Even if you are just a casual shooter, you probably know the name, Massad Ayoob. He has been handgun editor of GUNS magazine and law enforcement columnist for AMERICAN HANDGUNNER since the 1970s, and has published thousands of articles in gun magazines, martial arts publications, and law enforcement journals. He is the author of some twenty books on firearms, self-defense, and related topics, including “In the Gravest Extreme” and “Deadly Force,” widely considered to be authoritative texts on the topic of the use of lethal force.
The winner of the Outstanding American Handgunner of the Year Award in 1998, Mas has won several state and regional handgun shooting championships. He was the first person to earn the title of Five Gun Master in the International Defensive Pistol Association. He served 19 years as chair of the Firearms Committee of the American Society of Law Enforcement Trainers, and several years as a member of the Advisory Board of the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association. In addition to teaching for those groups, he has taught for the International Association of Law Enforcement Firearms Instructors and the International Homicide Investigators seminars.
Mas has received judicial recognition as an expert witness for the courts in weapons and shooting cases since 1979, and served as a fully sworn and empowered, part-time police officer for 43 years, mostly at supervisor rank. Ayoob founded the Lethal Force Institute in 1981 and served as its director until 2009, and now trains through Massad Ayoob Group. He has appeared on CLE-TV delivering continuing legal education for attorneys, through the American Law Institute and American Bar Association, and has been retained to train attorneys to handle deadly force cases through the Armed Citizens Legal Defense Network. Ayoob served for two years as co-vice chair of the Forensic Evidence Committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. He also appeared in each episode of Personal Defense TV (Sportsman’s Channel). Mas was named president of the Second Amendment Foundation in September of 2020.
If you carry a concealed weapon, you can thank Massad Ayoob for your ability to do so legally. His testimony, writing, and influence has made that possible in nearly every jurisdiction since the notion of “shall issue” became a thing in the late 1980s.
His knowledge and more importantly, his ability to relay that knowledge to his audience through the written word was one of my inspirations to start writing about firearms two decades ago.
We sat down with Mas a little while ago to sort of pick his brain about training, firearms, and his work.
Part One:
GunMag Warehouse: Mas, I guess I have to start at the beginning. What got you into law enforcement?
Ayoob: It was probably the most venal of things. I was a young competitive shooter at 23 years of age. A buddy of mine said, “Hey, have you ever seen a PPC match?”.
These practical police courses were strictly for law enforcement. And I said, “ No I’ve read about them, but I’d like to see one.”
So we went out and watched and I said “This looks like a hell of a lot more fun than the stuff I’ve been doing. How do you get into this?”.
He said, “Well you have to be a cop.” So he was a part-time officer and we wound up talking with the head of the police in a small town. And we told him what if he gave us badges that we would win the state championship pistol match for him next year.
They said “Yeah well, trophies are nice but I need cops, you’d have to learn the job get out there, and do it. I thought “Hey, that might be fun”.
So, my first night as a ride-along was an option there. Right away, I was like to hell with shooting, where has this been all my life? This is cool. So I started as an active part-time officer and did that for about 43 years. I would have done it full time but I wouldn’t have had the opportunity for my career to go all over the country, take classes, go shooting, study threat management, investigating officer-involved shootings, all that sort of thing. At about the same time I was writing my first article and it was published at the same age of 23 and I found myself writing for a lot of the police journals.
Subsequently, a group that was publishing a bunch of state-level police journals called me and said, “We read some of your articles in Law and Order magazine. And our problem is we’ve got cops on the job that can’t write or aren’t inclined to write. And we’ve got writers who don’t understand police work. How would you like to travel all over the country writing articles for us?”
And the money was good. So I promised on that and spent several years doing that and that in turn got me in more training. So I found myself teaching in the mid-1970s.
GunMag Warehouse: Was this civilian students or police students?
Ayoob: I started teaching cops in 1972 and civilian courses since 1981. I did the pilot civilian course for the Chapman Academy in Columbia, Missouri. And that was very successful and Chapman, the first world champion of the combat pistol who ran that school said, ”You know, you really ought to open a school of your own.” My wife and I talked about it and I thought, hey it might be fun, you know, do a class a month or something. And within a year that became the tail that wags the dog. We started the Lethal Force Institute in 1981 and by 1982 it became my primary occupation and has been ever since I left Lethal Force Institute in 2009. I started Massad Ayoob Group, which is the mantle I teach under now.
GunMag Warehouse: That’s incredible, now how did you get into the expert witness field?
Ayoob: In 1979, I was asked to do an expert witness case in New York City and from there it got around by word of mouth. I’ve been successful at that and I’ve been doing that ever since. My most recent trial was about two days ago. On the gun owners and civil rights side, I was on the board of trustees for many years, for the Second Amendment Foundation and was president of the organization in September 2020. So, I wear a lot of different hats. Uh But I’ve enjoyed the whole ride.
GunMag Warehouse: One of the things that always kept me reading your articles over the past 4-5 decades is that you’re a great writer. True, the information you put out is definitely in my wheelhouse, but you have that ability to hook readers in with your way of telling the story. I’ll never forget a piece you did in the Ayoob Files. I started reading, thinking it was a modern story involving local law enforcement, federal law enforcement, a confidential informer, and a street gang. Then halfway through it turns out it was your retelling of the Gunfight at the OK Corral. It was pure genius.
Ayoob: (Laughs) I try to do a few stories like that every once in a while. Of course, the point of it was to show that the dynamics of human violence seem to be timeless. All that changes is the clothes, the weapons they bring to the gunfight, and the conveyance to get them there.
GunMag Warehouse: Speaking of that, I know you’ve gone through all of what I call the caliber wars. I’ve seen it myself but I know you have much more input. The old 9mm versus 45 versus 40, etc. Yet, it seems like everything’s centering in back on the 9-millimeter. Is that what you’re seeing, too?
Ayoob: I do and it doesn’t worry me. I carry a 9mm, probably 2/3 to 3/4 of the year. But, people telling me 9mm equals 45 ACP is a bit much; they haven’t changed the laws of physics yet,
But the lighter recoil, the easier trainability for people who don’t have a lot of training time, lower cost to the ammunition, more rounds in the gun where that’s legal are all genuine advantages with the 9mm and the 9mm of today is way better than it used to be. But so, of course, is the 45 ACP.
Gunmag Warehouse: It’s almost unbelievable how far things have advanced in the past decade with 9mm as a cartridge and of course the size of the guns with these little micro compacts, like the Sig P365 and the baby Glocks and all the others. I know I see it as a gun reviewer. I’m finding it hard to write a bad review anymore.
Ayoob: Oh, we have the best guns, the best ammunition, the best holsters and the best training that we’ve ever had.
Part Two:
GunMag Warehouse: Mas, I always think of you as an influencer before influencers were a thing. Before we had YouTube or Instagram or whatever; if you were a dedicated shooter, you went to the gun magazines. At least I know I did and I almost always flipped to one of your articles before anything else.
Ayoob: I tell people I’m just a funnel. I’m not an Oracle, I’m a funnel. I go out there, I find the people who’ve been there and done it, who are there now when they’re doing it, and pick their brains. I put it into the funnel to filter out all the obvious bullshit and get it to as many people as I can.
Early on, I knew most cops and most armed citizens couldn’t afford to be training junkies. You know the departments won’t send them, and most individual persons’ budgets won’t allow it. But somebody who is in a position to take all those courses, who can funnel the key elements to others who need it, is basically the function that I perform,
GunMag Warehouse:: Yeah and that’s kind of a unique role we have in the firearms media, most of us get access to more stuff and more opportunities to shoot than the average person and I’m glad someone like you was there to show us the way to sort of lay it out for our readers and viewers.
What do you think of this newest resurgence in gun ownership and the culture in general?
Ayoob: Well, we’ve seen the last few years, so there’s the ammo droughts, the gun droughts, and we’ve seen those over the years, but the real turning point was 2020 and the pandemic.
GunMag Warehouse: Right.
Ayoob: A whole lot of folks realized what the newspapers and media were telling us: police forces are going to be decimated by the virus. And if one cop comes down with the virus, every other cop who had contact with him during that shift is going to get quarantined. And we’ve seen the rise of, you know, the summer riots that year and all that came with it. Community after community was burning. The police were saying, “We can’t help you, we’re tied up with us, we can’t respond to calls right now,” and people figured it out.
We learned a long time ago that we can’t wait for the fire department. We need to have a fire extinguisher at home. We can’t wait for the paramedics. We need to know first aid and CPR and to stop the bleeding. All that is exactly in the same realm. I consider it an analogy to a fire extinguisher. It’s an emergency piece of lifesaving rescue equipment. It’s designed for the individual first responder to hold the line until the designated governmental first responders, police fire and paramedics can get there to deal with it and take over. A whole lot more of the public is thinking that today.
GunMag Warehouse: Yeah, that’s one of the things I have to say that I noticed this time around. As you say, we’ve had these buying spurts go on in the past. you go to a typical gun shop, and they’d be cleared out. Just everything’s gone. Then six months later, maybe a year, you’d see used guns trickle back in.
It’s been three years now, and I do not see that at this time. People who had never bought guns before were buying guns and ammo, but I was thinking in the back of my head, you know what, everything I missed out on is going to be here a few months from now or a year from now. Todd’s going to need to make a truck payment, he’s going to bring that Benelli M1 back in and sell it, but I haven’t seen a whole lot of used firearms come back in at all.
Ayoob: Yeah. I’m seeing the same people that are predicting that, but one of the magazines I write for every month is Shooting Industry, a trade publication and I talked to a great many dealers and manufacturers. We are just not seeing that, Most of the people are keeping what they bought. One thing I was surprised by was, particularly in a time the quarantine was shutting down training, was that new people with guns were not being able to get trained on how to use them.
Oh my God, there will be an increase in accidental shootings. And we simply have not seen that dynamic, either. I have to say it kind of restores your faith in your fellow Americans.
GunMag Warehouse: Do you have any thoughts on this new brace rule with ATF?
Ayoob: Not really, that’s not something I know enough about to comment on. Okay, I’m kind of sad that they would say okay, you can have them. And then now that you’ve all bought them, we’ve changed the lines and you can’t have them. You’ll be a criminal if you keep it unless you register them. Although there is the amnesty but it’s really not the ATF’s finest hour.
GunMag Warehouse: Most definitely not.
Okay, so you said you’re carrying a nine nowadays?
Ayoob: Today I’m carrying a Glock 19 Gen 5 MOS with Winchester Ranger T 127 grain +P+ and a spare Glock 17 mag of the same ammunition. I actually just shot it yesterday in a Glock match.
GunMag Warehouse: Right on! Do you run an optic on that or you’re just using sights.
Ayoob: No. Now, I teach people how to use optics. I have optics guns. I don’t carry them myself at this time. I’ve seen too many of the batteries fail, fog over, dots that lose zero.
GunMag Warehouse: Right.
Ayoob: Yeah, they’re not in their infancy anymore, but they’re still in their teen years, you know. They can be troublesome and rebellious.
GunMag Warehouse: Right. Kind of building on that; I want to ask about one of your books, probably came out in 1983. “The Truth About Self Protection.”
Ayoob: Yep.
GunMag Warehouse: I found that in a used book store when I was serving as a US Marine Infantryman at Camp Pendleton a few years after it came out, and to me, that was a masterpiece. When I became an instructor in the 90s, I must have bought at least a dozen copies of that book over the years to give to people because I thought it was the greatest book of its kind. You ran the gamut from door locks to dogs, alarms, driving, and of course the guns. It’s been 40 years so some of it is dated because technology and dynamics have changed, but have you ever thought of revisiting that and updating it?
Ayoob: You know, that was the longest book that I ever did. One of the editors told me it was about the same length as William Manchester’s “History of the War in the South Pacific.” At one time I sat back down and said, “Holy shit! I’m never gonna write a book this long again.” As you said, there’s been great leaps forward, including everything from the technology for self-defense to the alarms, the locks, the cameras, and all that. But there are other people writing about that, and right now, I’m staying with the weapons side and use of force teaching.
GunMag Warehouse: I hear you, I just think it was it was an unbelievable resource, it was the most comprehensive book on the subject. And you covered everything. To this day I don’t think anyone has ever been so comprehensive in their coverage.
Ayoob: You know, come to think of it. I haven’t either. But the technology is changing so rapidly, whoever does it, the book’s gonna be obsolete in a couple of years,
GunMag Warehouse: Right? I mean that’s the thing. But even though you wrote that one in the early 80s, I was giving that out to people in the early to mid-90s when I was teaching a CCW class in Florida. It was dated a little bit, but the basics are all there. And you know the basics done well is what makes you successful.
Ayoob: I appreciate you doing that and saying so.
GunMag Warehouse: Of course, I have the “StressFire” ones too. I write for Gun Digest and I know they keep up on a lot of their publications on the book side with updates every few years. I know they did that with one of your others.
Ayoob: Yes, the “Deadly Force” book came out in 2014 and last year the updated second edition came out and last month or the beginning of this month the audiobook is up. I tell people it’s my first audiobook, so I always had a good face for radio—let’s see if I have a good voice for radio.
GunMag Warehouse: So where can my readers find more about how to take a training class with you?
Ayoob: Massad Ayoob Group dot com. We teach all over the country. I’ve got classes right now in Washington State, California, Florida, New Hampshire, and a whole lot of places in between.
If you go to https://massadayoobgroup.com, that will lead your readers to where and when they find a class that’s within striking distance. It has the connections with the local hosts and the local hosts are the ones who take care of sign-up and all of that.
GunMag Warehouse: Thanks again for talking with us and for all that you do and have done for us.
