STATUE OF WYATT EARP in Tombstone, compiled from many descriptions and images of Earp, all describing him as heavier and broader-chested than he described himself, or appeared in the one photo of him in shirtsleeves during that period. Was body armor helping to fill out those clothes?
To George Santayana we owe the famous quote that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. It is said that experience is the collected aggregate of our mistakes. Otto von Bismarck said that wisdom was found in learning from the collected mistakes of others.
Put that all together, and it makes huge sense to learn as much as we can from those who have gone before us. We want to focus on those who were conspicuously successful at the endeavor we ourselves wish to succeed in, should we ever have to undertake it. We want to analyze what they did correctly, and be alert for things that worked for them, in their time and place, but may not work for us in our time and place.
All of us have the opportunity to study the combatants of the past, and some of the present. A goodly number of autobiographical books have been written by American warriors returning from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a substantial body of literature exists written by their predecessors in every American war going back to the Revolution. The guns and the uniforms and the battlefields may change, but the core lessons of human beings in lethal conflict are timeless.
In many respects, the much more scarce reminiscences of police officers who’ve been in gunfights are even more useful, if only because they took place on the same sort of turf where the armed citizen can expect to engage the same foe: the violent criminal in America.
Due to limited space, three such are presented here. I chose men from three markedly different, but overlapping, time periods. One thing you discover in studying this discipline is that the guns they used, the clothing they wore, and the vehicles that brought them to the fight may evolve and change over time, but the principles of good men fighting bad men to the death are absolutely timeless.
During the inquest into the shootout at the O. K. Corral, Wyatt Earp testified as to the opening moments thus:
“When I saw Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury draw their pistols, I drew my pistol. Billy Clanton leveled his pistol at me, but I did not aim at him. I knew that Frank McLaury had the reputation of being a good shot and a dangerous man, and I aimed at Frank McLaury.”
Earp testified that Clanton shot at him, and he at Frank McLaury, almost simultaneously. Clanton missed, Earp did not.
“The fight,” Earp then testified in a classic example of understatement, “then became general.”
Wyatt Earp had followed a key principle of gunfighting with multiple opponents. You don’t aim necessarily at the nearest opponent, or necessarily at the one with the deadliest weapon. You direct your fire first at the one most likely to kill you in your present position.
Earp’s telling first shot that folded Frank McLaury over kept the man most likely to kill any of the Earps from doing so. Young Clanton, whom Earp had suspected would break under pressure, did. Though only five to six feet away from Earp, he fired at Wyatt two or three times – and missed.
Earp’s end score was the best of the fight. He was the only person on his side of the gun duel to go unwounded. He deliberately shot Frank McLaury, may well have shot Billy Clanton, and some insist he also shot Tom McLaury, already mortally wounded by Doc Holliday’s shotgun blast.
His marksmanship under stress, like his coolness under fire, was exemplary. It may have been as high as a 100 percent hit potential.
In his book Gunfighters, Col. Charles Askins, Jr. – a man of no small gunfighting experience himself, and one who did his homework – concluded, “(Wyatt Earp) had fired two shots and both had found their mark. He had killed Frank McLowrey (sic) and had his lead in Billy Clanton. Extreme range of the fight was 20 feet, a proximity which might have induced some gun-swingers to hurry. Not Earp. In commenting on the battle many years afterward he said, ‘I don’t make fast draws. I pull my gun deliberately, aim carefully, and don’t jerk on the trigger.’”
What is even more interesting is that the O.K. Corral incident was Wyatt Earp’s first gunfight, and he was by no means the world’s most seasoned lawman. He had some six years of law enforcement experience, some of it full-time in Dodge City and Wichita, Kansas, and was a part-time cop and full-time coach guard for Wells Fargo at the time of the Tombstone gun battle.
It was his first gunfight, but not his first shooting. In July of 1878, a cowboy raced past Assistant Marshal Earp and Officer Jim Masterson, Bat Masterson’s brother, and fired three shots from a Colt .45 that narrowly missed the marshal. As he rode off, Earp, Masterson, and possibly others opened fire.
Though no one could be sure, Earp was credited with the shot that struck the fleeing George Hoy in the arm and caused him to fall from his horse. The arm wound became gangrenous and, despite amputation, Hoy died just under a month after the shooting.
Even if it was Earp’s bullet that caused Hoy’s death, however, this “fleeing felon” shooting was by nowhere near as harrowing as a gunfight, let alone the experience of three men trying to kill you, your brothers, and your friend.
A study of Earp’s life shows that, 100 years before the term “officer survival” became a buzzword, Wyatt Earp was practicing its tenets. Consider the following examples.
IN THE 1880S, Wyatt Earp carried two handguns, and both rifle and shotgun in saddle scabbards. Here in the 1990s, police were emulating him with standard gear. Left, Capt. Ayoob with Benelli auto 12 gauge; right, Chief Russ Lary with Ruger Mini-14, one of each in every patrol car. Each carries issue .45 auto and concealed backup gun
In his memoirs, Bat Masterson said people wondered why Earp hung around with a psychopath like Doc Holliday, whom Masterson and most others in their circle personally despised.
Part of it was put down to the story of Holliday saving Wyatt’s life by risking his own, grabbing two revolvers and facing down multiple men who had Earp at gun point in a Dodge City incident in 1878. However, reading between the lines, one sees another reason for Earp to have opened a relationship with Holliday.
He knew that the tubercular dentist was a seasoned killer, and that one day, in all probability, he would have to kill men in gunfights himself. There were things Holliday could share that would teach him to survive.
There was precedent in Earp’s background for this. Earp was born in 1848; he would have been 23 in 1871 when, in Kansas City, he began to gather the advice and the oral histories of those who had gone before.
He told his biographer, Stuart Lake:
“The spot favored by the men best known in frontier life was a bench in front of the police station where Tom Speers, then marshal of Kansas City, held forth each afternoon. Because these hunters, freighters, and cattlemen knew so much of the country and the life which held my interest at the time, I spent most of the summer on or near Tom Speers’ bench.
“I made acquaintances that I was to renew later, all over the West, on the buffalo range, in cowtowns, mining camps, and along the trails between, some as far away as the Alaskan gold fields in ’97 and ’98.
“I met Wild Bill Hickok in Kansas City in 1871. Jack Gallagher, the celebrated scout, was there; and I remember Jack Martin, Billy Dixon, Jim Hanrahan, Tom O’Keefe, Cheyenne Jack, Billy Ogg, Bermuda Carlisle, Old Man Keeler, Kirk Jordan, and Andy Johnson. The names may not mean much to another century, but in my younger days each was a noted man. Much that they accomplished has been ignored by the records of their time, but every one made history…
“I was a fair hand with pistol, rifle, or shotgun, but I learned more about gunfighting from Tom Speers’ cronies during the summer of ’71 than I had dreamed was in the book. Those old-timers took their gunplay seriously, which was natural under the conditions in which they lived.
“Shooting, to them, was considerably more than aiming at a mark and pulling a trigger. Models of weapons, methods of wearing them, means of getting them into action and of operating them, all to the one end of combining high speed with absolute accuracy, contributed to the frontiersman’s shooting skill.
“The sought-after degree of proficiency was that which could turn to most effective account the split-second between life and death. Hours upon hours of practice, and wide experience in actualities supported their arguments over style.”
For the last 25 years, police survival instructors have brought in gunfight survivors to lecture to their young officers. They have studied videotaped analyses of such disastrous gun battles as the Newhall Massacre of four California Highway Patrol officers in 1970, or the Miami shootout of 1986 in which seven FBI agents were shot, two fatally. Earp, clearly, had been ahead of his time.
Today’s officers learn cardiovascular fitness and physical conditioning, with emphasis on endurance. Hard physical labor when he was growing up apparently took the place of exercise studios in developing these characteristics in Earp.
Those who knew him described him as whipcord-tough, extremely skillful as a boxer, and believed to have won every fistfight he ever engaged in. This included one memorable 15-minute exchange with a larger, stronger man whom Earp left helpless on his knees with a face like mincemeat and a dislodged eyeball.
Most officer survival instructors today encourage the carrying of a backup handgun. Earp was ahead of the curve on that as well. Again, from Stuart Lake, Earp is quoted:
“That two-gun business is another matter that can stand some truth before the last of the old-time gunfighters has gone on. They wore two guns, most of the sixgun-toters did, and when the time came for action, they went after them with both hands. But they didn’t shoot them that way.
“Primarily, two guns made the threat of something in reserve; they were useful as a display of force when a lone man stacked up against a crowd. Some men could shoot equally well with either hand, and in a gunplay might alternate their fire; others exhausted the loads from the gun in the right hand, or left, as the case might be, then shifted the reserve weapon to the natural shooting hand if that was necessary and possible.
“Such a move – the border-shift – could be made faster than the eye could follow a topnotch gun-thrower, but if the man was as good as that, the shift seldom would be required.”
Earp also noted, “Jack Gallagher’s advice summed up what others had to say, to wear weapons in the handiest position – in my case as far as pistols were concerned, in open holsters, one on each hip if I was carrying two, hung rather low as my arms were long, and with the muzzles a little forward on my thighs.
“Some men wore their guns belted high on the waist, a few, butts forward, army style, for a cross-draw; others carried one gun directly in front of the stomach, either inside or outside the waistband, and another gun in a holster slung below the left armpit; still others wore two of these shoulder holsters. Style was a matter of individual preference.”
Speaking of principles of surviving a shooting, Earp told his biographer, “The most important lesson I learned from those proficient gun-fighters (starting in 1871) was that the winner of a gunplay usually was the man who took his time. The second was that, if I hoped to live long on the frontier, I would shun flashy trick-shooting – grandstand play – as I would poison.
“Later, as a peace officer, I was to fight some desperate battles against notorious gunmen of the Old West, and wonder has been expressed that I came through them all unscathed…Luck was with me in my gunfights, of course – so were the lessons learned in Market Square during the summer of ’71.”
In studying the different accounts of the O.K. Corral shooting, it becomes apparent that Earp coolly and carefully extended his revolver to arm’s length, aligned the sights, and carefully squeezed the trigger. He was not alone in taking this approach to shooting when his life was on the line. Bat Masterson, his contemporary and friend, felt the same way.
Historians argue about how many men Masterson killed. One says perhaps none at all. Others put the number at three, and Earp credited Masterson with four. However, others put the number in the 20s, which is actually quite possible if one counts Indians Masterson shot at during the Battle of Adobe Walls.
Masterson’s biographer Robert K. DeArment has this to say: “As much as he may have enjoyed impressing young (observers) with his hip-shooting ability, however, it is clear from Bat’s own words that he considered the sights on a weapon of great importance in an encounter with an armed adversary.
“In the series of articles on western gunfighters he wrote in 1907, he cited a pistol fray involving Charlie Harrison and Jim Levy, celebrated gamblers and gunmen who faced each other across a Cheyenne street and settled a personal difficulty with hot lead.
“Levy downed his opponent, wrote Bat, because ‘He looked through the sights of his pistol, which is a very essential thing to do when shooting at an adversary who is returning your fire.’ Another well known western sport and pistolero, Johnny Sherman, once emptied his revolver at a man in a St. Louis hotel room ‘…without as much as puncturing his clothes.’ Sherman, said Bat, ‘…forgot that there was a set of sights on his pistol.”
Earp clarified what he was talking about. “When I say that I learned to take my time in a gunfight, I do not wish to be misunderstood, for the time to be taken was only that split-fraction of a second that means the difference between deadly accuracy with a sixgun and a miss.
“It is hard to make this clear to a man who has never been in a gunfight. Perhaps I can best describe such time-taking as going into action with the greatest speed of which a man’s muscles are capable, but mentally unflustered by an urge to hurry or the need for complicated and nervous muscular actions which trick-shooting involves. Mentally deliberate, but muscularly faster than thought, is what I mean.”
Great minds think in like directions. In his classic 1966 text on police gunfighting, Bill Jordan would comment, “At the time I knew (Captain John Hughes of the Texas Rangers) I was a young man just starting in law enforcement, while he was quite elderly and long retired from active service. Like most old timers, he was reluctant to talk of personal experiences but occasionally passed out advice well worth heeding.
“One such gem that I have always remembered and will pass on was, ‘If you get in a gunfight, don’t let yourself feel rushed. Take your time, fast.’”
Concluded Earp, “In all my life as a frontier peace officer, I did not know a really proficient gun-fighter who had anything but contempt for the gun-fanner, or the man who literally shot from the hip. In later years I read a great deal about this type of gunplay, supposedly employed by men noted for skill with a .45.
“From personal experience and from numerous sixgun battles which I witnessed, I can only support the opinion advanced by the men who gave me my most valuable instruction in fast and accurate shooting, which was that the gun-fanner and the hip-shooter stood small chance to live against a man who, as old Jack Gallagher always put it, took his time and pulled the trigger once.”
Today’s instructors say, “Remember the basics! Keep It Simple, Stupid!” Getting a little déjà vu?
Today, the Modern Technique pioneered by Jeff Cooper that takes an instant to visually verify a flash sight picture before the trigger is smoothly but quickly compressed, has re-proven the wisdom of what Gallagher taught Earp, and what Earp and Masterson taught us.
On the LAPD, both handgun hit potentials under stress and police survival ratios in gunfights have soared since this sort of training was instituted in the 1980s, replacing “point-shooting.”
One goes from physical presence to verbal crisis intervention, to the application of bare hands, the use of “intermediate weapons,” and finally, as a last resort, lethal force. Earp practiced these principles more than a century ago.
Those who followed his career noted that he made wise use of his reputation to the point where men who might have fought another marshal would become quiescent in his very presence. Those who met him remember him being scrupulously fair and, for the most part, hearing each side of the story when two men squabbled, and letting the man he was about to arrest have his say.
All of this follows the principles taught and proven today of command presence and verbal crisis intervention skills.
Though a bit quick to use his hands by today’s standards, Earp used his open hand or his fists in situations where some of his contemporaries would have manufactured an excuse to shoot the suspect. There were no pepper sprays at the time, and except for the occasional cane, no impact weapons analogous to the PR-24 or the telescoping police baton of modern times.
Earp and his older brother frequently struck men with their guns, a practice decidedly frowned upon today. But in fairness, at least a few of these incidents probably ended an encounter with a concussion instead of a fatal gunshot wound that would probably have had to be inflicted if things had taken their natural course otherwise.
It is significant that at the end of the O.K. Corral fight, Wyatt Earp and his brothers did not finish off the dying Billy Clanton, who was sprawled by a building with a Colt .44 in his left hand that he was trying to balance on his knee and fire at them.
Earp made it clear to Lake that they felt Clanton was done for at that point and of no further danger. The most compassionate of today’s police are trained to shoot a man in such a scenario as Billy Clanton presented at the end, and the Earps are fortunate that he didn’t get his “second wind.”
(Doc Holliday, however, was not cut from the same cloth. One historian has him pulling his trigger on Clanton at the end of the fight, and the hammer of his nickeled Colt falling with audible clicks. Holliday had run his revolver dry).
Judge Wells Spicer noted in exonerating the Earp faction for the shooting that if the triple homicide had been maliciously motivated, Ike Clanton would surely have been the first to die, since the Earps hated him most of all as their prime enemy among the cowboy faction. Earp not only didn’t kill the older Clanton, he shoved him aside when he grabbed Wyatt’s arm, and Earp told Clanton, “Go to fighting or get away.”
Earp testified, “I never fired at Ike Clanton, even after the shooting commenced, because I thought he was unarmed. I believed then, and believe now, from the acts I have stated and the threats I have related and the other threats communicated to me by other persons as having been made by Tom McLaury, Frank McLaury, and Ike Clanton, that these men last named had formed a conspiracy to murder my brothers, Morgan and Virgil, Doc Holliday and myself. I believe I would have been legally and morally justified in shooting any of them on sight, but I did not do so, nor attempt to do so.”
BAT MASTERSON, LEFT, AND WYATT EARP, RIGHT. In this rare picture of Earp without vest and one or more coats, he appears thinner than described by those who “saw him on the street.” More indication that he might have worn early body armor beneath his silk vest and frock coat or overcoat.
Earp sustained no gunshot wounds in the O.K. Corral affair, though Billy Clanton and others shot at him multiple times from as close as five feet away. He was also unscathed in his shotgun duel with the highly skilled gunfighter Curly Bill Brocius, a known cop killer whom Earp slew at Iron Springs.
Richard Davis of Second Chance, the inventor of modern, concealable soft body armor, is a student of his product’s history and finds tantalizing the rumor spread by Earp’s enemies that he wore a bulletproof vest. Military labs are today working with “super-silkworms” with a view toward getting them to produce body armor, since certain kinds of silk can, in enough layers, indeed stop bullets.
Did Earp, Davis wonders, somehow discover this ahead of everyone else, and have a vest made of layer after exhaustively piled layer of tightly woven silk, perhaps combined with something else?
This would account for frequent depictions of Earp wearing such a garment. Of course, silk vests were in fashion at the time.
Other observations support the possibility. Wyatt Earp himself and those who knew him intimately described him as standing just over six feet tall and weighing somewhere between 145 and 150 pounds for most of his life. This is a man who would look almost gauntly slender, as Earp indeed does in a photograph of him with the shorter, stockier Bat Masterson where both are in shirtsleeves.
However, most casual observers of Wyatt Earp seem to have described him as a big, strapping man who gave the appearance of weighing perhaps 180 pounds. This is exactly the effect that one would expect if a tall, thin man was wearing an armored vest – especially a thick, primitive one – under his clothing.
It would also account for him being so often impeccably dressed, complete with a dark, frock coat of heavy fabric – the sort of garment that would hide the outlined edges of such a vest.
Earp himself took the accusation seriously enough to deny it. He told his biographer Lake, “Certain outlaws and their friends have said I wore a steel vest under my shirt. There have been times when I’d have welcomed such a garment, but I never saw one in my life outside of a museum, and I very much doubt that any other frontiersman has, either.”
Of course, if Earp did wear a “bullet-proof vest,” one wonders if he’d have discussed it. A keenly intelligent and intensely practical man, Earp even in his old age might not have wanted to give away his secrets to potential enemies.
In the early days of current soft body armor, Richard Davis and others tried to keep the concealed vests a “secret weapon,” but the media let the cat out of the bag. Earp would have been justified in keeping quiet; as soon as the trumped up NBC White Paper on cop-killer bullets was aired, reminding the TV-watching public that cops might have bullet resistant torsos, we started getting the cases of murdered officers deliberately shot in the head and elsewhere to bypass the armor.
We’ll never know, but the possibility exists that Wyatt Earp was the first American law enforcement officer to have worn a ballistic vest concealed under his shirt – and indeed, might have been the first such “save.”
The contemporary rule is, “If you know you’re going to get into a gunfight, bring a rifle or a shotgun.” Earp always did, and his not carrying one on Oct. 26, 1881, is further proof that he didn’t intend for the Clanton/McLaury confrontation to escalate to a gun battle.
The shotgun was his favorite weapon, and throughout his law enforcement career he kept short double-barrels stashed in the saloons and gambling halls he frequented, and other strategic locations, often with a shell belt of buckshot rounds.
Today’s police firearms instructors are increasingly pushing for carbines – in rifle or pistol calibers – to augment the riot shotguns in their patrol cars. Again, Earp was a step ahead.
He observed, “When mounted on a horse and ‘armed to the teeth,’ as the saying goes, a man’s rifle was slung in a boot just ahead of his right stirrup, his shotgun carried on the left by a thong looped over the saddle-horn.
“With the adoption of breech-loading weapons, a rider equipped with two pistols, rifle, and shotgun customarily had one of the belts to which his pistol holsters were attached filled with pistol ammunition, the other with rifle cartridges, while a heavier, wider belt filled with shotgun shells was looped around the saddle-horn underneath the thong which held that weapon. He was a riding arsenal, but there might well be times when he would need the munitions.”
It is quite likely that Wyatt Earp was so equipped when he led the hunt for the men he felt had murdered his brother Morgan, personally killing three of them, two with shotgun blasts and one with his .45 revolver.
Today’s police handgun masters may not carry tricked out guns (though more than one well-known and well-respected police survival instructor wears a pistol with a compact recoil compensator, Bo-Mar sights, and other combat amenities), but almost all have revolvers with slicked up actions and auto pistols with “carry melts” (rounded edges) and “reliability tunes” (all critical internal parts polished, including optimum trigger pull).
Earp is known at one point to have acquired a pair of revolvers second-hand when his employer would have paid for new ones, because he wanted guns that were well broken in, with smooth actions.
He told his biographer, “Cocking and firing mechanisms on new revolvers were almost invariably altered by their purchasers in the interests of smoother, effortless handling, usually by filing the dog which controlled the hammer.” He seems to be talking about filing the sear down for a lighter, easier trigger pull.
Speaking of custom guns, did Earp really use the Buntline Special, a Single Action Army .45 with 12-inch barrel supposedly made on special order for him? Earp told Lake that it did indeed happen, and that the long tom revolver was his favorite and was frequently used, including the day he shot down Florentine “Indian Charlie” Cruz, a man he suspected of murdering his brother.
He said that Masterson had cut (his own Buntline Special’s barrel) short, but other gunfighters (who received them) kept theirs at one-foot length. Earp didn’t feel it slowed him down, and he carried one of his 7 ½-inch single actions on his left hip for backup.
Earp historian Alford Turner says it didn’t happen, and that the Colt factory could show no records of such a special order. However, Colt authority James E. Serven implies that the guns might indeed have been made up – they just wouldn’t have been Buntline’s brainchild.
“Revolvers of standard barrel length were sometimes used with the detachable stock (as allegedly came with the Buntline Specials),” wrote Serven, “as well as those with the longer barrels, up to 16 inches in length. Colt advertised that the cost of these special long barrels was $1 per inch over the standard 7 ½-inch maximum.”
The old NYPD Stakeout Squad preferred hunters for their dangerous job, primarily because such men had a proven ability to sit and observe a danger scene with a gun in their hand for long periods of time without their mind wandering or their alertness fading.
Their ability to hit moving, live targets at unmeasured distances didn’t hurt, either, nor did the fact that they’d already proven that they could fire bullets into living flesh.
Earp had been a professional buffalo hunter in the Indian Nations during his early 20s. Though he sometimes used the traditional buffalo rifle, he preferred the shotgun.
He explained, “My system for hunting buffalo was to work my way on foot nearer to the herds than the rifle-users liked to locate. The shorter range of my shotgun made this necessary, but I could fire the piece as rapidly as I wished without harming it. I planned to get within 50 yards of the buffalo before I started shooting, and at that range pick off selected animals. I would shoot until I had downed all the skinner and I could handle that day.”
Not abusing his guns seems an incongruous concern for a man who frequently used his revolver as a club, but Earp was keenly aware that the man who held the record for the most buffalo kills from a single stand had ruined his expensive Sharps rifle. He didn’t see that as a problem with a slug-loaded shotgun at 50 yards, or closer. He claimed to have made a very good living at it while it lasted.
Earp’s friends and contemporaries Bat Masterson and Bill Tilghman were also successful buffalo hunters, whose skills learned in that environment served them well later when they shot for survival.
From Charlie Askins to Jim Cirillo to Dave Wheeler and many others, champion shooters of the 20th century have traditionally fared dramatically better in gunfights than their less-skilled brother officers.
Wyatt Earp’s experience seems to be a precursor of this survival reality, too. Though he never sailed for England to test his revolver skills against Walter Winans at Bisley, Earp apparently shot in the informal matches that were frequently held at the edges of the cowtowns, and seems to have done well.
There is one vital component of police survival that can only be found within. The best instructors can inspire it, but they can never directly transfer it. This is the ability to unswervingly face danger in the line of duty, ignore and suppress absolute terror, and prevail.
Writing in 1907 of the Western gunfighters he had known, Bat Masterson, quoted here by Don Chaput, had this to say about his old friend: “Wyatt Earp is one of the few men I personally knew in the West in the early days, whom I regarded as absolutely destitute of physical fear.
“I have often remarked, and I am not alone in my conclusion, that what goes for courage in a man is generally the fear of what others will think of him – in other words, personal bravery is largely made of self-respect, egotism, and an apprehension of the opinions of others.
“Wyatt Earp’s daring and apparent recklessness in time of danger is wholly characteristic; personal fear doesn’t enter into the equation, and when everything is said and done, I believe he values his own opinion of himself more than that of others, and it is his own good report that he seeks to preserve.”
Wyatt Earp, dead these many years, is back in the limelight today. I picture a young probationary rookie coming home from a tough day on the job and relaxing in front of the home screen with a tape of Tombstone or Kevin Kostner’s Wyatt Earp.
Certainly, there were dark sides to the man that veteran cops will recognize from the workplace. I wouldn’t want the hypothetical young officer to steal the lady of a brother cop, nor dump his previous significant other so cruelly that she committed suicide, nor pistol-whip suspects who were aggressive with him, nor hang out with psychopathic killers like Doc Holliday. History shows us that Earp did all these things.
At the same time, there were strong things in Wyatt Earp, things that make him by and large a damn good role model for anyone, in any time, who undertakes the difficult and thankless job of going armed in harm’s way to preserve the public safety.
Footnotes
a Askins, Charles, Gunfighters, Washington: NRA Publications, 1981, P. 3.
b Lake, Stuart, Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal, Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1931, pp. 33 and 37.
c Ibid., pp. 40-41, and 38.
d Ibid., pp.37-38.
e DeArment, Robert, Bat Masterson: the Man and the Legend, Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979, P. 78.
f Jordan, Bill, No Second Place Winner, 1965, Police Bookshelf, pp. 106-7
g Lake, op. cit., p. 39.
h Turner, Alford E., editor, The O.K. Corral Inquest, College Station, TX: Creative Publishing Company, 1981.
i Lake, op. cit., p. 38.
j Ibid., p. 38
k Serven, James E., Colt Firearms From 1836, Santa Ana: Foundation Press, 1967, p. 221.
l Lake, op. cit., p.53.
m Caput, Don, The Earp Papers: In a Brother’s Image, Encampment, WY, Allied Writers of America, pp.205-207.
The gunfights of Col. Charles Askins, Jr. took place primarily in the second quarter of the last century, spilling over into the 1950s. He remained on the scene for decades thereafter as one of the leading authorities on firearms and gunfighting. Earp was alive in Askins’ younger days, and while there’s no evidence that Charlie ever sought him out to pick his brain, we know that Askins studied his exploits and those of the other Western handgun artists who painted in hot lead. Indeed, in his later years, Askins would write a book about Earp and others of Earp’s period, titled Gunfighters. I knew Askins, visited him at his home in Texas, and chatted with him when we’d meet at the annual gun industry trade shows, first the one for sporting goods wholesalers, and later the SHOT (Shooting, Hunting, and Outdoor Trade) Show.
There was, and still is, much to learn from him.
COL. ASKINS as he appeared later in life, posing with a customized 1911 for the cover of one of his many books. He had shot 2- and 4-legged creatures with 1911s, and won a National Championship with one. He left us a rich legacy of gunfight survival knowledge.
The death of Col. Charles Askins, Jr. closed a hell-for-leather life that lasted nine decades. He was a national pistol champion, one of the first winners of the Outstanding American Handgunner of the Year Award, and a big game hunter with an impressive collection of trophies from all over the world. He aggressively sought out maximum action in his careers, first as a lawman and then as a soldier.
He was also a stone cold killer. For those of us who knew him, there was just no gentler way to put it.
Charlie’s contemporary, Bill Jordan, once said that killing your first man is the hardest and after that it gets easier, but for a certain kind of man, it can get too easy. Some thought old Bill was talking about Charlie. Not without reason did Askins title his autobiography Unrepentant Sinner.
Any future history of 20th century gunfighters will have to devote a substantial chapter to Col. Askins. The son of a prominent hunter and gunwriter, Junior followed in Senior’s footprints and left some marks deeper than his dad.
Charles Askins, Jr. killed dozens of men, both in war and on the streets. When asked for an official body count, the Colonel replied, “Twenty-seven, not counting (blacks) and Mexicans.”
Askins was bright, thoughtful, and without fear, but he had a darker side. The man’s prejudices spoke for themselves. Charlie once confessed to a friend that he thought he was a psychopathic killer, and that he hunted animals so avidly because he wasn’t allowed to hunt men anymore.
He was sometimes too willing to kill. A reading of Unrepentant Sinner shows confessions to murder and manslaughter. Yet among the many Askins gunfights, there were also acts of heroism, shootouts against the odds that he won with his coolness under fire and his deadly marksmanship.
He spent a lot of his life teaching assorted Good Guys to win firefights, and when the Final Ledger is tallied, one hopes that is taken into account on the credit side.
Let’s examine some of the life-saving lessons Askins left behind.
Askins learned early that a rifle or shotgun always beats a sidearm when trouble is in the offing. His favorites included the lever action Savage Model 99 in caliber .250/3000. For close work, he was partial to the Remington Model 11, a clone of the Browning 12 gauge Automatic-5, with an extended magazine. Night sights not yet being available, he tied a white bandage around the muzzle to index the weapon in the dark.
Askins put the speed of fire to good use. He wrote of one shootout in East El Paso, where he employed a Winchester .351 semiautomatic carbine:
“One night at the foot of Piedras Street, which runs slapbang into Cordoba Island, a team of (Border) Patrol officers watched a gang of smugglers scramble out of the willows in the river bottom and pile their load of liquor into an old Hudson sedan.
CHARLIE ASKINS studied the Old West gunfighters in his younger days, and wrote about them later in his life.
CLOSEUP OF THE COVER of the book Gun Fighters by Col. Charles Askins, Jr. That’s Charlie (a southpaw) in the drawing, taken from a famous photo of Askins. Note that the revolver is a Colt New Service with cutaway trigger guard and King sight rib, a motif Askins favored, and that the holster is a Berns-Martin breakfront. His contemporary Bill Jordan later spoke of how fast Askins was with that combination.
“Then the cargadores turned and raced nimbly for the protection of the Mex side of the line. Three cholos piled into the old car and commenced to drive away. The BP vehicle pulled up beside the runner’s vehicle and, with guns drawn, we motioned the driver to halt.
“The Hudson came to a stop just as I set foot on the ground. The officer who was in the rear seat also alighted. The driver of the gov’t vehicle threw the door open on the left side and hit the ground. He stepped down just as a gunman sitting beside the driver of the old Hudson swung a Model 94 carbine behind the driver’s head and let go at the Patrol officer in front.
“He was struck in the head by the .38/55 bullet and fell dead. The bullet broke up in his skull and a major fragment exited and by a strange coincidence struck the patrolman alighting from the back seat in the head. It did not kill him, but knocked him unconscious.
“Thus in the space of two heartbeats and with only a single round, the contrabandista had knocked out two patrolmen and had only myself to contend with.
“I ran round behind the smuggler’s car and opened fire. I shot the gunman through the eye, the bullet exiting through his temple. I kept right on firing and shot the driver through the kidneys. He later died. A third smuggler in the back seat cautiously poked a sixshooter up over the back seat and got shot through the hand for his pains.
“By this time I was busy reloading. The gunman, despite the fact that he had a bullet through his right eye which had passed out through his temple, managed to pull the driver from beneath the wheel and with him out of the way, got in the driver’s seat and drove the old sedan for a couple of blocks down the street where he crashed it into a tree.
“The Border Patrol in those days, as I have said, had no radio communication. I cranked up the old patrol car, after loading the dead and wounded, and got to a telephone and called Patrol headquarters. Before the night was done the trio, the dead and wounded, were all rounded up. It had been a big evening. I did not feel much regrets over the loss of the patrolman. I had never liked him much anyway. The second lad, who picked up a jacket fragment, was not seriously hurt.”
On another night, Askins used the Remington autoloading shotgun, loaded with the 00 buckshot he called “blue whistlers.” He recounted:
“They came out of the shadows and, as it was brightest moonlight, I could see every manjack had a long gun in his hands. We let them get up to within nine paces of us and I fired the first shot.
“I had the old Remington with its 9-shot magazine and I knocked down the first two rannies in as many shots. I then switched my attention to the other three who did not like the heat. They ran back into Mexico, a distance of about 60 yards, and opened fire.
“An interesting facet of this little exchange was that the lobo in the lead had an old Smith & Wesson .44 Russian. Despite the fact that he had a load of my 00 buckshot through his middle and one of the boys had hit him spang on the breastbone with a .351 slug, he dropped to his knees behind a cottonwood sapling and kept right on firing.
“The .44 Russian is a single-action and this bravo had to thumb the hammer back for each shot. He got off three rounds before a second charge of my buckshot ended his career.
“Quite as interesting, really, was the second gunman who had a Westley Richards 10 gauge loaded with Winchester High Speed #5 shot. We had killed him before he could touch off either barrel. A most happy circumstance since the distance between both parties was only nine steps. I have the Westley Richards today, a memento of lively times long past.”
Today, (an attorney such as) Johnnie Cochran would be hired by the families of the deceased to sue Charlie and the whole Border Patrol for opening fire on the heavily armed gang without warning. Yet doing as they did undoubtedly saved multiple Patrolmen from being killed or maimed. As the saying goes, “Things were different then.”
Weapon retention is the art and science of retaining control of your firearm when the criminal tries to disarm you and turn your firearm against you. Plan A is to execute a technique and peel the offender off the gun. If that can’t be achieved, Plan B is to shoot him.
There wasn’t much in the way of gun retention techniques in Charlie’s time, and Plan B was his Plan A. He made it work more than once. He recounted the following in (the) American Handgunner Annual in 1988:
“I got to my feet and made a run at this coyote and just as I reached him, I tripped and fell down. This bastardo, as quick as a cat, grabbed my gun, which I had drawn, and standing over me commenced to tussle enthusiastically to get it away.
“I had no illusions as to what he’d do if he succeeded. He had thoughtfully wrapped his hands around the cylinder and while I had my finger on the trigger I could not fire the weapon because he would not permit the cylinr to turn.
“Very energetically I rolled up on my shoulders and kicked this sonofabitch in the belly. It broke him loose from my pistol. He wasted no time. He ran for the river which was only 30 steps away. I saw him very clearly against all the lights of Juarez and I let him run until he was in the Old Rio Grande up to his knees.
“I held the gold bead front sight in the white-outlined rear notch and put the gold right in his back just at the belt line. On the shot he pitched forward as though spanked with a baseball bat.
“Three days later the BP Chief told me, ‘They dragged a dead Mex out of the river of the Socorro Headgates yesterday. The U.S. Consul in Juarez told me.’ I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t any too proud of the fact that I had stumbled and the wetback had almost killed me with my own gun. (A customized Colt New Service .44-40).”
The colonel continued, in the same issue of the magazine:
“One chill evening, it was January 1931, we jumped out a big gang of smugglers in the Standpipes district. We halted them on the levee and I ran up to the bunch and some bravo reached out and caught the old Remington by the muzzle and gave it a hell of a jerk. He aimed to catch me by surprise and get my gun, which you may be sure he’d have reversed in a twinkling and given me a dose of those big 00 pellets.
“He jerked on the muzzle and I jerked on the forestock and the pistol grip. As I gave the gun a hell of a tug, I pulled the trigger. The charge of buckshot got this coyote right through the left eye. The force lifted him completely off his feet and pitched him some four to five feet off the levee. The back of his head was quite a mess.
“I reckon I was just too impetuous in those days, for it wasn’t three months later until we ran up on another gang of freebooters, this time near the Nichols Packing Plant. I got too close to the leader and he grabbed my gun muzzle and tried to whip it out of my hands. He jerked in his direction and I jerked in mine – and I pulled the trigger.
“The nine big slugs took him right above the knee. The City-County Hospital took his leg off the next morning. The worthless scoundrel had syphilis and the last I heard the amputation would not heal. I reckon it sorta put an end to his river hopping.”
Charlie’s actions in the two shotgun grabs would almost certainly be ruled justifiable even today. The shooting of the fleeing man who had grabbed his Colt revolver unsuccessfully, however, would probably be seen as excessive force in light of the Supreme Court’s mid-(19)80s Garner decision.
Askins had no patience with suspects who grabbed police guns. One of his partners was pistol-whipped almost to death by a hobo who had disarmed him of his Colt 1917 .45 revolver. The patrolman had already sustained multiple skull fractures and brain damage from the clubbed revolver when Askins stopped the assault.
At a distance of 10 paces, he killed the assailant with three shots in the chest, double-action, from his pet .44-40 New Service 4-inch with D.W. King sights, the weapon the previously mentioned suspect tried to take from him near Juarez.
IN LARRY WILSON’S EXCELLENT BOOK The Peacemakers (Chartwell Books, 2004), we find this photo of Charlie Askins’ personalized New Service .38, with which he shot at least two men during WWII. Charlie donated it to his good friend John Bianchi for John’s museum.
When he was actively in the field, Askins seems to have almost always fired the sidearm one-handed. In his later years he would enthusiastically recommend two-hand positions for defense, but he was not an early advocate of the concept.
It would appear that in most of his shootings, Askins aimed rather than pointed. He practiced a good deal, drawing and firing from the point-shooter’s crouch position, but practiced more with a sight picture at arm’s length for the matches.
He wrote that during one 10-year period, he logged 334,000 practice shots. Though in some articles late in his career he had good things to say about point-shooting, I can find mention of only two such incidents in his personal reminiscences of gunfights.
One was a mistaken identity shooting in which he exchanged shots in an alley with a rifle-armed U.S. Customs agent. The distance was 10 yards. The man with the rifle fired twice and missed both times. Askins also fired twice; one shot missed, and one struck the other man’s rifle stock.
He point-fired (in that instance) because he had to; his gun that night was a Colt New Service .45 sixgun, its barrel chopped to two inches with no front sight.
He would write later, “To say that I took a ribbing was an understatement compared to the comments over firing two shots at another feller at 30 feet, down a narrow alley, and missing him. It was a disgrace which took a long time to live down!”
Charlie later mentioned that he had point-shot without a specific sight picture when he shot the man who was pistol-whipping his brother officer. Reading Askins’ own account, he seems mildly surprised that he hit him shooting like that.
He wrote, “Each time one of the big flat-nosed 240 grain slugs hit him, it brought forth a little puff of dust. This ‘bo had been riding the freight for several days and his clothing was full of dust. I cannot begin to tell you how happy it made me to see those bullets raise that dust! It made my day, believe me!”
A southpaw, Askins liked ambidextrous autoloaders and lever actions for long guns – the Savage Model 99, the .351 Winchester and the 12 ga. Remington. The latter, he said, was cut to 22-inch barrel length for him by J.D. Buchanan, who also affixed a full length extended magazine that held eight shells, bringing total capacity to nine rounds.
For a time when it first came out, Askins carried a 4-inch Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum in a Berns-Martin breakfront holster, although I can find no mention in his work of him ever using it in a gunfight. Virtually all his shootings with handguns found him using one or another Colt; not until the very end of his man-killing days would he shoot a human with a Smith & Wesson.
Askins began his law enforcement career as a forest ranger, using a stock GI 1911 .45 auto swapped from his lifelong best friend George Parker. “It was stamped ‘U.S. Property’ and had been purloined from the ordnance stores at Fort Huachuca,” Charlie later admitted. He wore it in a Sam Myres holster. This was also his first sidearm when he joined the Border Patrol, but he quickly switched to a Colt New Service .44-40 with 4-inch barrel.
The large-frame Colt double action was always an Askins favorite. The sawed-off snubnose version he had acquired for plainclothes wear quickly fell out of his favor when, sans sights, he fortunately missed the two shots he fired in the mistaken identity incident.
The same big gun in its long-barreled .38 Special target format, the Shooting Master, was Askins’ choice in the centerfire class of bullseye pistol, the discipline in which he captured 534 medals, 117 trophies, and the National Championship of the United States. When he became chief firearms instructor for the Border Patrol, he again showed his preference, though his choice of caliber was surprising. He wrote:
“As the Great Depression eased somewhat, the Border Patrol at my insistence purchased new revolvers for the entire service. I had small love for the Smith & Wesson, a dislike which I share to this day, and so I elected the Colt New Service in .38 Spl. caliber. The revolver had a 4-inch barrel, fixed sight, and a square butt.
“There were 642 revolvers purchased, at a cost to the U.S. Gov’t of $19 each. I had the entire shipment sent to me in El Paso. I shot each revolver and sighted it in. The sights were all the fixed type, the front sight was a great upstanding chunk of metal and the rear sight was a rectangular notch cut into the top strap. I made a tool to bend the front sight either right or left to bring the gun to zero, I filed down the front sight if the gun shot low and filled (sic) the rear notch if it shot high.”
In the .22 events, Askins shot a Colt Woodsman auto with a lead weight under the barrel. In the .45 category, his choice was a Colt Government tuned by the same “Buck” Buchanan who had tuned his shotgun and was now working for the legendary Frank Pachmayr.
In the national individual championship, an externally-stock GI .45 was required, and Askins used one that Buchanan and Pachmayr had internally accurized and fitted with a 4 lb. trigger.
This was one of the guns he took with him to the European Theater in World War II. He swapped between it and his personal New Service .38, that one fitted with a King sight rib and a cutaway trigger guard. He shot men with both guns.
He used 230 gr. Ball in the .45 and Winchester’s slow 200 gr. Super Police roundnose lead in the .38. Askins believed that an accurate handgun with a smooth action, sighted to point-of-aim, made the most sense as a defensive sidearm.
Based on his autobiography, the last man he killed was in 1957. Charlie was a U.S. military advisor in Vietnam. While hunting in the jungle one day, he ran across a Viet Minh soldier. Askins was carrying a Savage .358 lever action rifle (with which he had blown away a couple of other Viet Minh who interrupted his hunting on another occasion) but chose to draw his new Smith & Wesson Model 29 and fire it left hand only.
“I let the ambusher have the first 240 gr. slug right through the ribs on the left side. It was probably the first man ever killed with the .44 (Magnum) because it was quite new in those days,” Askins observed casually. He finished the man with a second shot to the throat.
In his later life – I got to know him in the early 1970s – he told me he generally carried one or another single-action .45 auto. At one time Charlie was quite partial to the small, lightweight Star PD.
I knew Charlie Askins as a man who was fun to drink with, but a man you wouldn’t want to get drunk with. He was an adoring husband and father, a lover of horses and a sucker for stray dogs. When his many fans wrote him, he answered them promptly and (usually) politely. Perhaps it was a natural compensation for the part of him that went beyond survival euphoria in the pleasure he took after killing a man.
I’ve heard people comment, “Whatever else you say about Askins, he sure didn’t suffer from that ‘post shooting trauma’ stuff.” I beg to differ.
One of the virtually inescapable things in the aftermath of killing is what Dr. Walter Gorski defined as “Mark of Cain syndrome.” This is the sense that having killed people has changed the way that others look at you, and the way you look at yourself.
There is no doubt that this was true of Charles Askins. The men he had killed, and the gunfights he survived, defined him in a very real way. Not just to others, but to himself. You didn’t have to know him and talk to him to see it. It was inescapably visible in the body of his written work.
There were facets of Charlie that I wouldn’t want in a cop. There was racism. There was a killer instinct, too strong, strong enough to sometimes slip its leash. Some of his shootings, if they’d been adjudicated, could have earned him “life without parole.”
Yet Charlie was also the man who first organized firearms training in the Border Patrol, laying a foundation that sees that agency today as one of the world’s leaders in law enforcement gunfight survival.
His tenacity, his courage, his coolness and above all his skill at arms are qualities we can all strive to emulate, though few of us will manifest them to the degree that he did.
Let that be the legacy of Col. Charles Askins, Jr. May he rest in peace.
Footnotes
n Charles Askins, Unrepentant Sinner, San Antonio: Tejano Publications, 1985, 58-59.
o Ibid. 59-60.
p Charles Askins, “Ride the River With Colonel Askins,” American Handgunner Annual 1988: 52-55.
q Askins, Unrepentant 81.
r Askins, “Ride the River,” 51.
s Unrepentant 75-76.
t Unrepentant 245.
Charlie Askins had a lot of fans. I was (and remain) one of them. After the comments above came out in American Handgunner magazine, some folks thought I was unduly harsh on Charlie. I respectfully disagree. Charlie saw himself as a man-killer, and was proud of the gunfights he had survived. I knew him, and I think he would have liked the article.
Another man I knew was Jim Cirillo, whose gunfights took place in the 1960s and ‘70s. Charlie and Jim knew each other and got along well. Both pistol champions, they well understood how skill and confidence developed on the range carried over into actual gunfights. Both set trends in both the competition world and the world of combative handgun training.
JIM CIRILLO WAS A DYNAMIC SPEAKER and a most impressive teacher. He spent the second half of his career teaching both cops and armed citizens to survive gunfights as he had.
Situation: A master shooter applies his skills to a high-risk felony squad…and learns that there is more to gunfighting than shooting.
Lessons: One of the last of the modern master gunfighters, Jim Cirillo left us a rich legacy of wise advice.
On July 13, 2007 – Friday the 13th, oddly enough – I received a phone call from Jim Cirillo, Jr. He told me his father had been killed in a traffic accident the night before. As I set the phone down, I was flooded with the memories of a man I had known for some 35 years. Gun enthusiasts and trainers knew him as the epitome of the modern police gunfighter.
He was one of the most misunderstood men I’ve ever known. Too many never got past the trigger finger to see the heart and the mind of Jim Cirillo. A cop on NYPD for a decade before he had to kill a man, six or so tumultuous, bullet shattered years on the famed Stakeout Unit (SOU) defined him in the public eye. It was easy to forget that after he retired from The City, his next career as an instructor – first with US Customs, then at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, and at last in the private sector after he “retired” – saw him save even more lives than those future deaths he prevented when he shot down vicious armed robbers who gave him no choice.
Jim wrote an excellent book still available from Paladin Press, Guns, Bullets, and Gunfights. If you’re serious about armed self-defense, it belongs in your library as surely as Cooper on Handguns and No Second Place Winner. The direct quotes that follow, unless otherwise noted, come from that important book.
Jim could have written another, perhaps in several volumes, on his own experiences in this vein. I can’t cover all Jim’s incidents in the 3000 words I’m allotted here. I’ll cover three of them. If the choice of those particular incidents surprises you, it probably indicates that you didn’t know Jim Cirillo.
CIRILLO, A PASSIONATE DEFENDER of the Second Amendment, lectures at Andy Stanford’s historic Snubby Summit in Titusville FL, 2005.
Cirillo’s first gunfight was his most famous. It occurred just two hours into his very first stakeout with the new unit. Three armed robbers hit a New York City dairy store. They positioned themselves in such a way that Cirillo’s partner, armed with a buckshot-loaded shotgun, could not fire for fear of hitting customers. Only Cirillo had an acceptable shooting angle. He told the story in his book:
“I was never so terrified in my whole life. They never told me in the academy that the targets were going to jump and move all over the place. There wasn’t one three-by-two-foot target to shoot at like on the police range. One gunman only gave me a six inch circle of his moving head to shot at. The other two jumped behind the cashier and only exposed about nine inches of their bodies on each side of her. During those hectic microseconds when I popped up from concealment, my protective crotch piece fell off my bullet-resistant vest. I prayed that none of the gunmen would hit me in what I considered a most vital area.
“When the metal nylon-covered crotch piece fell to the floor with a resounding clunk, all three turned toward the sound and pointed their handguns in my direction. The next thing I knew, I heard shots. I felt my Model 10 Smith & Wesson bucking in my hands, and I was asking myself mentally, ‘Who the hell is shooting my gun?’
“When the smoke cleared, I did not see one gunman anywhere. I cursed myself for the fear that overcame me and was terribly embarrassed by what I thought was a total loss of control and accuracy. When the cashier told me that one robber was still there, I quickly drew my second revolver, but she stated, ‘Don’t worry. He isn’t going anywhere.’ As I jumped down from the manager’s booth where I was positioned, I was partially relieved that at least I had stopped one of the robbers.”
JIM CIRILLO SHOWS ONE OF HIS FANS the fine points of fitting a revolver. Despite his star-level reputation, he was a friendly, self-effacing man with an earthy sense of humor.
A four-inch heavy barrel S&W Model 10 .38 Special like this one was Cirillo’s primary handgun in his gunfights. This one has S&W finger groove grips; Cirillo made his own to fit his hands.
He had done better than he knew. The robber who wasn’t going anywhere was mortally wounded by a bullet through the brain. Jim had hit him three times in the head with 110 grain Super Vel semi-jacketed hollow point .38 Special. Two of the bullets had skidded off his skull, leaving him up and running. The third had ended his deadly threat.
The other two thugs had escaped, one half-carrying the other. Both were arrested that day when they attempted to seek treatment for gunshot wounds. Cirillo had hurt each of them badly enough to make them desperately flee the fight.
Sergeant Joe Volpato, acting commander of the Stakeout Unit when I visited there in the early 1970s, told me that reconstruction showed that Cirillo had fired six rounds, and shot all three armed felons, in three seconds.
Jim told me that at the beginning of the fight, he was so scared his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth, but when his .38 came up and he saw a sight picture, a strange calm seemed to descend upon him, as if something was telling him that he was in his world, on his turf, now. Automatic pilot took over as his finger rolled the trigger, the way it did in PPC matches, of which he had already won so many. Jim experienced a phenomenon known as psychological splitting, a sense that there were two of him. There was a passive, Conscious Jim, who focused on the front sights and watched the blurred figures he was aiming at react to the shots, as Conscious Jim thought to himself, “Who the hell is shooting my gun?” And there was the active, Subconscious Jim, who was tracking the moving targets and smoothly stroking the double action S&W’s trigger.
Cirillo would later write, “I could not comprehend how I was able to take out three gunmen when I was so consumed with fear prior to the gunfight. I dared not speak of the strange phenomenon where I felt that someone else was shooting my revolver. Later, I understood that this miraculous reaction, which most probably saved my life, came from the subconscious…It was now evident to me that the subconscious can take over during moments of great stress. When it does take over, it is infallible – it can only achieve perfection. The shots that I made in that first gunfight were so precise and so quick that I have never been able to duplicate the feat at a range on paper targets.”
To fully understand why Jim’s performance that day, some forty years ago, has become so widely recognized as a genuine “feat of arms,” one has to remember the distances involved. Jim fired those shots at 60 to 75 feet – up to 25 yards – from the perpetrators, in a crowded market, shooting two of the perps out from behind a human shield.
You won’t find this one in Jim’s book, because he titled that Guns, Bullets, and Gunfights, and this story would have been off topic. I wish he had written another book and called it The Job. I suspect this incident would have been one of the first chapters.
I once asked Jim which of all his encounters he was most proud of. It turned out to be an incident where he and his partner looked through the one-way glass at the stakeout scene and saw a young man who obviously had a hidden gun. They were poised to open fire as soon as he made a hostile move, but something told Cirillo that things weren’t as they seemed. Telling the partner to cover him, Jim took off his armor and his heavy duty belt with its two .38s and five reloads of ammunition, stuffed one of his Model 10s into his belt to supplement the Colt Cobra he always carried in a pocket, and put on a windbreaker to cover his uniform. Then he slipped out of hiding and out into the store.
Cirillo made his way to the suspect, realizing as he approached that the guy was even younger than he looked through the milky one-way glass. He jumped the suspect, disarmed him, and put him on the floor. By the time the suspect was handcuffed, he and his partner realized that their gunman was a young teenager with a starter pistol.
A supervisor put in for Cirillo to receive a medal for his courage above and beyond the call of duty. It was overruled by higher brass. They had decided that taking off the armor he was supposed to constantly wear on stakeout had violated unit regulations, and thus, could not possibly be rewarded. The NYPD is a department with a lot of heart, but in any organization of more than 30,000 people, it is possible for the heart to be choked by regulations.
CIRILLO CREDITED MUCH of his gunfight survival to his combat match shooting experience. Here he engages through a low window circa 1999 at the Winter National IDPA Championships at Smith & Wesson Academy.
People who didn’t know Jim and signed up for one of his classes often expected him to do nothing but brag about his own exploits. Anyone who thought that, didn’t know the man. Few American cops have ever earned more “been there, done that” creds in gunfighting, but Jim learned early that no two shootings were likely to be the same, and he was more likely to draw learning points from the many other gunfights he had studied than from his own. One he frequently cited was one in which he participated, but in which his own life was saved by his partner, one of his best friends.
A tip had been routed to the SOU that there would be a robbery at a hotel airport. The commander assigned his two most accomplished marksmen. If memory serves, the site was the Air Host Inn. With Cirillo was his most frequent stakeout partner, Bill Allard. Bill was as good a bullseye shooter as Jim was a PPC competitor, though he was no slouch at either game. Allard shot whenever he could as a military reserve at Camp Perry (where he would one day win a national champion title), and one year there had purchased a beautiful Colt National Match .45 auto. It was his favorite handgun, and as designated firearms instructor for the SOU, he had a loophole that allowed him to carry it “experimentally” on duty even at a time when official regs restricted officers to .38 Special revolvers. While the department mandated issue, non-expanding 158 grain standard pressure lead .38 ammo at the time, the penalties for carrying something else were not as strict as they would be later, and both Cirillo and Allard were fully prepared to endure a slap on the wrist if their non-approved ammo ended a gunfight more quickly. On this particular stakeout, that .45 auto was Allard’s primary weapon, and in its chamber – backed up by a magazine of hollow points – was a handload he and Jim had worked out, featuring a cup-point bullet with full wadcutter profile.
Let Jim tell the story: “I had confronted what was supposed to be two juveniles who had previously held up a certain hotel, always with their hands in their pockets. Bill and I had set up a plan with the desk clerk where he would use a code word when speaking to this juvenile team. When we heard the coded word, one of us would go out a side door and cut off their escape.
“Sure enough, the clerk panicked and gave us the code word, only this time it was with a different armed team. As I slipped out the side door, what a surprise I received – both individuals were armed with autos! They both pivoted at my movement. The first gunman swung his weapon in my direction, but I dared not fire with a lobby guest directly in the line of fire. The gunmen then swung their weapons back and forth between me and the clerk. I yelled for them to drop their weapons. I knew the first character was doped up and wasn’t going to let anyone get in the way of his next dose. As he swung his weapon back on me, I prayed that his shot would miss my unprotected neck and head.
“It seemed like an eternity before I saw the billowing dust and gun smoke pour out from behind the hotel desk and then heard the shot from Bill’s .45. The first gunman reared up from a crouch, walked backward on his heels for about four steps, then fell backward. He was dead before he hit the hotel floor. The second gunman dropped his weapon and ran for the exit. Neither Bill nor I fired for fear of hitting pedestrians outside the hotel entrance.
“At the postmortem examination, we saw that the .45 wadcutter had entered the gunman’s sternum, clipped the pericardium sac, and come to rest along the left side of the spine. It had expanded to more than an inch in diameter. Had Bill used a standard .45 bullet, I probably would not be writing this…”
Jim so frequently used this incident as a case study in class because it was high in learning points and low in machismo. It pointed up the need to rely on your partner, and the fact that no one person can always manage things alone. Just as movement of innocents in the dairy store had prevented his partner from firing but permitted Jim to shoot because of his slightly elevated position in the manager’s booth, the Air Host Inn situation left Cirillo unable to shoot because of the unexpected movement of a hotel guest into his field of fire.
FROM LEFT: Walt Rauch, Jim Cirillo, and Mas Ayoob at the Snubby Summit in 2005.
Cirillo emphasized tactics as much as he did marksmanship. Studying the SOU in the early ‘70s, I accompanied Stakeout sergeants Tom Derby and Augie Luciente as they scoped out establishments that were candidates for SOU protection. Angles of fire, angles of view, paths of access and egress were all carefully examined. Sometimes, the unit would literally restructure their potential battleground. Installation of one-way mirrors was one of their favorite strategies. Jim always pointed out to his students the importance of predicting what could happen, and controlling the scene as much as possible before the gunfire erupted, and reminded them that the same principles applied to armed home protection.
He understood that the term “gunfight” is a misnomer. The guns don’t fight, the involved human beings do. Cirillo observed that the best gunfighters on the unit were competitive shooters accustomed to shooting accurately under pressure, and hunters, the latter less because they had taken some degree of life than because they had conditioned themselves to watch an area for certain things with unrelenting focus, without being distracted.
Those who came to know Cirillo were often surprised that he was far from the steely-eyed killer they expected to meet based on his reputation. Jim was an ebullient, outgoing man, always smiling and always joking. Facing death had taught him to love life. He was very much a family man, a loving dad to son Jim, Jr. and daughter Margie, and was devastated by the untimely death of his wife and soul-mate Mildred. For the last nine years of his life, he found happiness again with partner Violet Martinez. Hunting or fishing, dinner out or just good conversation with friends, Jim was a man who had learned to appreciate – and do something useful with – every minute.
He coped better than many with the fact that he’d repeatedly had to kill men. He had strong religious faith, and that seemed to help him a lot. So did his strong love of family. Jim wrote, “The family man…was even more superior, for he took fewer chances. He wanted to go home. He wasn’t about to let some beast of prey hurt him. He gave us safety and deliberation.”
Not all of his colleagues coped so well as he. The SOU had a high incidence of cardiovascular problems, ulcers, PTSD, and other stress-related problems. One member’s heart stopped at age 36.
Even Cirillo couldn’t escape “post shooting trauma” entirely. One element of that is what police psychologist Walter Gorski described as “Mark of Cain syndrome,” the situation of being seen by others primarily as a killer instead of the good person you are. Jim learned that despite strong recommendation for promotion by the superiors who knew him, it had been turned down farther up the NYPD food chain by a commissioner who had said, “If we promote Cirillo, it would be telling all the young cops who come on the job that we promote cops who kill.”
The comparisons between Wyatt Earp, Charlie Askins, and Jim Cirillo are striking. All three were hunters, for one thing. Earp did it professionally; Askins did it throughout his life, recreationally (and in a sense professionally, since his written legacy is rich with tales of hunts around the world); and Cirillo was an avid hunter who used handguns almost exclusively.
Each man shot in competition. Earp appears to have done so casually, in the format of informal matches, but organized competition with handguns was embryonic in his time. Askins was a national champion and won many state and regional championships. Cirillo had won the state championships of New York and New Jersey at the time of his first gun battle.
All of them made it clear they’d rather be holding a rifle or a shotgun than a handgun when trouble started, but religiously carried sidearms throughout their lives for the moments when trouble came on them by surprise and the portable pistol would be all they had. Earp used one or another single action Colt .45 at the O.K. Corral and to kill Florentino Cruz, but used a shotgun to kill Frank Stilwell in the train station shooting and Curly Bill Brocius in the gun battle at Iron Springs. After Earp’s death, his widow supposedly told a researcher that Wyatt had used a rifle to kill Johnny Ringo, a shooting for which he never personally took credit. Charlie Askins killed his various opponents with double action revolver and with semiautomatic pistol, with assorted rifles and the .351 Winchester carbine, and with shotguns. Jim Cirillo shot all his opponents with either a Smith & Wesson Model 10 .38 Special revolver, or a 14-inch-barrel Ithaca Model 37 12 gauge pump gun. He never mentioned shooting anyone with a rifle, but noted that the .30 caliber M1 Carbine with 110 grain expanding bullets had worked remarkably well for some other members of the Stakeout Squad.
All of them understood the rationale of the backup gun. You see Earp’s explanation here earlier, in his words to his biographer Stuart Lake. Charlie Askins didn’t mention it often, but in a mid-century article on hideout guns in one of the Gun Digest publications he mentioned that he often carried a short-barrel .38 revolver concealed as a backup weapon. While on the Stakeout Squad, where each officer was required to carry two handguns in addition to the issue long gun, Jim Cirillo wore a four-inch heavy barrel Model 10 as the primary duty sidearm on his right hip, a second Model 10 with tapered four-inch barrel as his secondary (worn butt-forward on his left hip, accessible to either hand), and his ever-present two-inch barrel Colt Cobra .38 with hammer shroud in a pocket. He told me that on some particularly high risk jobs, he would have a fourth handgun, a totally-forbidden-by-the-department Walther PPK .380 auto, tucked behind his waistband in case he was surprised from behind at gunpoint, patted down, and disarmed of everything else.
All three of these men had custom guns that became their trademarks to one degree or another. For Earp, of course, it was the Buntline Special. I’ve discussed this with Western historian Lee Silva, who is convinced that Earp did indeed own a long-barrel Colt (more likely ten-inch than twelve in barrel length), and according to Lake, Earp used it to kill Florentino Cruz, one of the men he held responsible for the murder of his brother Morgan. Many years before Colt brought out their distinctive Python with ventilated rib barrel, Charlie Askins had a King vented barrel rib complete with adjustable sights on a Colt New Service .38 Special he shot men with, in the European Theater during World War II. Among gun enthusiasts, Charlie earned fame for coming up with the idea of a gun that would absolutely dominate the Centerfire class at the National Bullseye Championships, a game then dominated by thumb-cocked .38 Special revolvers. It was a .22 Colt Woodsman target autoloader, converted to work with a centerfire small caliber French Velo Dog, a low-power, light-recoil cartridge then technically legal for the game. He got so many accusations of cheating that he never actually used the modified pistol there, and the National Rifle Association was so shaken by the whole “Askins Affair” that it changed the rules to make .32 caliber the smallest that could be used in the Centerfire matches. Jim Cirillo is believed to have been the first man to use a “PPC gun” in PPC shooting, getting his friend Austin Behlert to put a massive one-inch diameter barrel on a Model 10 frame. The trend he began would change the game, with that type of custom revolver dominating utterly for decades. And all, of course, made sure to carry guns with particularly smooth actions for “serious business,” with Askins and Cirillo employing the best gunsmiths to achieve the smoothest trigger pulls, and Cirillo often doing his own action work.
All were very strong family men. Earp’s loyalty to his brothers is legendary, and the ambushes that killed Morgan Earp and permanently crippled older brother Virgil led Wyatt on the famed Vengeance Ride that left a trail of deserving corpses. Earp’s first wife died young, and his second long-term common law relationship ended badly, but he was totally devoted to Josephine Sarah “Sadie” Marcus from a time beginning before the O.K. Corral incident to the day of his death so many decades later. Throughout Askins’ writing we can see his utter devotion to his father. You have to dig harder to find his long, devoted marriage to his wife, though his love for his sons shone through in much of his writing. Cirillo, too, was deeply dedicated to family. Jim wrote that the men who felt that way were more likely survivors; they knew what they were surviving for, and therefore, fought harder and took fewer foolish chances.
There is much to be learned from men such as these.
I first met Massad Ayoob in 1990, when I invited him to teach a two-day “Judicious Use of Deadly Force” seminar at a gun range where I worked. Little did I know that this encounter would change my life forever. Having already been trained in use of deadly force as a police officer and also as a police firearms instructor, I thought I was pretty well versed on the topic. Those two days though, where he dissected each and every aspect of the deadly force encounter, opened my eyes to a whole new way to look at the subject of use of deadly force in self-defense; that being to filter each and every aspect of teaching how and when to shoot, through the filter of the likely jury assessing whether or not your act was reasonable under the circumstances.
That year, not only did I take the aforementioned course, but I also took three other week-long classes from him, flying back to New Hampshire to complete the trilogy of LFI-I, II, and III, and along the way being asked by Ayoob to join the staff of the Lethal Force Institute.
When asked to write the foreword to this particular work of his, I must admit I was both honored and a little horrified. He was both my mentor and friend. Would I do him and this book justice? The good news is I don’t have to, the work speaks for itself, and speaks volumes.
I asked for a pre-release review copy of the book, and upon reading it, the years of working with him on the range and in the classroom seemed to fly by in my memories. I could hear his words, and came to realize that this book, Combat Shooting with Massad Ayoob, was a compilation of his life’s work to date, a history I am lucky to have shared with him for the past 20+ years.
The five different sections of the book, dealing with mindset, learning combat shooting, men we can learn from, competing as a way to sharpen your skills and choices that need making is a novel, but effective way to communicate the volume of information which an armed citizen should (and in many cases MUST) know before going armed in our society. Invoking the words of Jim Cirillo, Charlie Askins and even Wyatt Earp drives home the point that modern day training for the deadly force encounter shares much of the same techniques and mindset that earlier generations of armed Americans successfully used to succeed in deadly force encounters. We are fortunate to have their exploits to study, and their words to heed.
Over the past decade or so, we in the business have heard the constant drum beat of the crowd who say that shooting in competition will teach you bad habits, and will likely get you killed. I agree with Ayoob and many of my contemporaries who have not only tried to quiet that voice, but also urge others to get involved in competing with a gun in hand. But, there is a point to the anti-competition crowd that is worth considering. If ALL you do is compete, and you learn how to run the gun under stress shooting a sport, then it is likely that under the stress of the gunfight, your body will naturally seek to relieve that stress by using familiar shooting techniques. That is why competition should not be your only training venue, but instead used as a test to see if your skills are honed and your techniques are sharp. Ayoob explains this concept admirably.
As a man grows older (I am in my mid fifties as of this writing), he starts to look back at his life and mentally reviews the worthiness of his many experiences, and plots his course for the remainder of his days. Twenty years ago, I took Ayoob on as a mentor in the business of teaching the how and when of using the gun for self-defense, one of the more intelligent choices I have made. I look forward to the next 20 years to see how the final chapters of this fascinating career play out, and hope to share a good portion of the next two decades with Mas, on the range, teaching, learning and competing.
Welcome to these pages, and needless to say, thanks for buying the book. (Hopefully, that will be the only thing I say needlessly here.)
The topic is a broad one, and if the late editor Dan Shideler had assigned this book title to a hundred of us who work in the field, he’d have wound up with a hundred markedly different manuscripts. If you look at the six editions of Gun Digest Book of Combat Handgunnery that have been published over the years, you’ll see that Jack Lewis and Jack Mitchell, Chuck Taylor and Chuck Karwan and I, all had different interpretations and ended up writing very different books under the same title. It’s a broad subject, and a subjective one.
That’s as much true on the readers’ end as on the writers’. It’s not all about mindset, though that’s certainly part of it. Only one section on competition shooting? Yep, ‘cause competition shooting is only one piece of the puzzle. Only three famous gunfighters profiled in depth? Yup, because that was all there was room for in a book that wasn’t just analytical biography of been there/done that role models. Nothing on how to draw a pistol? Nope, that would be Gun Digest Book of Concealed Carry. What, no catalog of firearms? No, that would be Gun Digest.
Dan Shideler had wanted this to be a thinking man’s book, with lots of quotes from thinking men. I’ve tried, in his memory, to make it so. An unexpected cardiac event took Dan from us before the book was fully underway, and his premature departure is in my opinion a loss to the entire shooting community. He had been a joy to work with on the first volume of Massad Ayoob’s Greatest Handguns, and in his approach I saw his deep understanding of not only firearms, but this thing we’ve all come to call the Gun Culture. I miss him still, and hope that this book has turned out as he wanted.
I need to thank some other editors for permission to reprint here work I did originally for them. That includes group publisher Shirley Steffen and editor Linas Cernauskas at Harris Publications, which has published my annual Complete Book of Handguns since 1993; Roy Huntington, editorial director of Publishers Development Corporation and editor of American Handgunner, where I’ve been on staff for over 30 years; Jeff John, my editor at Guns, where I’ve served for a like period; Sammy Reese, who edits the PDC annuals; Dave Duffy at Backwoods Home magazine where I’ve been firearms editor for some 16 years now; and Bob Young, my editor at Black Belt. Without them, some of what you’re about to read would be less fresh for relying on a much older memory of the events. Thanks also to Gail Pepin, who did much of the photo work with me, and Herman Gunter III, my tireless and sharp-eyed proofreader. And of course, thanks as well to Marty Hayes, one of the best trainers in the business and the founder of the Armed Citizens Legal Defense Network, for writing the foreword.
I started this book with the section on mindset, because that’s where it all begins with the practitioner and therefore, is the core of the matter. Next comes a structured guide to learning combat shooting, because that’s where the practitioner gains the ability to weave together the necessary elements of this multidimensional discipline. In the middle of the book we analyze the experience of three gunfighters who all “faced the elephant” more than once. It’s striking how much they have in common, and on how many levels. Next is an introduction to the competitive element of combat shooting, and a rationale for why – though it’s not complete training in and of itself – competition can be an extremely useful component of training, skill maintenance, and skill assessment. Finally, we close with some of the choices the serious combat handgunner has to make if they’re going to get the most out of the whole endeavor.
I’ve left quotes as they were, and different writers, editors, and publications have different styles. Among the many quotes, you may see “.38 Spl.” and “.38 Special,” “bullseye” and “bulls-eye,” etc. It’s not my place to second guess another writer or editor’s writing style, so I “played those as they lay.”
There’s the occasional website address for an organization or trainer, but I didn’t put in a whole lot of those. They can change over time. Google can always find the current ones for anyone interested.
I hope, wherever he is, Dan Shideler is pleased with this book he assigned me to write. And I hope, wherever you are, you’re pleased with it too. None of us knows when we’ll actually need our skills in this discipline, which is why we need to keep them sharpened.