I would recommend this book to new comers. Unless you are searching for a reference book, you should spend your money elsewhere if you are already involved in shooting.


Put the simplicity in perspective   November 11, 2004
 18 out of 19 found this review helpful

I think the part that people don't get about Cooper is that he is basicaly a military style training guy. His perspective is to give you the essence of what you need to know, drill you on that, and proclaim you more than fit to undertake the challenges of the world.

The fact is that you may be a more sophisticated shooter than what Cooper describes, but his measure is combat, dangerous game and hunting, all places where sophisticated techniques often fail, unless your life is boring enough to entail stuning levels of practice. Your race gun perspective may win out, or loose you the day, you won't know till it's too late whether it was really better. Cooper's stuff is solid and will give you a better chance of coming through alive or well fed.

It's like Cooper's views on fear, he recomends anger as an antidote. Now a sophisticated guy might recomend Zen Budhism in it's marchalist guise, but most people are extremely unlikley to get to a level where they can use that, and know it is tested for the situation they will enter.

Anyway this book is about rifle shooting, and it's all you need to know for hitting big targets fast. There are technical issues where Cooper is wrong, but if you keep the real world objective in mind, he is usualy right. For instance if you want to hit a 1 minute target at 100 yards, the accuracy of your rifle is a big deal, want to hit a 10 minute target at 100 yards, and realisticaly you won't find a rifle bad enough to mater, as long as it has a good trigers and sights. This stuff drives people crazy, because they spend thousands to build a race gun to win at play scenarios that just don't exist in the real world. Take those LA bank robers. The problem wasn't that nobody could engage multiple targets against the clock: hundreds of courageous officers couldn't engage two guys from point blank range, with ample time.


The very short book for beginners   October 12, 2004
 5 out of 8 found this review helpful

I think this book is not really worth the money. However, if you are only interested in the basics and don't plan on buying any other books on this subject, it's worth it. The information in this book is something most people know already and I think I was mislead. This book seems to be too general about the art of shooting. But I still think that this book has a lot of value to beginners.