FEATURED AUTHOR
GABRIEL SUAREZ

I was born in Cuba right after Castro and his boys took over the place. My dad went from being a rich businessman to nothing in one afternoon. Luckily, he was able to bring our family out and start again in the United States. I guess this fueled my desire for personal freedom and self-reliance, which eventually drove me toward the martial arts and the gun. With self-reliance comes a much greater degree of individual freedom than you have when you are depending on the powers that be for things. So many Americans today spend a great deal of time and effort discussing the importance of freedom, when all they really want is for someone to take care of them--feed them, protect them, and so on. Ask them to tell you what freedom really is, and they’ll stand around scratching their heads. They’re willing to give up all their God-given rights recognized in the Constitution so they can be free from the responsibilities of freedom. Maybe folks like that should live in Cuba for a week. I think they’d return with a very different perspective on things.

I began training in Kyokushinkai karate in 1970 at the Burbank, California, YMCA. This was great stuff for a skinny 10-year-old kid. This training wasn't like much of what you see in today’s black belt mills; it gave me an appreciation for the dynamics of conflict and made me accustomed to physical violence. If students are physically able, I recommend getting some reality-based martial arts training as a basis for the overall package. Adding the gun seems a natural progression. It’s much easier to teach gunfighting to a reality martial arts fighter than it is to teach a marksman how to fight. My early training taught me how to really give and take punishment--no pads, no mouthpieces, no nothing. I stayed with this ultrahard style for many years and got up to 3rd dan. The 3rd dan test was something else: Mas Oyama, founder of Kuokushinkai karate, was visiting the United States and sat in on a portion of it. Talk about pressure! We did so many kata that we had blisters on blisters. We had to run five miles barefoot, swim one mile, bench-press our body weight, and fight until we couldn't fight any more. Then, of course, came board and brick breaking. On cold days I still have pain in my hands from those days.

A few years after I achieved 3rd dan, I got restless. This period was a sort of martial smorgasboard for me. I trained with boxers, wrestlers, jujitsu guys, kali guys, and anyone who had something interesting. I carried that eclecticism with me when I opened my first school in 1983. We taught a mix of what I'd learned and had an open training day when we would basically beat the hell out of each other for several hours and then go eat pizza and have a few beers at the Pizza Hut. I don't know that you could do that today with all the liability concerns. We had an urgent care medical center in the same parking lot, and if someone lost a tooth or broke a bone, we'd send 'em on over. It was a classic hall of fighting, and it smelled like sweat and blood and pain. I still smile thinking about those days.

I'd never have admitted this before, but one of the reasons I went into police work was because I wanted to test myself against the bad guys. I'd been training for 16 years at that point, and I had this big question in my heart that I needed to answer: How would I do? How would my training and skills hold up? (It’s funny to think back, but many of my black belts went on to law enforcement shortly after I did.)

To answer that question I applied and was accepted to Los Angeles County Sheriff's Academy back in 1986. A few months later, I got into a fight with a really big bad guy and did what came naturally: I reverse-punched him six or seven times. It worked . . . sort of, but then I looked at my hands. I'd punched him in the mouth, and my hands were cut up. This was in the era when AIDS was becoming a concern. So there I was, standing around looking at these bloody makiwara-trained knuckles, wondering if I've just gotten some sort of creeping crud. Luckily, I was OK, but the experience got me to start evaluating things that I'd never thought of before.

Since then, I've always taken a very pragmatic approach to any fighting concept or method, whether it involves guns, knives, or fists. This hasn't endeared me to traditional trainers in the gun world (I think there's got to be a Gabe Hater’s Club out there somewhere), but I question everything. You have to do this. Doctors are not the only ones who bury their mistakes.
As for the firearms side of the package, I was largely self-taught up to the point when I entered law enforcement. Then my credentials opened lots of doors for training, so I took every opportunity to learn. I'll be painfully honest--most police shooting schools are trash and are more concerned with teaching tolerance and politically correct shooting than gunfighting. When the cops want to learn gunfighting, they go to the civilian schools. The state of the art resides in the private sector.

My turning point came when I went to train with Jeff Cooper at Gunsite Academy in 1989. Jeff is a true warrior, and he helped me to codify what was the correct mental attitude in a fight. Police schools make people think they are going to go to pieces and start crying, and such, in a gunfight. Cooper taught that this was not so and gave us alternatives to the commonly held notions. “Getting my mind right” was my primary focus in those days, and much of what I’ve learned since then is written in my new book, The Combative Perspective (Paladin Press, September 2003).
Shortly after training with Jeff for the first time, I had to put what I’d learned to the test. There was a guy on the beach shooting at people one evening. This was back in the days when you were responsible for half the city, and the other guy working that night was responsible for the other half. There was no mutual aid or anything; you just took care of business. So I did. When first contact was made, the bad guy tried to bring his Beretta pistol up and shoot me. He wasn’t fast enough, and I shot him before he could bring his weapon into action. The whole event took less time than it took you to read this sentence, but due to my training and focus, I never lost control of what was going on around me. My mind was “right.” The striking thing was that it was so much like training that I felt almost like, "Is this it? Is this all there is to it?" The suspect died soon after being transported to the emergency room.

I trained with Jeff a few more times. We became good friends, and I learned more in the conversations I had at his house than in all the police schools I attended put together. I still credit him with pointing me in the right direction in terms of marksmanship, but I do not teach or train his methodology any longer. Unwittingly through the years, I was blending the martial arts concepts and the gun, but that would only become evident to me later when I began to write the training curriculum for one of the courses I teach, Close-Range Gunfighting.

It was Jeff who got me writing. I was concerned about writing things that didn’t go along with the current tactical thinking. Jeff convinced me to simply write what I knew and not worry about what the keyboard gunfighters would think. I’m glad I took that advice.

Today the training I offer is a concepts-based, aggressive approach to gunfighting. I’ve taught this system all over the United States, as well as in Europe, Central America, and Africa. The training involves some range work, but it also incorporates hand-to-hand combat and a good bit of interactive training (force-on-force). This eclectic method of training makes some traditional shooting teachers very uncomfortable, but progress sometimes does that to people. I’m not so concerned with fitting into a certain methodology as I am with accomplishing the mission of winning the fight.

Suarez International recently moved from California to a charming little plot of land in the Arizona wilderness. The demand for our training has skyrocketed. I'm also continuing my traveling courses. My 2004 course schedule is already booked solid, and I'm receiving solicitations for training for 2005 and 2006. I'm working on expanding my crew and adding instructors. I still do the bulk of instruction, but there are some public- and private-sector projects that we are involved in overseas and here in the United States that will likely take up a greater slice of my time in the coming years. We've established training academies in Spain and Costa Rica, and we're working on a couple of other regions as well. We also have agreements with a very large overseas company for the training of several elite presidential-level protective teams for deployment to “troubled places.” Having just published my sixth book, The Combative Perspective, I am working on another volume as we speak. So you could say I'm keeping busy.

Q & A

Paladin: What motivated you to write The Combative Perspective?
GS: I’d written volumes on the mechanics of shooting pistols, shotguns, and rifles, as well as tactics, but nothing on how to prepare the mind. This mental prep business is the most important thing of all, and I wanted to get my thoughts on paper for my readers.

Paladin: How would you compare it to Jeff Cooper's classic Principles of Personal Defense?
GS: Jeff's book is a classic and should be in everybody's library, but it is very general. I think The Combative Perspective is much more specific to our times with regard to the problems faced by a 21st century combatant. The concerns in 1950, 1960, and even 1970 were different from what any one of us may face today. I suspect, for example, that in 1975, few were worried about what they'd say to an investigating officer after a shooting. That is a great point of discussion today, as a few poorly chosen words can turn a good shooting into a bad one.

Paladin: You've been involved in a number of, shall we say . . . critical incidents. What is the most important thing you learned from your experience?
GS: I learned that training is essential. The man who trains and prepares will do well. If he leaves things to chance with little or no preparation, who knows? Similarly important is the matter of mental attitude, or perspective. The marksmanship problems I faced were not difficult from a "range" perspective. Having the mental edge was what allowed me to prevail. (That and a few other things—such as my faith in Christ.)

Paladin: You were a long-time police officer in Southern California, yet your views on some controversial issues, such as civilian gun ownership, often ran contrary to the party line. Why was that?
GS: Because I've always been a free thinker and always spoke my mind, even to the detriment of my career. There are some police officers who develop an arrogant attitude that they are somehow better than the public that pays their salary. They begin to cultivate a true "us and them" perspective, distrusting anyone who is not a police officer. This leads right to the attitude that only police officers should have guns because mere civilians cannot be trusted. In any case, it’s wrong. I never went along with it. I never forgot that, regardless of the uniform, "once a civilian, eventually a civilian again." I remember during the riots of '92 I came across a storeowner who was standing post with an unloaded shotgun inside his TV store. The gun stores had been closed, so "mere civilians" could not get any ammo. I gave the man a box of buckshot in case he needed it to protect himself or his property against the savages. It’s not about police protection; it’s about personal freedom and the ability to protect yourself.

Paladin: What is your view on concealed-carry permits?
GS: We should not need them. Any good guy should be able to stick a pistol in a pocket and go for a walk anywhere in the country without being harassed. Period. Nonetheless, except in truly free states, you won't get that. Concealed-carry weapon (CCW) permits are the next best thing. At present almost all states have a state permit. In fact, I think there are only a handful of states that do not trust their citizens this way. Eventually, all states (except maybe New York and California) will have state-issued permits that are recognized by all other states. It’s the wave of the future. As far as the social effects of all this, I think that the proliferation of CCW permits is what has caused crime to drop in the last few years. Tell a hoodlum that there's a million bucks in a house but that there are three armed guys there ready to shoot anyone who goes in, and see the hoodlum pick another house.

Paladin: You say that "traditional" firearm trainers take issue with your teachings. Which specific concepts or techniques do they disapprove of and why?
GS: Well, you have a group of established teachers and schools stating that you must use their methods because they are the best and nobody else has any answers. They say you must shoot this special $2,000 pistol; stand this special, school-approved way; use this approved technique; and so on. Then I come along and kick their food bowl all the way out of the house by saying, “Shoot any kind of gun you want, don't stand but move—and move like you are going to fight. Integrate hand-to-hand combat and the gun, and use whatever technique works for you.” To the student it is liberating; to the traditional trainer it’s a nightmare of questions.

Paladin: You criticize police shooting practices as too "politically correct." What do you mean by that?
GS: The majority of officially sanctioned police schools that I have attended, whose course outlines I've read, or whose students I've trained, do not focus on the same type of material you'd get at a private-sector training event. And that includes many industry-sponsored schools as well. Oftentimes, their overall focus is to make cops so afraid of the repercussions of shooting anyone that they are almost afraid to take their guns to work. In one class, the training cadre was made up of Internal Affairs investigators! And that was a tactics class. I had one administrator (who was prominent in training cops and now is a vice-chief in Southern California) tell me, "It’s not about enforcement; it’s about perception." I laugh when some trainer advertises his class as “for police only,” as if that phrase somehow makes the class more advanced or the topics more "deadly." Rubbish. The state of the art resides in the private sector salles d'armes, the unofficial shooting schools.

Paladin: Are there any police departments that offer effective firearms training?
GS: I'm sure there are. I've worked with DEA, for example, and their shooters are very good. Some of the Federal Air Marshall trainers who have attended our Close Range Gunfighting courses are exceptional. And I have lots of police officers come to my training courses who are fantastic shots. But they are that way because of personal effort, not because of their department.

Paladin: What are your recommendations for serious self-defense handguns these days?
GS: Well, I still carry my Glock 22 in .40 caliber. This is one area where I usually get hate mail because I don't tell everyone to go out and buy a custom 1911 and load it with hardball. I got accustomed to Glock, and now that I can carry anything I want, I stay with it. The most important things are that the gun has to be comfortable in your hand, and it has to be in a caliber you can control. You don't need a $5,000 gun when you can do just as well with a Glock or Walther 9mm. The issue of modifying the guns is not such a point of concern now as it was in the past, since most serious weapons already come with suitable sights, triggers, and so on.

Paladin: Do you still train in the martial arts?
GS: Yes, we have a special study group in my area that meets regularly for training and study. I also work out regularly, and I integrate everything in training--guns, knives, sticks, fists, and so on.

Paladin: Do you believe that all police departments should employ martial-arts-trained instructors for close-quarter combat training?
GS: Yes, but beyond that I believe police departments should hire the right people. If they hire the right people they won't need to train them in martial arts because they will already have that skill.

Paladin: Have you seen the attitudes of Americans change toward freedom and its protection since 9/11?
GS: Yes, absolutely. Among those in the martial community (that is, gun owners and martial artists), there is a great concern over these issues. More and more Americans realize that true homeland security begins with them. Yet there are many others who turn their backs on their duty and freedom and instead want to give up every grain of freedom they have out of fear. When the first terrorist tries something, there will be no time to call 911 or duck and cover with your duct tape in hand. There will only be time for willing and able civilians to put a stop to it . . . with gusto and conviction.

Paladin: What do you consider to be the greatest threat to freedom in America today?
GS: The desire for the illusion of safety.

THE COMBATIVE PERSPECTIVE
The Thinking Man's Guide to Self-Defense