It has been a tough week for shooters and the friends and followers of two handgun greats.<\/p>\n
In the early morning hours of Tuesday last, Todd Louis Green passed away after a very long \u2013 and very valiant \u2013 battle with cancer. Only 45, Todd was one of the brightest and fastest-rising stars in the firearms training world until he had to turn his attention to fighting his disease, a battle that included successful advocacy for cancer treatment research on multiple fronts.<\/p>\n
Todd was a skillful instructor and excellent diagnostician, who never patronized his students. He was also constantly testing new things, whether guns or techniques.\u00a0 High volume endurance tests on handguns, for example. Todd was a big advocate of AIWB (appendix inside the waistband) concealed carry, and a few years ago I watched him (minus a kidney recently lost to cancer) outshoot us all at the Polite Society Match (in Tulsa that year at the US Shooting Academy) with a double action HK .45 drawn from that type of concealment. Equally comfortable with Glocks and 1911s, Todd was a strong advocate of double action semiautomatic pistols for practical street reasons that went beyond mere \u201cshootability.\u201d He was also an \u201cindustry insider,\u201d having worked for both Beretta and SIG, and was happy to share his knowledge with the shooting public.<\/p>\n
When radical cancer surgery took substantial bone out of his gun arm, Todd made lemonade out of the lemons by using it as an opportunity to study what it felt like to be a new shooter or a handicapped shooter, knowledge he shared with those who followed his excellent posts, archived at the forum he created \u201cwhere professionals go,\u201d pistol-training.com<\/a>.\u00a0 It remains a treasure trove of knowledge and a monument to Todd\u2019s approach. He will be greatly missed.<\/p>\n In close proximity to Todd\u2019s death came news that Walt Rauch had suffered a serious stroke. Walt is one of the grand old men of tactical handgunning: one of the originators of the famed National Tactical Invitational, a co-architect of the International Defensive Pistol Association (IDPA), and a strong supporter of the International Practical Shooting Confederation (IPSC). His career took him from the US Secret Service to the Philadelphia Warrant Squad, where he became the man I described decades ago in my book \u201cThe Truth About Self-Protection\u201d as a legal burglar, empowered by warrant to enter homes to take dangerous men into custody. He did it in a day when such entries were made not by heavily armed and armored SWAT teams but by a couple of detectives in suits with department-issue snub-nose .38 revolvers. What Walt learned and shared with the rest of us \u2013 in lecture, and in his many articles in magazines like Combat Handguns and Handguns \u2013 \u00a0made us all safer.<\/p>\n