Traditional Double Action Pistol

One of my goals for the year is to gain a basic proficiency with some weapon platforms that are unfamiliar to me, one of these being the traditional, double action pistol.  These are the pistols that were so popular in the nineties, where the first pull of the trigger cocks the hammer and fires the round, much like a double action revolver.  To fire subsequent rounds, the hammer was cocked by the slide, making the trigger pull closer to the short, light pull of a single action pistol.

Popular examples are the Smith and Wesson 5900 series pistols, which were adopted by many law enforcement agencies before the Glock became dominant in that market, and, of course, the M9, which was the official pistol of our armed services from 1990 until 2017.

A couple of years ago, I found a police trade- in Beretta 92, which is the civilian version of the M9.  I picked it up because it was a good deal, and because anything John McClane carried had to be good, right?  However, since buying it, I haven’t put more than a box of ammo through it.  I decided it was high time to change that.

anything John mcclane carried has to be good, right?

The traditional double actions are famously difficult to master.  Jeff Cooper once compared shooting a double action it to swimming the English Channel without flippers; it is possible, but not easy.  I think the colonel was speaking in hyperbole when he said that, but it underscores the truth: this is not an easy system to learn.

My goal with this project is not to achieve mastery,  which would take more time than I am willing to invest at this time.  My goal is to gain a basic level of skill with a system that is common, if not widely used anymore.

The chief difficulty with the TDA, is that you will have to learn two different trigger pulls.  To work on this, I used a version of the popular dot torture test made for this platform.

Dot-Torture-30-rd-version-small-dots-TDA

I found this to be a good drill for learning the trigger of the TDA.  After running it a couple of times, I felt ready to move on to some timed drills.

I decided to run the Hojutsu Short course. Based on the Alaska State Troopers Pistol Qualification, it is a well- rounded course covering a variety of practical skills, but using time allowances generous enough not to dissuade a beginner.

I ran this twice, and was able to score 90% on the second attempt.  Col. Cooper was right; this is a difficult gun to shoot in many ways, the trigger inconsistency being the greatest hangup.  That being said, the pistol was extremely accurate.  Recoil was as mild as I have ever experienced in a pistol, and I did not experience a single malfunction, even using some hand loads that my glock refused to eat.

One problem I had concerned the safety mechanism, so I did some research, and wrote to Jeff Hall explaining my difficulty.

“I have been running the safety as one would a 1911, wherein the safety comes off between 5 and 6 of the draw stroke, and goes back on when the gun comes to the guard position.

 I don’t see a lot of reference material on the double actions, a bit surprising considering that they were so popular for awhile, but one reference that does deal with them is Farnam’s Defensive Handgunning.  In it, he recommends the pistol be carried de-cocked, but with the safety off, something similar to a double action revolver.  The safety need not be taken off on the draw, and after shooting, the safety is switched on to de-cock the pistol, and then taken back off to holster and have at the ready for the next draw.

 What manual of arms do you recommend for this type of weapon?  Is there a reference that you recommend for this platform?”

He replied: “I carried a S&W double/single action, the 4006, for ten years with the Troopers. S&W does not call it a safety, they call it a de-cocker.

We did it just like John says. The gun is carried with a round in the chamber, de-cocked, with the de-cocker in the up (off safety) position. So, draw, point in, shoot as needed, decock as you come to guard, tac load and holster. It’s the same thing as a double-action revolver.”

When I shoot this gun next, I will try this method.  It would have saved me a couple of overtime penalties, when I forgot to lift the decocker, and  dropped the hammer on the safety bar.

If you are looking to gain some basic familiarity with a TDA pistol, give the course of fire I describe here a try.  You can shoot the Dot Torture and the Short course twice, and still only burn 156 rounds.

For more on the TDA pistol, I highly recommend John Farnam’s book, “Defensive Handgunning”.

Accuracy was good with the Beretta, but my unfamiliarity with the trigger cost a couple of over- times.

BaseBall and Bullets

I started teaching my children baseball this summer, just the basics: How to throw and catch a ball.  It got me thinking about the process of learning the basics.

“This is only basic rifle marksmanship that you are teaching!”  The student said it with something between derision and accusation.

“Yep, that is exactly what we are teaching,” I replied.

“I’m a sergeant, I already know this stuff.”

I shrugged, and let it pass.  He was grouping three inches at twenty five yards, with the aid of a bipod.

I sometimes start classes by stating: “We will be working a lot on basics today.”  I can accurately predict which students will do well, and which ones will perform poorly, based on their response.  The ones that say, “Great, I need basics”, excel.  The ones who look disappointed, or bored, do not.  Ironically, it is those students who embrace the basics, who are ready to move on to more advanced work more quickly.

The basics aren’t cool.  They don’t look good on Instagram, and basics won’t get you followers on YouTube.  Basics are hard, tedious work.  I have heard it said that ten thousand repetitions of a single movement are required to achieve mastery.  How long does it take to amass ten thousand trigger presses?  Or ten thousand draw strokes?

Everything fancy is just basics, faster, or from some inconvenient position.  To paraphrase one instructor I heard, “All you got to do is line up the sights, then don’t screw it up pulling the trigger.”

Yep, basics.

Next time you tune in the ball game, look at the highlights reel.  You will see those amazing triple plays, the slide into home plate, the fielder leaping to catch that would be home run, before it sails over the fence.  Then watch what the players do when they take the field.  Even though they are professionals, the very best players alive, they practice the basics, tossing the ball to each other, warming up for the inning.

They all started out as kids playing catch with their dad in the back yard, and even now, as pros making obscene amounts of money, they are still learning to catch and throw.  That’s why they are the best at what they do.

 

Un-Timed Drills

Only 18% of pistol shooters use a shot timer when they train, according to a survey by Concealedcarry .com. I believe that number may, in fact, be artificially high; very few of the gun owners I know have a shot timer.  With that in mind, I thought I would publish a few drills which can be run without at shot timer.  None of these are my own invention, and where I can recall, I will attribute the drill to the person who taught me.

One Hole Drill

At any distance (start at three yards), put five shots into one hole.  Resist the urge to fire a sixth or seventh shot to make up for a miss.  If you need to run a second time, re holster, take a breath, and then start over. This drill is about mental focus, sight picture, and trigger control. This is, perhaps, the most important drill you can practice, working on the fundamentals.  I learned this from Jeff Hall, founder of Hojutsu.  I run this drill two or three times, every time I shoot. No matter what I do, I like to end the session with a one hole drill.  It tends to bring me back to the fundamentals.

A very respectable one hole drill shot from 5 yards

Okey Dokey Drill

This is like the one hole drill, featuring five shots into one hole, with the single difference that you hold the pistol only with the thumb and middle finger of one hand.  Imagine holding your hand in the Okey-Dokey sign.  The purpose is to isolate the trigger from the grip.  If I have a student who has bad trigger control, an error he is trying to overcome by maintaining a death grip on his weapon, this will cure the problem. Likewise, if his trigger press is good, but his grip is torquing the weapon, this will also cure the problem. I was taught this technique by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, who is most well known as an author, but is also an excellent pistol instructor.

Clover Leaf

This is yet another adaptation of the one hole drill (if you notice, I really like the one hole drill).  For this drill, fire three shots.  The first shot is fired with your normal, two handed grip.  The second shot uses strong hand only, and the third, weak hand only.  You want all three to touch; i.e., create a clover leaf pattern.  This drill is created to work on one hand trigger control.  I learned about this from Greg Ellifritz’s excellent blog, Active Response Training.  If you aren’t reading his blog, you are wrong.

The And Drill

 Any target will do for this drill, but try a ten inch plate at ten yards to start.  Point in on your target, and start counting: “One thousand and one, one thousand and two…”  Each time you get to the end of a number, press the trigger.  When you can keep five shots in a row on target, drop the thousands and just count, “One, and two, and…” with the trigger press at the end of each “D” in “and”.  Eventually, drop the numbers altogether, just using the word “and”. This is about tempo, coordinating sight picture with breath, and controlling recoil.  I learned this drill from D.C. Reed, of TAGtrainingllc.com

Three Steps Froward Three Steps Back

Using an IDPA sized or similar target, start at ten yards, and shoot five shots.  If they are all on target, move three steps back.   If you miss one, take three steps forward.  Eventually, you will settle into your maximum effective range for the size target you are using.  The goal is to increase your maximum effective range.  If you use a steel target for this be sure that you do not get too close to the target (most manufactures recommend no closer than ten yards).

 

A shot timer is a great tool, and well worth the investment. There are many skills that can only be developed with the use of a timer, but there are others that can only be mastered with slow, deliberate fire.  I use a shot timer every time I go to the range, but I still utilize a number of untimed drills, especially if I find myself becoming sloppy with my fundamentals.

You can find the article that inspired this post at https://www.concealedcarry.com/gear/shot-timer-survey-results/

Every shot counts

Our patrol had walked into a nasty ambush, and it was not going well for us.  We were on the low ground, and our adversaries were raining down plunging fire from the top of a steep bluff.    Our patrol leader had determined that this was a near ambush, and ordered us to assault through the enemy position.  Juan, my fire team leader, led the charge up the slope.  It is hard to over- emphasize the confusion as we struggled through the thorns and rocks, near misses from the enemy buzzing our harness.  We almost immediately found ourselves channeled in a narrow draw that afforded the only footing up the slope.  Suddenly, an enemy head appeared at the crest of the hill. The young man beside me, Madison, raised his M4, fired over Juan’s back, and missed, “killing” Juan.  This was a training exercise utilizing blanks and miles gear, but the lessons are widely applicable.

Every bullet you fire hits something, even the shots that miss their intended target.

Read that sentence again, slowly, and think about it.

Newton’s law of gravity dictates that everything that goes up, comes back down.

Cooper’s fourth safety rule: Know your target; its foreground, and background.

We recently learned that the deputy who was killed in the shooting at the Border Lines bar was shot in the heart, not by the killer, but by another responding officer.  You can read about it here: https:

//losangeles.cbslocal.com/2018/12/07/sergeant-killed-in-borderline-shooting-struck-by-friendly-fire/

Fratricide (literally, the killing of brother) is far more common in combat than anyone wants to admit 1 and we see that mirrored regularly in force on force training at One Shepherd.  In spite of taking extensive measures to avoid “friendly fire” incidents, they still happen.  Most stem from a failure to identify the enemy properly. To my knowledge, the story I related regarding Juan and Madison is the only case I know of where someone was actually aiming at an enemy, and hit a friend.  The officers responding to the Border Line shooting were from separate departments. I doubt they had the opportunity to train together prior to that call, where they had to attack into a dark bar, crowded with innocents, with the exception of one homicidal maniac; bad luck all-around.

But what about a civilian gun fight? What is the likelihood that you will not have any innocent persons within the lethal range of your weapon? Think about the Sutherlands Springs church shooting. Fortunately, Stephen Willeford was able to confront the killer outside of the church; but what if he had been forced to shoot it out in the church?   In a spree killer/active shooter situation, the killer doesn’t care who he kills, only that he kills as many people as possible.  Any shot that misses you, and strikes a noncombatant, is a win in his evil game. Will you be able to position yourself in such a way that you have a solid back stop behind your bad guy?  Greg Ellifritz recently posted a very good article about this:

https://www.activeresponsetraining.net/when-misses-hit-a-look-at-real-world-backstop-issues

One of the antidotes he touches on lightly, but I think bears repeating, is marksmanship.  When you hit your target, you don’t have stray rounds.

Anyone who has studied under Soke Jeff Hall will recognize this doodle, the shooter has killed a parrot, this is an automatic failure to complete the test.

Perhaps the most controversial part of the Hojutsu pistol training system, is the no-miss policy. The shooting portion of the Hojutsu black belt test is 158 rounds of pistol shooting, from various positions and distances, all under time pressure, with 90% accuracy. Here is the catch: if any one of those 158 rounds misses the target, it is a failure to complete the test.  You could shoot a 99% score, and one miss would disqualify you.  I have seen more people walk away from the program because of this stringent no- miss policy, than for any other reason.  They tell me, “This is too hard, I’ll never make this”, and they give up.

The no- miss policy is not an arbitrary standard, intended to make the test more difficult.  It grows out of the cold, hard truth that every bullet you fire is lethal, and every bullet you fire hits something, or somebody.  If you are a cop you might be insulated from some of the civil and criminal liability stemming from killing or wounding an innocent with an errant shot (though civilians almost certainly will not), but the legal consequences pale in comparison to the emotional consequences of having to live with such a thing on your conscience.

Are there things you can do to mitigate the risk? The late Jim Cirrillo, of the NYPD Stakeout Squad, fought countless gun battles inside of crowded stores and banks. He was famous for shooting suspects in the hips, on the belief that the downward angle of the bullet would decrease the likelihood of injury to bystanders.  He reportedly shot so many perpetrators in their neither regions, that he gained the nickname “the Proctologist” among the NYPD, but even this denotes a high level of marksmanship. He was not aiming for “center mass”, but at a specific part of the anatomy.

Marksmanship tends to deteriorate when someone is shooting back at you. If you can’t make your hits on the one way firing range, don’t expect to be any better on the two way.

If you strive for a high goal, you will improve, even if you never make the goal.  What do you want: skill, or recognition?  Strive for the goal, go after the skill, and someday it may save the life of someone you love, or that of a complete stranger.

To attend a Hojutsu Seminar go to: https://hojutsu.com/blogs/seminars

To train with One Shepherd go to:https://1shepherd.com/

 

1 E. B. Sledge With the Old Breed at Peleliu, Charles B. MacDonald Company Commander, Robert Lecki Helmet for my Pillow all recount cases of fratricide, these are just a couple of many more I could sight.

Holstering, a Hojutsu Perspective

“Holstering a pistol is the most dangerous thing we do.”

I believe I was told this at the first pistol class I ever took, and some form of this warning has been repeated at nearly every class I have participated in since.  There is certainly plenty of truth in it; even a cursory internet search will yield dozens of gruesome photos and videos of people shooting themselves in the foot, thigh, and, perhaps most dangerously, the groin, as they holster their pistols.

Not long ago, nearly all the big experts advocated learning to holster the pistol without looking toward the leather.  These experts emphasized the need to keep your eyes up, in order to be aware of your surroundings.  A new threat may emerge, or the threat you thought had backed down may take advantage of your holster fumble to attack again.

This practice has fallen out of favor with the newest crop of influential firearms instructors, who are teaching the opposite- Do look at your holster as you replace your piece. Men like Greg Ellefritz and John Correia, and even some of the older guys (for instance, Gabe Suarez), have jumped on the “look your gun into the holster” band wagon.  Suarez lays out perhaps the most cogent and authoritative argument for this, which you can read here. http://blog.suarezinternational.com/2017/02/looking-at-the-holster.html?cid=6a0133ec985af6970b01b8d2618563970c#comment-6a0133ec985af6970b01b8d2618563970c

The arguments he makes is simple and powerful: Holstering is dangerous; you have no business putting your gun away if there is still a possibility of a threat any way. The reason cops were formerly taught reholstering without looking, was so they could handcuff a perp, but the new doctrine calls for the suspect to be held at gun point until back up arrives.  I will discuss these points one at a time.

1 Holstering is dangerous. This is quite true, and more so than it was before 1981, when the Glock 17 with its light trigger and lack of an external safety was invented.  The danger has grown with the advent of widespread concealed carry laws, which have spawned a plethora of holster types, carry locations, and methods, nearly all of which are less safe than the old, reliable, outside-the-belt-strong-side method that used to be the norm.  The other side effect is that large numbers of people are carrying guns, the vast majority of which have less training even than the small amount that police are required to undergo.  Added to that is the internet, which broadcasts the photos of negligent discharges, making them seem even more common than they actually are.

2 You have no business putting your gun away if there is still a possibility of a threat. This makes a lot of sense, as long as your problems remains simple, back up is only minutes away and it is always obvious that you are the good guy.

Imagine that you are unfortunate enough to be present during a classic spree shooting at your local shopping mall.  You intervene, and the perpetrator, when confronted with an armed resistance, surrenders.   You hold him at gunpoint while you wait for the police to arrive.  Bear in mind they are responding to a shooting in progress, so when they see you holding the prep at gunpoint, they see a man with a gun holding a hostage, not a citizen stopping a homicidal maniac. Here you are faced with two threats: the first is a homicidal maniac, who may choose to jump back in the fight; the second is the responding officer, who may, with reasonable justification, perceive you as the gunman. Sounds like a great time to deliberately reholster your pistol, while keeping your eyes on the threat.

His third argument is that cops do not need to reholster to cuff their collar, all they need to do is hold the felon at gunpoint until backup arrives.  To this, I can only say that I wish every cop in America worked in an environment where backup is only minutes away.  Unfortunately, many serve in departments where backup is too far away for this to be practical.

As in many other respects, the Hojutsu answer to “should I look my gun into the holster?” is not “always”, or “never”, but “It depends”.

Are there times and places for that deep concealment holster that takes two hands and two eyes to use? Absolutely, but whenever possible we should use a pistol holster combination that can be holstered safely, even blind. We also train, using a blue gun to practice our manipulations, until we can perform them safely, even when cold, wet, tired, hungry, scared, and wounded.

In the Hojutsu Ry discipline, students learn to holster without looking.  I get it, sometimes we all need to look at our holster, and you are not “wrong” if you do.  When something doesn’t seem right, you look, clear whatever is the obstruction, and holster the gun, but we want to cultivate the ability to transition seamlessly and fluidly from weapon to open handed technique and back again as the situation calls for

 

I am reminded of something Jeff Cooper wrote in The Art Of the Rifle:

“A marksman is one who can make his weapon do what it was designed to do…

A master marksman is one who can shoot up to his rifle”

The goal of Hojutsu is not only to teach people to make the weapon do what it was designed to do, but to inspire them to go beyond that, and work toward mastering their weapon system, working to be able to do all that the pistol is capable of.

A small part of that goal of mastery is the ability to perform crucial manipulations, including reholstering, without looking.

 

To learn more about Hojutsu Ryu go to http://www.hojutsu.com/

Dry Fire, A Hojutsu Perspective

When I am asked what Hojutsu is, I like to say that it is the teaching of pistol craft from a martial arts perspective.

There is, perhaps, nothing in the firearms culture quite as in tune with traditional martial arts, as dry fire.  The repetitions of a movement until the technique is perfected, then building speed and power, is the essence of martial arts.  Long before the two disciplines of Karate and gunfighting were brought together by Jeff Hall in the modern discipline of Hojutsu, the old west gunfighters had come to the same method of training as the eastern martial artist.

John Westley Harden, one of the most skillful, if least moral, of the old west gunfighters, was said to practice one hundred dry shots a day.  Bill Hickok was also known for his dry fire routine.

One of the obstacles to dry fire that inhibited me for a long time was the elaborate safety protocols recommended by some instructors.  If I were going to go through as many safety precautions as they recommended, I might as well go to the range and fire real bullets.  Nevertheless, safety during dry practice is a real issue. We have all heard the stories of quick draws that ended with wrecked televisions and shattered mirrors, and some are far more tragic.  Depending on how you look at it, dry practice is a violation of the first rule of firearms safety (all guns are always loaded).

I personally chose to address this by buying a plastic dummy barrel that drops into my pistol. This renders the pistol inert, and obviously so, because of its bright yellow color. I add to that a weighted dummy magazine, to keep the feel of the pistol the same.

To cover the second safety rule (never let your muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy), I place my dry fire target on an exterior wall that is either concrete, or backed up by an empty, wooded hillside.  If you don’t have a wall that will stop a bullet, something as simple as a thick stack of old phone books could suffice to contain the bullet, in the unlikely event of a negligent discharge.

The bigger safety issue, as I see it, is maintaining the mental shift between training, and ready- for- action.  We do things in the controlled training environment (not just dry practice, but combatives and force on force), that we should not do in everyday, ready- for- danger conditions.  I once read an FBI study that found most training accidents happened when police came back to the range after their lunch break.  After relaxing for lunch, they failed to shift their mental focus back to a training state.

The dummy barrel helps with this aspect as well. Breaking down the pistol, and inserting the dummy barrel, becomes part of my mental discipline of preparing for dry practice, just as reassembling the pistol with the real barrel readies my mind to transition back to a ready state.

Once I have transitioned my weapon and my mind to a dry practice configurations, with a target the size of the head box at a distance of 21 feet, I start off by moving to step 1 of the draw. If you are unfamiliar with this, at step 1, the support hand is anchored high on the chest, eyes are on the target, and the strong hand assumes a firing grip on the pistol while it is still in the holster.

I go back to a relaxed, hands- up posture, and back to step 1, several times.  The reason for this is simple. Step 1 is the most important part of the draw, and if you do not get a correct grip at step 1, nothing else will work correctly.

After a few reps of the above routine, I make a complete presentation to a perfect trigger press on a perfect sight picture; slowly, very slowly.  I may use seven or eight seconds to make each presentation. The point is to make each presentation absolutely perfectly.  I may do this procedure for five or ten reps.

Once I press the trigger, I will need to reset for the next rep. This is a great opportunity to practice my type one malfunction. Tap the magazine, rack the slide, and reassess the target.  I have just achieved three objectives: the sear is reset for the next rep, I practiced my type one malfunction, and I am conditioning myself to go into a malfunction drill any time the trigger produces a click instead of a bang.  Now I can practice my scan for additional threats, and reholster.

Once I have completed five or ten reps at slow speed, I set my timer for one tenth of a second faster than the par I want to achieve. In other words, if the time I want to achieve is 1.9 seconds for a head shot at 21 feet, I set the timer for 1.8.  Why only a tenth of a second? If 1.8 is good, wouldn’t 1.4 be better?  This is not necessarily the case. If you are trying to push your ability too fast, you will become sloppy, and your practice will be counterproductive.  For a new shooter, a three- second head shot might be a reasonable goal. As you achieve that time, you can begin trimming the time down.

At the sound of the buzzer, I try to replicate, at speed, the movement I just made slowly.  There is a tendency in dry practice to drop the barrel of the pistol as soon as the trigger breaks. This is a bad habit. I try to be careful to maintain the sight picture even after the trigger breaks.  I try to do twenty repetitions at speed. If I find I am not maintaining my sight picture, I set the timer aside, and go back to the slow presentations for a couple of cycles before I try using the timer again. I try to get in twenty reps at speed. I find that this is about as long as my attention span is capable of retaining appropriate focus, so I stop there.  If I find myself becoming distracted or losing focus, I will stop earlier.  I am convinced that a small amount of practice regularly is far more effective (and safer), than a lot of practice when tired and un-focused.

The dry fire routine I have outlined here is what I have learned in my study of Hojutsu, with only a few slight additions of my own.  There are many ways and methods of dry fire that can be followed safely, the practices mentioned above are what have worked well for me.

Osu

Hojutsu

Show any twelve- year- old in America a set of nunchaku, a kama, or a tonfa, and ask him what they are, and you will get an enthusiastic reply: “Karate weapons!”  I remember watching a Bruce Lee movie with my wife, who commented, “If I were fighting that many bad guys, I think I would find a better weapon than a nunchaku.” My wife was certainly correct. The nunchaku isn’t a very good weapon; in fact, it isn’t a weapon at all.

So thoroughly has the Hollywood and Hong Kong mythology filled the American mind, few realize that all three of the above mentioned “Karate Weapons” were originally designed as farming tools.

Most of the martial arts weapons tradition comes to us from the islands of Okinawa, which were conquered in 1609 by the Satsuma samurai clan of Japan.  One of the first acts of the new overlords was to outlaw the ownership of weapons by the natives.  Being thus unable to train with swords, bows, and spears, the Okinawans developed the martial art of Kobudo, learning to use farming tools as weapons.  While any of these brave Okinawan warriors would have preferred a sword, a grain flail, a scythe, and a mill handle became, in the hands of a trained practitioner, formidable weapons.

As much as I respect these weapons and believe they should be studied from a historical and scholarly standpoint (just as the flintlock rifle should be studied), none of them would be my weapon of choice when facing a deadly opponent.

In some ways, our situation in America is not dissimilar from that of seventh- century Okinawa.  We have laws which prevent private citizens from owning and training with the most effective,  military grade weapons.  We are forbidden from owning automatic weapons, mortars, claymore mines, and rocket launchers, just to name a few.  A private citizen can, however, poses and carry a handgun in every state of the union. Thus, like the Okinawans of old, we train with a weapon so impotent that modern militaries do not even give them serious consideration.  Yet, like the nunchaku, with enough training, even the handgun can be a formidable weapon.

While most westerners tend to think of the samurai as sword warriors, muskets were introduced to Japan during the samurai period of history, and after the battle of Nagashino, the musket became an important weapon in Japan, where the formal study of musketry and artillery was called Hojutsu, or fire art.  As the Japan began build a modern military in the end of the nineteenth century, the term fell into disuse.

Once Eastern martial arts came to America, it was only a matter to time until someone decided to apply the dojo method to the study of the hand gun.  The first person to do this in a serious way was Jeff Hall, a legendary figure in the Alaska State Troopers, and a traditional martial artist.  Hall was inspired when he saw how quickly traditional martial artists, being accustomed to disciplined study, were able to master the handgun, and set about to revive the old art.

The modern revival of Hojutsu enfolds all modern weapons and techniques in a continuum of use-of-force options running from empty hand techniques, through knife and cane, to handgun, and on to shotgun and precision rifle.  These techniques are taught from a disciplined, dojo perspective, emphasizing precise repetition of movements. The handgun is the entry point of Hojutsu, as it is the most available both for defense and training in America.

The handgun is taught as only one of many options to be deployed in self-defense.  Most firearms schools will teach that there is a time not to use force, but Hojutsu is one of the few that teaches the use of a level of force less than that of a hand gun.  How many dangerous encounters might have been better handled with a fist than a gun?

Hojutsu is a thinking man’s practice. You won’t hear Jeff Hall use the words “always” and “never” very much.  He likes to say that the answer to every gun fighting question is, “It depends”.  When you study Hojutsu, you can expect thoughtful discussions about the solutions to gun fighting problems.  For instance, if you are shooting around the left side of cover, should you shoot left handed?  Jeff Hall’s answer is, “It depends. If you shoot with the same speed and accuracy left handed as you do right, yes, it would be foolish to expose any more of your body than necessary; but, if you shoot slower, or less accurately, it might be better shoot right handed, even if that means exposing more of yourself to incoming fire.”  That conversation is a good example of Jeff Hall’s gun fighting philosophy, which I would summarize thus: “Movement, use of cover, scanning, reloads and malfunction drills are all important, but the most efficient way to win a gunfight is to put rounds on target with speed and precision.” Just as any good Sensei spends more time teaching his students the straight punch than the much more exciting two-step-flying-side kick, Hall spends more time teaching accurate, fast shooting than many of the fancier techniques that make for exciting promotional videos.  This is not to say that Hojutsu is a simple art; rather, in the dojo tradition, students are challenged to strive for mastery of the complex through precise application of the fundamentals.

For more information about Hojutsu, go to http://www.hojutsu.com