The Annoyed Man wrote:MOA wrote: Well, I've nearly finished the book, and there are some average ordinary Americans who have heroic roles in the story. Dillon Cole is some kind of ninja god, but there are a few regular folks with concealed carry licenses who acquit themselves very well with a number of different kinds of handguns and a 12 gauge pump gun in one case. They just don't have as prominent a role as Cole does as the primary protagonist.
Hi Annoyed Man and fellow DFW-metro-madness inhabiter,
Dillon's not really a ninja-god as he only has two physical encounters in the book (the second one being in the very last chapter). In the back-county pool hall/beer joint, his opening two moves are actually moves taught to us in SERE school way back in the late 70's. The third move is just an old fashioned bar-brawl move, and the last is a basic arm-bar hold/submission hold and one of the first submission holds I learned in judo back when I was in junior high.
His other physical encounter is in the water and trust me, even an old competitive swimmer like myself can't do karate moves in the water--that is a whole nother environment! We used to play water-polo in the off-season and you learn every dirty trick in the book and I DID employ a couple of those in the final scene.
The main character is a good shot, however, but gives credence to the old line of "Excuse me, how do you get to Carnegie Hall?"
"Practice, son. Practice."
I shot a lot of IPSC during my LE days and I saw some other-worldly shooters, even in the LE world. I'll tell ya right here and right now, the US Secret Service boys and girls can just flat well shoot! So can the Mississipi Highway Patrol. And back in the day (mid/late 80's, I remember being in a LE match with some McKinney PD officers who were shooting their issue S&W Model 29s in a four-inch barrel loaded with factory .44 Specials. . . THOSE boys could dang well shoot!
Dillon Cole is a retired advertising executive, so strategy and tactics are a strength of his, along with presentation skills and power of persuasion. His "legendary" status in LE came from finding three Top 15 fugitives, which in that line of work with the USMS is like winning the Super Bowl three times. But you find and catch those guys with brains, not brawn, so combined with his friends and former boss at the NRA's ad/pr agency, Cole helps "keep the skeer up" in seeing the big picture of gun-owners and CHL holders holding and defending the line.
One of my primary objectives when writing Above Reproach was to portray gun-owners as the good guys and demonstrate that there are still law enforcement folks who see gun-owners as not just the good guys, but the most integral defense against all enemies (foreign/domestic) that we have. This is displayed in the incident in Pocatello, Idaho when the cops congratulate the CHL holders who stopped a shooting before it even started.
But most of all, I just wanted to write something that was fun to read and made you feel GOOD about being a gun-owner, CHL holder and defender of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
JD
Compared to me, even v-rog is a ninja god, and when I saw him a couple of days ago, he was using a walker and had come over to borrow one of my canes.
