’t last an hour in the dark in your own house.

War has always been the solution. War has always solved all the problems. You reduce the number of mouths to feed. Everybody’s got a job. Instincts are reinvigorated. That’s why there’s continuous war. When man actually lit the first fire and figured out how flame works, he said, “Now who can we go burn?” And the world is getting smallerat an amazing pace, no question, because of technology . We’re losing the ability to think. Do we need the ability to think? Right now, yes, but we may not need the ability to think in 40 years’ time. Once technology is perfected, you may not have to think for yourself. If you’re in a car that drives itself to work on a GPS and your grandkids are going to the moon for a weekend vacation . . .

BB: So why do a growing number of people still think they need to learn to shoot?
LA: Because the gun still represents the equality of power. Whether it’s a little old lady from Pasadena or a muscle man, with a gun they can deliver equal power from a distance, whether 6 feet or 60 yards. Some people are realizing the glory days are gone. The world is pretty much hell-bent for destruction. We’re in for a worldwide religious war from hell that is going to make the other world wars look like Sunday picnics. Right now you have laws: you can’t carry a gun here, you can’t do this there, you can’t spit on the sidewalk. These may be fine in a peaceful society. But when you’ve got a society that’s gone mad, worldwide, the law of the jungle supersedes all other laws.

Look at the year 2000, when the world was supposed to be coming to an end. It could have, for all that I knew. You had people hoarding stuff and then standing on the TV smiling at the camera and pointing to their house with their address on the front door. Proudly displaying their two years' worth of life-saving food and water when they’re not capable of lasting two hours in their own house with the lights off. That’s part of what it is, buying something material like a gun as a symbolic way of protecting themselves.

BB: Are pop culture and the mass media leading this or following it?
LA: I think it’s self-feeding. When I first came out here there were all the standing jokes about the National Enquirer, but the national media is pretty much the same as the National Enquirer now. The media is a lot to blame, but if people are going to blame the media and it’s self-feeding and you’re going to buy this to read it, of course they’re going to give you what you want. If there’s no market, there’s no seller. It’s like drugs. You can bomb Colombia till it’s a parking lot, but if you don’t stop the person in Phoenix, Arizona, from snorting the stuff up his nose there will be a market. Somebody will make the stuff. If the person in Phoenix doesn’t snort the stuff up his nose there is no market, there is no point in manufacturing it because you can’t sell it because nobody wants it. It’s as plain and simple as that. Supply and demand.

BB: You wouldn’t think this country would have got so soft so quickly, would you?
LA: You would and you wouldn’t. Something like 9-11, yeah it’s a tragedy, but it’s not like this is the first time something like this has ever happened in the history of the world. People over here wonder why somebody sitting in South Africa or Germany may ask, well, what have we been saying for 30 years? What are you getting so excited about? It’s a tragedy, absolutely it’s a tragedy, but all of the sudden now it’s a worldwide problem. It’s been a worldwide problem for 30 or 40 years. Everybody’s been telling us that, but it’s been so warm and cozy here. Now we say we’ve got to do something about it, we need to call somebody. I have a buddy in California whose daughter’s boyfriend just got suspended from school. In California it’s a big deal to get suspended from school. With all their political correctness, you’ve just about got to murder somebody. This kid is a really good kid. By today’s standards, it’s almost bizarre what a good kid he is. The reason he was suspended is because he grabbed another kid by the shoulder and told him to cut it out because that kid was walking around the school grabbing girls’ boobs from behind. So, for doing what clearly needed to be done, he was suspended.

I love dogs, but if one comes here and he’s jumping at me with all his teeth showing and white foam around his mouth, he hasn’t just been brushing his teeth with Crest. He’s rabid. As much as I love dogs, I’m going to have to kill him. The problem is people standing there saying, “Maybe he’s just a clever dog who can brush his own teeth and forgot to rinse his mouth.” And then they’ll start discussing 15 brands of toothpaste. They just miss the point entirely.

BB: You’re the only guy I know who carries both a 1911 and a Glock.
LA: I’ve got my reasons. The 1911 was made as a fighting weapon, and it works. I don’t want extraneous levers and things on my weapons. The little Glock 19 I carry as a backup works too. Your so-called backup gun is really an alternate weapon because you may not be able to get to the primary. Using different weapons is just mind-set. I’ve always carried a 1911 as my primary weapon, and I used to run a .44 Special revolver as backup until I changed to the Glock. I firmly believe a .45 is better than a .44 1/2, and I think a Tomcat fighter jet is better than a shotgun. Unfortunately, I can’t get a Tomcat or a shotgun in a holster, so rule number one is to hit your target. It does no good to miss the target, but people are missing. The .45’s been out for 150 years if you include the British Webleys. They’ve always got the job done.

The sorry truth is, my brother got killed with one round from a .32 S&W revolver. Stone dead. It hit him in the head, and he’s dead. No matter what you carry, your primary objective is hitting the target. You cannot turn a handgun into a big-game rifle; I don’t care what you do to it. And if you did, it would be unmanageable in a gunfight. So people are not hitting the target, and it comes back to training.

I’ve got a problem with flat targets, nonrepresentative street or battle targets. We’re talking about shooting people, and if the target is an 18 x 30-inch piece of flat paper, this has nothing to do with reality. All males from the shoulder line to the waist are the same height, whether it’s me or a basketball player. And from nipple to nipple they’re all nine inches wide. So in a full frontal shot, if you’re out nine inches you’ve got nothing. And if people are going to be kind enough to stand like that, why are you shooting them? They’re probably twisted in like this with an AK or a blade and you’re down to three or four inches of target.

But you’ve got to start somewhere. If you’ve got a neophyte you’ve got to teach him the basics. The problem is, what is an advanced gunfight? There is no advanced gunfight. I’m running with curved targets, graphic targets, angled this way and that and everything else. But you’ve got to start somebody off with flat paper, explain this is the trigger, these are the sights, this is the follow-through, get him to shoot a group on a piece of paper. You can get an organ grinder’s monkey to shoot a group on a piece of paper; he can take his paw and pull the trigger back, and he can shoot accurately. That’s all there is to it. Has this got anything to do with shooting people, when the target is that big and three feet away from you and is about to turn you into a little brown shit spot on the ground?

People are very, very hard to hit because a lot of shooters cannot transpose the angles of a biped as opposed to a quadruped. You were talking about dangerous game earlier on. What comes at you like a human? Maybe a polar bear, that’s about it. Everything else runs on four legs, but a human is usually on his hind paws most of the time when you have this problem. People have trouble transposing this concept into a vertical instead of a horizontal problem. I bend one piece of cardboard, splice it with another, and then staple a target over that, then I angle them some way or twist them or turn them. Now you’ve got to start thinking about going into the rib cage, side of the head, simulating a flight on stairs. If the guy is lying in a bed, say the head’s facing you and the feet are away, you have to go in real high, because if you shoot at the chest and miss by five degrees you’re going to miss him entirely.

BB: Do you teach outside the States much these days?
LA: Not a lot. I go to Switzerland next year. I won’t do South America, and there are some very good people in South America. The problem is, I live in the United States, and the United States vacillates every four or five years between friend and enemy, and I do not want to be Ollie North four years later. I’ll do Switzerland next year, but I can’t remember the last time we had a war with Switzerland.

Plus my schedule. I’m 56 years old, and I’m still running 10 1/2 or 11 months of the year flat out on the road. Since I last talked to you a few weeks ago I’ve been in practically every town in California. Do I need to go on a world tour right now? No. Plus the airlines are a pain in the rear. To fly to Germany for a three-day class and have to deal with the hassles of international customs and the airlines is not worth it.

And I don’t like working without my own target systems. I do not run with flat targets after the first day of the class. You can’t correlate them to a human antagonist problem. Nobody looks like a nonmoving IPSC target. Nobody. With all due deference to Mr. Pepper, I don’t use Pepper poppers because they’re too easy. The full-size Pepper popper is 42 inches high and pretty wide. You can hit it in the knees or the top of the skull, and it falls over. They’re too easy to hit. I’d rather use irregularly shaped steel. Not square. If you take a steel target that’s 10 inches square, do you think that if it were 10 inches in diameter circular, the same amount of people would hit it the same amount of times? The last time I saw square people, they were all dead.

I made a decision when I started training, from all the people from whom I’d learned and the one or two things I’d seen in my life, that range targets were not representative of the street. That’s the first thing I changed. I use humanoid targets (or, as I was told in California, you’ve got to use the word anthropomorphic) with lateral angles, irregular three-dimensional shapes with erratic movement. I soon found out that people who could shoot great groups at 20 yards would miss these at 10 feet with shots going all over the place. A hundred years ago, nobody missed. Because they had one round for the family’s musket and Daddy told you to get your 12-year-old butt out there and go fetch lunch, and if you came back without lunch, where’s the ball and where’s the powder? Jeff Cooper rehammered this into people’s heads, he’s still doing it, and I don’t think enough credit is being given to him. That annoys me. Everything I know that my dad didn’t teach me, Jeff Cooper did. They were my two mentors. Jeff’s definition of a marksman is somebody who can hit his target, whatever that target may be, on demand, right now. I think there’s too much emphasis placed on the gun, the caliber, and this, that, and the other thing.

BB: What are you going to do when you retire?
LA: I will probably not retire. And if I did, I would stay in some aspect of the game. I’ve got a metabolism from hell, I can run 24 hours a day, and I’m quick for my age, though I obviously don’t have my 22-year-old reactions. I’ll know it before anybody else, but when my reactions slow down to where I miss your hand when I’m grabbing for it, I’ll quit the next day because I’d be running an unsafe range. I don’t want to sound supercilious, but I’m getting like the humble martial artist who finally realizes that he needs another 400 years of this. I’m at base level—I’ve finally got a little bit of knowledge; now I’ve got to start climbing the tree.

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