READING! (Col. Jeff Cooper, et al: Shit You Need To Know!)

SayUncle: They see me patrollin’. They hatin’:

just about every writhing related to handguns today, can directly be traced to Jeff Cooper.

It doesn't happen often, but every now and then some KnowzNothing has a bad thing to say about The Colonel.

SayUncle is far too wise to "go there", and he realizes the great benefits that Col. Jeff Cooper has lent to such competitive entities as USPSA/IPSC and similar activities.

But not everyone has such good sense.

I have a lot of opinions, and as a personal favor I'll spare you the recitation.  If you haven't  even read, let alone OWN, Cooper's "Gargantuan Gun Gossip",  *(both ONE and Two, let alone THREE)* you don't know shit.

Cooper's great about providing you all the SHIT you need to know about guns, gun safety, and the gun community/milieu.

And I use the term "shit" advisedly, because there's a shit-load of stuff about the gun culture that you can't get without either (A) spending thirty years in the culture, or (B) reading Cooper's accumulated works on the subject.

Best if you can do both, but for some folks it's a little late to attempt to grasp 30 years of culture in a single session;  Cooper attempts to give us at least a shadow of the values of Gun Culture, which nobody else (with the possible exception of perhaps Skeeter Skelton) has managed to do in the past half-century.

Oh, and of course Robert Ruark is on your "Must Read" list, for all times!

I find myself on the verge of providing a reading list for my friends, and that's A Bad Idea.  It's best that we discover our own "favorite author" list,

The Shooting Sports comes with a century (or two) of literature, which non-shooters neither know nor appreciate.  The writers (from Robert Service through Ernest Hemingway to Peter Hathaway Capstick  .. well, you name it) have provided the glory of the Gun World to millions of readers over the past century and longer.

...

I am of the opinion that people in general need to develop and perfect three social skills:

(1) Shooting ... quickly, accurately,  ... where and and when it is needed;
(2) Situational Awareness, so that the first skill is never needed;
(3) Civilized Discourse, so that the first two skills are less likely to be needed.

This isn't to say that the three skills are mutually incompatible; only to say that there is an accelerating stratus of skills to be learned, with the hope that each may minimize the need to descend to the next highest level.