Defending your life
From 'StressFire' by Massad Ayoob
Self-defense guru Massad Ayoob, above, demonstrates the power of a gun by the flash of a .357 Magnum fired at night.
Self-defense teacher passes insights and skills on lethal weapons
By Burl Burlingame
Star-BulletinMOST gurus are there to provide enlightenment, to provide golden paths to peace and serenity and well-being and harmony with your fellow man. Massad F. Ayoob is a different kind of guru. He'll teach you how to take down your fellow man, swiftly and at minimum danger to yourself, loved ones or property, and how to face up to the inevitable consequences. Among the self-defense crowd, Ayoob is something of a legend, whose generalist books "The Truth About Self Protection," "In the Gravest Extreme" and special-interest manuals like "StressFire - Gunfighting For Police" and "Fundamentals of Modern Police Impact Weapons" have sold thousands of copies. His Lethal Force Institute holds popular classes on using guns for self-protection that are attended by both police and private citizens.
Ayoob will be holding an LFI class Jan. 10 and 11 in Honolulu. Total cost is $295; register at 955-4523. The class, on using guns, will not include firing guns, and that should give you a clue about Ayoob's approach.
No matter how provoked, pulling the trigger isn't the solution. The action will have all sorts of consequences and ramifications, most of which aren't well understood either by the public or police, Ayoob believes.
You'll be in court for years. You'll be prosecuted. You'll have nightmares. You'll be sued by relatives of the victim, even if he was in the midst of murdering or raping you at the time. Your own family and co-workers will think less of you. And you will have killed or gravely injured another human being, an act, as they say, that diminishes all of us.
Arming citizens is absolutely a last resort. "It's all so simple-minded," Ayoob said in an interview. "This is the them-or-us mentality. It disquiets me ... you've got the whole atmosphere that 'We're fed up, mad as hell and we're not going to take it any more.' So instead of them killing us, we're going to kill them. It's not the approach.
"The tragic fallacy here is (the belief) that the only way you can fight criminal evil and evil strength is to become utterly vicious and uncompromising yourself.
"If I'm at the point where, OK, because criminals on the street are vicious and souless and have no compassion and have no humanity, if they reduce me to a robot killing machine with no compassion, then I haven't won anything. I've already lost."
Ayoob, a second-generation Syrian-American, was firing pistols by the age of 4, and became a nationally ranked pistol-shooting champion and a New Hampshire police officer by his early 20s. He is also a senior research associate at the Center for Advancement of Applied Ethics at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh and remains a police captain in New England.
Despite these skills, in several real-life mugging attempts, Ayoob defused the situation without having to draw a weapon, and he's proud of that. In addition to a concealed weapon, he always carries a $10 bill wrapped around a matchbook, and tosses that to the mugger first.
And he's appalled by the amount of violence people see on television, thousands of shootings that desensitize citizens to the effects of shooting. While his own teen-age daughter is a trained shot, he forbade her to play with toy guns while growing up. "I simply did not want my child playing games that kill other human beings," explained Ayoob.
Bottom line - a gun is a very, very dangerous tool, but just a tool. "A gun is not a talisman, a magic charm to ward off evil. It is a remote-control drill that takes a lot of skill to use," said Ayoob.
Taking a human life with that tool "is an unnatural act ... and post-shooting trauma will produce depression, social withdrawal, sleeplessness, increased alcohol intake, impotence or some other sort of sexual dysfunction in 30 percent of all cases," warns Ayoob. The only rationale for ever shooting at someone, Ayoob has boiled down into a kind of mission statement: IMMEDIATE AND OTHERWISE UNAVOIDABLE DANGER OF DEATH OR GRAVE BODILY HARM TO INNOCENT PERSONS.
Like many who have experienced criminal trauma, Honolulu resident Steve Gendel began researching self-protection after his life was threatened by marijuana growers while hiking alone in the mountains. He managed to escape.
Afterward, he discovered that "in self-defense, all roads led to Massad Ayoob. His books, magazine articles and videos all hit home," said Gendel. "He could have been talking about me in some of those cases."
After taking the LFI course on the mainland, Gendel decided to bring it to Hawaii, despite the lack of a suitable shooting range on Oahu. The course being taught here is the distilled lecture portion, and students can take the shooting portion later for a completion certificate.
Despite considering himself a fair and trained hand with a pistol, and being a gun dealer himself, Gendel found himself reconsidering his relationship with his weapons after taking the Lethal Force Institute class. And that seems to be the goal of Ayoob's training - the sound of unwanted gunfire will echo for years, and it may never go away from inside your head. Make sure it's worth it.
The facts
What: Lethal Force Institute class on using guns
