Louis Awerbuck: Interview With a Madman

[DaveM55]

http://www.louisawerbuckinterviewwit....blogspot.com/

Jeff Cooper once told me that he considers Awerbuck one of the top half-dozen firearms instructors in the world.
Cooper helped Awerbuck immigrate to the U.S. from his native South Africa 25 years ago, and he has been instructing high-level firearms classes full-time ever since. Awerbuck teaches at major firearms training centers around the country under the auspices of his own Yavapai Firearms Academy.

After spending a recent week watching Awerbuck work during a defensive pistol class at Gunsite, I wanted to get him off the range for a few hours and ask him some questions. We met for dinner a few miles from Gunsite at the Little Thumb Butte Bed & Breakfast, a favorite retreat for Gunsite students, where owner/hostess Ann Harrington served us a wonderful home-cooked meal on a private balcony overlooking endless juniper-dotted hills with a river running through them.

Among his other personality attributes, Awerbuck is a very humble guy. If there is a gulf between the way he thinks and the behavior and attitude of society in general, Awerbuck is willing to admit that maybe he’s the one that’s crazy. From what I’ve seen, however, it’s clearly the other way around.

I asked him what the toughest thing was about teaching people to shoot.

“For beginners, probably realizing it’s easier than they think it is. They tend to overthink the problem. For experienced people, trying to correct ingrained habits they’ve had for years. That’s much harder.”

Q: A lot of guys can teach the mechanics of shooting, which is fairly simple, don’t you think?

A: 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 103 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.

Q: I just read your book, Tactical Reality (Paladin Press 1999), and you talk a lot about that. I especially liked your chapters dealing with heart and mind. That’s a pretty deep subject.

A: 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 mindset as the Samurai, the Ninja, Genghis Kahn, the Romans, the Greeks, the Spanish, you can just keep on going back through the ages. It was always the same thing.

Q: Why do some people not get it?

A: Some of the people who don’t get it are highly professional, skilled 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. 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.

Q: What do the non-warriors do when they get in trouble?

A: 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.

Q: A lot of instructors have told me that their toughest problem is that something like eighty percent of people are not capable of shooting somebody.

A: Not looking into their faces, looking into their eyes from six feet away and doing it. A lot of people will go out and shoot Bambi in the Coconino Forest and not think twice about it but couldn’t bring themselves to do it to a human, who just happens to be an animal walking on his back legs.

Q: Do you see any parallels between defensive pistol shooting and dangerous-game hunting?

A: 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.

Q: But I’m talking about dangerous game. The hunter is not afraid of Bambi.

A: 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 bogey man.

Q: 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?

A: 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 ribcage, 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.

If it’s the same incident, it wasn’t a case of buck fever. The thing is, in a gunfight you don’t know what you’ve done afterwards, retrospectively. You think you know what you’ve done, and you’ll backtrack everything to the premise to which you want to backtrack it.

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 thirty feet -– you are going to convince yourself that you point-shot that round. You may have used sighted fire. You don’t know.

Colonel 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 in a fight who never press the trigger, run the slide, never press the trigger, run the slide and jack out eight or fourteen 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 does somebody go out there and shoot ten rounds and miss after forty 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 don’t 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 fourteen-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 fourteen-year-old females will turn out amazing pistol shooters. They don’t have an ego, they haven’t got the prior mistakes, so they don’t know how to miss.

Q: 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?

A: 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 Hathcock called “getting in the bubble.”

Jeff [Cooper]’s “Flying M” (a man-on-man shootoff drill) is still being used today. I don’t know when he first used it, but I’ve been with him twenty-five years so I know it’s been around a quarter century. Every Friday afternoon in a 250 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 ninety-five 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’s a piece of metal. How many times are you going to let a two-pound piece of metal and plastic outwit you? We’re not talking about flying a Tomcat here, this is not brain surgery. But it is psychology.

Q: Do you still get a kick out of instructing?

A: 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. 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 ten years.

Q: Why the last ten years especially?

A: 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. You look at instructor resumes, and they’ve taken all the classes, but what have they done? They’ve taken everybody else’s lesson plans and put them into a program of their own and they’re teaching it like a parrot.

Q: There’s definitely a proliferation of so-called firearms academies, some of them run by IPSC guys who win a couple of titles and open a school.

A: 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 a 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.

continued at link... A long but very good read

[arjohnson]

Good read, what I take from that is that some things you can not teach people, no matter what kind of training or tactics you learn, can and will you use it when your life is at stake is the key.

If I ever take a class this is the guy I would like go to.

[Shawn.L]

great read.

[Orive 8]

Back in the late 90's our instructor's association brought up Mr. Awerbuck for a shotgun training session. Top notch training; very, very good instructor, I am glad that I had the chance to attend.

I have three of his books: Hit or Myth, The Defensive Shotgun: Techniques and Tactics, and Tactical Reality "An Uncommon Look at Common-Sense Firearms Training and Tactics.

All three are worthwhile reads.

[TonyF]

Jeff Cooper once told me that he considers Awerbuck one of the top half-dozen firearms instructors in the world.

Fuck Awerbuck.

What could anyone possibly learn from an instructor with a Modern Technique background?

Yes I'm being facetious. I'm MT too.

[DaveM55]

Fuck Awerbuck.

What could anyone possibly learn from an instructor with a Modern Technique background?

Yes I'm being facetious. I'm MT too.

Exactly why taking a course with the FIRE institute is high on my list.

[dgg9]

What could anyone possibly learn from an instructor with a Modern Technique background?

I hope to find out -- he's on my short list of guys to seek out.

[Yoder]

Once sentence out of the whole interview really made me think:

"The bottom line is, you cannot put pressure on me if I don’t allow you to do it."

I always screw up at IDPA shoots and it's because I put pressure on myself to shoot as fast as possible. If I would ignore the fact I was at a shoot I would probably shoot 10x better. Not that IDPA has anything to do with tactical training but it does put you under pressure if you let it.

[Shawn.L]

PAFOA Road Trip anyone

All Shooters:

We start off the new year and new training dates for Louis Awerbuck and Yavapai Firearms Academy, Ltd. (YFA) courses at Pat Goodale's excellent tactical Anvil Rock Range near Lewisburg, WV. These courses were selected from the responses received from you based on the preponderance of your requests a couple of months ago.

These are not "shooting courses" rather they are "defensive fighting courses" with a firearm utilizing the combat triad-marksmanship, gun-handling and tactics/tactical mindset.

GENERAL INFORMATION. The course fees and deposits remain the same this year as were in place in 2009. The 3-day formatted class will be $550 with a $325 advanced deposit 45 days before the class start per participant. For more specific information on the fees, deposits and forfeiture of deposits policy, please see http://www.yfainc.com/fee.html. All courses will begin about 8:30 AM on Day 1 in the range classroom and conclude about 4:00 PM on Day 3 on the range with a final drill encompassing all techniques taught during the class.

The Lewisburg, WV area is nice and pleasant and the better motel accommodations fill early. Many of us choose to stay at the Dawson Inn-not in town located some miles out of town off Interstate 64, but there are many nice places in Lewisburg that are equally convenient. See http://greenbrierwv.com/ for area information.

2010 YFA COURSES in WV:

June 4-6, 2010 YFA Tactical Handgun-Stage II (FRI-SAT-SUN)
As an "advanced" course of instruction, YFA Stage I Handgun-or the equivalent-is a prerequisite. There are many courses from instructor's other than Awerbuck that fulfill this requirement. The course provides more shooting and round expenditure than most of the YFA classes along with new drills and techniques..

Ammunition requirement is 800 rounds for primary handgun and 150 for back up handgun (if you have trained with a back up previously). The back up is not required but highly desirable.

September 10-12, 2010 YFA Tactical Handgun-Stage I (FRI-SAT-SUN)
Ammunition requirement is 500 rounds for your primary and 50 rounds for your back up. No prior instruction is necessary and introduces the participant to the Awerbuck version of the Modern Technique, see http://www.frfrogspad.com/modtech.htm. This class is geared to train in the carry of two handguns-a primary and a back up. Back ups are not required but you are encouraged to take the opportunity to train with a back up. This will be our last Stage I handgun in WV for a few years.

Stage I Handgun, or the equivalent, is a prerequisite for all Stage II classes and all rifle and shotgun classes where transitions utilized. It is the primer for most tactical shooting under Louis Awerbuck and it is a good stand alone class for one who wishes the basics in self defense with a handgun.

COURSE EQUIPMENT:

I am attaching a source document (see above) of reliable equipment providers for your information. You will need for either class above reliable firearms, holster(s), sturdy belt, 3 spare magazines/speed strips and at least one pouch/means of carrying spare ammo magazines plus eye and ear protection.

Range Fees:

The Anvil Rock Range near Lewisburg, WV, is a range specifically designed for tactical shooting by Pat Goodale, a veteran USMC special operator and first class instructor with extensive real world experience. See www.pgpft.com The range charges a range fee of $25 per day to use this excellent facility for the YFA courses. We are fortunate to have this facility for the training.

ADMINISTRATION

This is not a request for deposits at this time, and I will send out more class information and an application with a return date about 12 weeks before each course start.

In 2011 and probably 2012, we will likely schedule only Stage II classes and HITT courses all requiring some prior training, some requiring prior Awerbuck training.

You are reminded to acquire your ammunition early especially since none of us can predict when the next shortage will hit. Get your ammunition as you can as early as possible.

See the YFA website at www.yfainc.com for more information, course descriptions and the schedule page for course offerings at other locations and dates.

Please contact me with any questions that you may have about course content, equipment needed, ammunition and accommodations in the area. I may be able to save you some money and effort.

DVC,

Steve

Please mark your calendar for the dates/courses that interest you;

Get your ammunition as soon as you can, do not put this off;

Rooming accommodations should be booked as early as possible;

Please respond expeditiously when requested with your deposit and application.

[SilentRage]

Great article , thanks for posting .