Old interview with Gabriel Suarez

From October 2003

Some excerpts:

Since then, I've always taken a very pragmatic approach to any fighting concept or method, whether it involves guns, knives, or fists. This hasn't endeared me to traditional trainers in the gun world (I think there's got to be a Gabe Hater’s Club out there somewhere), but I question everything. You have to do this. Doctors are not the only ones who bury their mistakes.
As for the firearms side of the package, I was largely self-taught up to the point when I entered law enforcement. Then my credentials opened lots of doors for training, so I took every opportunity to learn. I'll be painfully honest--most police shooting schools are trash and are more concerned with teaching tolerance and politically correct shooting than gunfighting. When the cops want to learn gunfighting, they go to the civilian schools. The state of the art resides in the private sector.

My turning point came when I went to train with Jeff Cooper at Gunsite Academy in 1989. Jeff is a true warrior, and he helped me to codify what was the correct mental attitude in a fight. Police schools make people think they are going to go to pieces and start crying, and such, in a gunfight. Cooper taught that this was not so and gave us alternatives to the commonly held notions. “Getting my mind right” was my primary focus in those days, and much of what I’ve learned since then is written in my new book, The Combative Perspective (Paladin Press, September 2003).

Gunsite Academy

I trained with Jeff a few more times. We became good friends, and I learned more in the conversations I had at his house than in all the police schools I attended put together. I still credit him with pointing me in the right direction in terms of marksmanship, but I do not teach or train his methodology any longer. Unwittingly through the years, I was blending the martial arts concepts and the gun, but that would only become evident to me later when I began to write the training curriculum for one of the courses I teach, Close-Range Gunfighting.

From the Q&A section:

Paladin: You say that "traditional" firearm trainers take issue with your teachings. Which specific concepts or techniques do they disapprove of and why?

GS: Well, you have a group of established teachers and schools stating that you must use their methods because they are the best and nobody else has any answers. They say you must shoot this special $2,000 pistol; stand this special, school-approved way; use this approved technique; and so on. Then I come along and kick their food bowl all the way out of the house by saying, “Shoot any kind of gun you want, don't stand but move—and move like you are going to fight. Integrate hand-to-hand combat and the gun, and use whatever technique works for you.” To the student it is liberating; to the traditional trainer it’s a nightmare of questions.

Paladin: You criticize police shooting practices as too "politically correct." What do you mean by that?
GS: The majority of officially sanctioned police schools that I have attended, whose course outlines I've read, or whose students I've trained, do not focus on the same type of material you'd get at a private-sector training event. And that includes many industry-sponsored schools as well. Oftentimes, their overall focus is to make cops so afraid of the repercussions of shooting anyone that they are almost afraid to take their guns to work. In one class, the training cadre was made up of Internal Affairs investigators! And that was a tactics class. I had one administrator (who was prominent in training cops and now is a vice-chief in Southern California) tell me, "It’s not about enforcement; it’s about perception." I laugh when some trainer advertises his class as “for police only,” as if that phrase somehow makes the class more advanced or the topics more "deadly." Rubbish. The state of the art resides in the private sector salles d'armes, the unofficial shooting schools.

Suarez International
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