Manhood, Rifles and Survivalism: Remembering Col. Jeff Cooper By John Steele

     Australia does not have writers along the lines of Jeff Cooper (1920-2006), just like it does not have bad ass cultural heroes such as Jim Bowie (1796-1836).  Sure we have Ned Kelly, but couldn’t anyone have put on a tin can and got shot up? Just joking irish fans, I love old Ned and his tin suit, real cool and clever. We Aussies were once as tough as our brother Yanks, but now it is a moot question who has the lowest T.

     Anyway, back to Jeff Cooper, the father of American pistol craft, and the thinking man’s survivalist:
https://www.buckeyefirearms.org/quotations-jeff-cooper
While there are a lot of Cooper’s works out there, I found a real gem from Special Weapons, 1983 Annual, “The fighting Rifle: Forgotten but Not Gone.” I was culling out my bag of papers to get paper to use as fire-stater, and I read this one before burning it. You see, living in a tent, space is premium and there is no room for such luxuries such as storage.

     Cooper was a critic of the affirmative action M16 rifle firing a small 5.56 x 45 m round. He described this round, and the Colt gun firing them, as a “poodle shooter.” The military had moved to this round because of weight and logistic considerations, that the average weak grunter could carry more ammo, since with select fire and a lack of skill in marksmanship soldiers tended to “spray and pray.” I have seen this first hand in ‘Nam with Americans just shooting up innocent vegetation, expending 500,000 rounds in the Vietnam War, for one kill:
http://www.103fieldbatteryraa.net/documents/74.html

     Cooper said: “Farmers who fought the Boer War shot weapons that were vastly superior to those which are issued to American or Russian soldiers today.” He thought that this posed something of a philosophical puzzle, seeing the decline of the rifle as a symbol of the decline of the man:

“I used to consider it embarrassing to train a modern soldier or marine to the fine edge of physical conditioning and then to hand him a .223 rifle with which to fight. Looking over the scene today it seems that maybe a .223 is about all he can handle. The notion that a man can carry more rounds of .223 and can shoot then faster than with, say, a .30-06, is meaningless when one remembers that all our soldier has to do is to hit two or three enemies solidly, with two or three shots, in order for us to win the war.”

Along the same lines, Cooper said in “Cooper’s Corner,” Guns & Ammo, February 1993, p. 105:

“Two hundred misses do not constitute firepower. One hit constitutes firepower.”

     Not only was Cooper right about the decline of the military, but I bet my sweat-coated rotting ‘Nam hat that even talking about gun issues makes some conservatives “uncomfortable.” Cooper said, in line with the Founding Fathers of America: “Pick up a rifle and you change instantly from a subject to a citizen,” terrible extremist thought which founded America.  Libtards have already begun a “racist’ chant, which they now do even for East Asians, because they are not happy with subjects, but want communist slaves. That is how far we have tumbled and we need to find out why and deal with it.