You Will Shoot Your Eye Out

In my decades on masthead staff at GUNS magazine, I’ve been privileged to work with many fine editors and, to my great and enduring relief, no bad ones. One of those editors was Jerry Lee, who went on to become an editor for Petersen Publishing and then (and now) editor of Gun Digest. He was in the second of those positions when he asked me to write an article that wound up titled, “Ayoob’s Laws.”

It began kinda like this: “Ayoob’s Law No. 1: Be able to predict where the attack will come, and have a proven counter-attack already in place and poised for launch. Ayoob’s Law No. 2: Anyone arrogant enough to name laws after himself is arrogant enough to number them arbitrarily.”

And, somewhere in there, was “Ayoob’s Law of Necessary Hypocrisy.”

Ayoob’s Law of Necessary Hypocrisy holds thus… We will tell you: Do not do this thing! It is incredibly (expletive deleted) stupid. However, we realize you might be in a situation where you say “You ain’t where I am and I have to do this!” Therefore, it is our responsibility to show you the least incredibly (expletive deleted) stupid way of doing this incredibly (expletive deleted) stupid thing.

Mas demonstrates a handcuffing technique. Not usually taught to civilians, but…

Example

I began training police in 1972 and law-abiding armed citizens in 1981. From the beginning of the latter endeavor, I taught private citizens the many reasons why they should never attempt to close in with a criminal suspect they were holding at gunpoint and attempt to disarm and handcuff him or tie him up. (Any experienced cop or corrections professional reading this knows the reasons why.) But, by the late 1980’s, in advanced classes I was teaching armed citizens one handcuffing technique.

Why? Two reasons. One was I had students who spent time in places so remote they had no communications that could reach the police, and had bought handcuffs for such purposes. The other was that I discovered the kind of people who would take my classes at Lethal Force Institute then, or Massad Ayoob Group now, were the kind of people who would come out of the crowd and help an embattled cop who was losing a fight on the street.

Micro .380’s like the Ruger LCP (above) aren’t ideal “man-stoppers,” but are
often the only compromise the armed citizen can make work. A J-frame revolver
like this S&W 340 M&P .357 Mag (below) has ample power, but requires training
commitment for hit potential and recoil control.

Applied to the Gun

How does the Law of Necessary Hypocrisy apply to defensive handguns? One example: I’m the guy who coined the phrase “friends don’t let friends carry mouse-guns,” and I personally don’t care to carry a .380; the best .38 Special and 9mm hollowpoints are my personal baseline minimum.

However, I work for myself and can dress how I like. The only environments in my life where I have to wear mandated clothing are part-time police work, where I’m expected to openly carry the department-issued .45, and court appearances, where most of my suits are tailored to hide a full-sized handgun that’s generally secured in a courthouse gun locker before I step into the courtroom anyway.

But I recognize a lot of people have more restrictive dress codes in “non-permissive environments,” and if someone has a choice of carrying a tiny Ruger LCP or equivalent .380 or nothing at all, I’d really rather they have that on their person than a .45 at home in the dresser when they’re attacked on the street.

The saying among those who study the history of gunfighting is absolutely true: “I’ve never met a gunfight survivor who wished he’d had a less powerful gun or less immediately-available ammunition.” That said, though, I don’t usually participate in Internet threads about “How much is enough?” There seems to be a meme on the gun-related Internet that says, “Those who carry more than I do are paranoid, and those who carry less than I do are pathetic ‘sheeple.’” I don’t buy that. As I write this I’m wearing a so-called “high capacity” 9mm pistol and spare magazine, and a backup J-frame S&W with 5 rounds of .38 +P and Speed Strip with 5 more. (It’s not hard with some thought, some ingenuity, and of course, habituation.) An adult lifetime of studying gunfights has taught me that with round count, “it is better to have and not need, than to need and not have.” Still, I recognize that my much younger self with the 5-shot Chief Special and no spare ammo was a heckuva lot safer than someone who had no gun at all, as that younger self learned on a dark and icy night by a dark and icy river in New England in 1971.
Which may be why my much older self is alive to discuss the matter in the year 2014.

Ayoob’s Law of Necessary Hypocrisy is one I invoke as little as possible. It should be taken in context with three other of Ayoob’s Laws.

1.) “Those who demand all or nothing generally end up with…nothing.”
2.) “Nothing is everything, but everything is something.” And, finally, a law someone invoked long before I did:
3.) “Something is better than nothing.”
By Massad Ayoob
Photos By Gail Pepin

“There,” I yelled triumphantly as I stabbed the “send” button. “Take your damn high tech cyber-pictures, Huntington!” I had just e-mailed my first column with digital photos to the editor. He told me I was the last of the Handgunner staff writers to give up our faithful old friend, 35mm film. I felt like the last dinosaur to leave Jurassic Park Island.

A couple thousand New York City cops know exactly how I feel.

When a cop draws this Ruger SP101, he knows it will go bang every time.

A Wheelgun Patina

According to New York Times story at the time, that’s how many of the city’s Finest were still packing .38 Special revolvers as primary duty weapons. They stood out among the more than 30,000 officers there, most of whom wear DAO 9mm autos to work. More, of course, are using small .38s for backup and off-duty carry. The commissioner, an old head himself, packs a Colt Detective Special in his ankle holster.

When I was a young cop, we saw the occasional old constable or deputy who still wore a single action, sometimes an antique Peacemaker, sometimes a Ruger Blackhawk. We snickered politely but cruelly. Hell, even Barney Fife had a double action Colt Official Police. That’s the way these cops are being treated now by some who spot their old “police specials.” One related that during a planning session with the Feds before the Republican convention, they noticed the .38 on his plainclothes belt and all wanted to see it. It was, he said, as if he had been carrying a flintlock.

Others reported the gun gave them a more positive aura insome circles, more of a patina. They would hear, “Wow, you must have some years on,” when people observed the revolver in their uniform holster. Or, “You must be gettin’ close to retirement, huh?” Well, being in the same age group, I suppose that’s better than hearing, “What kind of a geezer are you, old timer?”

The old harness bulls themselves explained to the Times reporter why they carried the “old-fashioned” guns. They had seen 9mms jam on their range, but it was well-known institutional history in the department that no revolver had ever malfunctioned in the hands of an NYPD officer in a gunfight. Revolver or auto, they had been taught in refresher training that the average shootout in the city was over in five rounds or less.

Some 2,000 4″ service revolvers, like this M&P, are still in duty
holsters on New York City streets.

Faithful Old Friends

In ancient times when people like me were fighting to get autos instead of revolvers for police duty, we kept hearing the phrase,
“Our faithful old friend, the revolver.” Today, we have a generation of cops who’ve never held a revolver unless they confiscated it from a suspect. In 1972, the first job the chief gave me was to show our officers how to safely unload the automatics they were taking off the street. Now, I have lived long enough to hear a young patrolman ask his supervisor, “Hey, Sarge, how do I open this revolver to unload it?”

The revolver was a faithful friend and still is. Some departments, including mine, still issue small revolvers for backup. I know a cop who has shot ten or so people in the line of duty. He thinks a .38 Special revolver is all a policeman really needs. At work, he wears the department issue Glock 17 with 18 rounds of 9mm; off duty, he clips inside his waistband a 1950 vintage 2″ S&W M&P.38. You tell him he doesn’t have enough bullets. I’ll wait for you here.

A cop who works near where I live dropped by my place today to ask a question, in uniform and wearing his department-standard Glock 21. “I shoot this okay, and it’s never jammed on me,” he said, gesturing at his 14-shot .45 auto. “But I carried the wheel-gun for so long, and I just won the Stock Service Revolver class at the IDPA match, and I’d just feel better with my Smith 625 and about four
spare .45 moon clips. The sheriff says it’s okay. You think I should?”

Before I told him it was a decision only he could ultimately make, a thought ran through my mind: maybe the 21st Century is a time for a return to the old values. One thing is clear, though. Coposaurus-Rex is not extinct. He walks among us even as we speak. And it’s probably not wise to mess with him.