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Twenty-five years ago, an officer with the Salt Lake City Police Department by the name of Dennis Tueller wrote an article entitled “How Close is Too Close,” which initiated considerable discussion about law enforcement officers’ defensive options when confronted with a suspect armed with a contact weapon. Tueller’s study is now one of the classic survival lessons, taught to students of armed defense, both in police circles and by trainers educating qualified armed citizens, as well.
Dennis Tueller’s study went so far beyond him that his name has become inextricably linked with what is erroneously called the “21-Foot Rule,” as if an arbitrary distance could be established beyond which an assailant armed with a contact weapon was no longer an immediate threat, or put conversely, justifying use of deadly force if an assailant with a contact weapon was within a certain distance.
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So what do you train and what do you practice? Why do you do these things? These are important questions to ask yourself and anyone you train with or receive training from. When it comes to firearms training, I would argue that marksmanship, holster skills, recoil management, trigger control, and movement are probably 80% of what you should seek training on and practice in your own time. Those are the skills most likely to save your life should the need arise.
Seek out training from a high-quality, vetted source. Spend some money on training under a good instructor before you start trying to buy your way into competency through gear. Don’t get me wrong, quality gear is important. But as trainer Paul Howe has stated, “Get some training. A $500 bat won’t fix a $1 swing.” I also recently read a great analogy: “You wouldn’t go to a dojo and spend 8 hours with a martial arts teacher and expect to be a highly belted martial arts practitioner. Yet that’s exactly what people expect to do with a gun.”
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Beretta 20X Bobcat: Tip-Up .22 Gets an Overhaul
Let’s look at the Beretta 20X Bobcat. It was released in late 2024 as the newest evolution of their series of tip-up barrel pocket pistols. It’s a complete redesign of the 21A Bobcat, which was in production from 1984 until this year.
The 21A was originally intended to be a super-concealable carry gun. Of course, being a .22, it’s a lot more enjoyable to shoot than most pocket-sized centerfire pistols. Some people keep them around purely as fun range guns. A few years ago, Beretta leaned into this with the 21A Covert, which has a threaded barrel and wider, more ergonomic grip panels.
Other than that, the 21A has gone more or less unchanged for 40 years and while it’s got a lot of charm, it could use some updating. Has Beretta addressed the old Bobcat’s shortcomings with the new 20X? Let’s look at what’s different.
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American Liberators: Buchenwald
Soldiers from the XX Corps of General George S. Patton’s Third US Army, advancing near Weimar, Germany, made a shocking discovery during the second week of April 1945. Elements of the Third Army had liberated a Nazi concentration camp at Ohrdruf on April 4, 1945, but few American leaders expected what they would continue to find. In a letter to his wife, Patton observed: “Ohrdruf was the first, and all of us prayed the last, concentration camp any of us would ever see. No such luck.”
For the soldiers of XX Corps, the first sign of something unusual came following a skirmish with German forces near Hottelstedt, Germany, on April 11, 1945. Combat Team 9, an American combined task force composed of troopers from the 6th Armored Division, had swept through the area in what official Army histories call a “spectacular drive” during the war’s final push. Afterwards, while mopping up resistance in the combat team’s wake, the 80th Infantry Division were fired on by a group of fifteen SS soldiers before encountering about 50 disheveled men who had emerged from the forest wearing striped uniforms. When intelligence officer Captain Frederic Keffer asked where they were from, “in disquieting and cryptic fashion, they pointed south and said they had escaped from a terrible place deep in the woods, not far away. The place was a concentration camp. It was called Buchenwald.”
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I’ll confess right up front: this question makes me cranky. It makes all sorts of assumptions I’m not willing to stipulate. It assumes that all women are alike, for one thing. There is no one best anything for all women! Anyone who tells you otherwise has no idea what he is talking about, so don’t listen to him. He might know something about guns, but he knows nothing about women.
The other assumption usually hidden in this question is that all women are reluctant, beginning shooters with small, weak hands. Some of us might be beginners, but not all of us. Some have small hands, but others don’t. Some are reluctant when they first begin shooting, but most probably are not. Yet this question often assumes that women have to be cajoled and coaxed along, babied and humored, to get them shooting. That’s condescending, but worse, it’s inaccurate in most cases. Most women who begin shooting do so for their own excellent reasons.
Guys, please hear me out. Your wife’s or girlfriend’s femininity might be the most important thing about her in your eyes, but it really has no bearing on what she can shoot or how well she’ll learn to do so. There are a lot — I mean a LOT — of other variables that matter far more than the sex of the shooter.
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How the Kinect Series Advances the M-LOK Platform
For shooters who frequently adjust their rifle setups, this process can become a barrier to experimentation and adaptation. The patented Kinect mounting system allows accessories to attach instantly through a spring-loaded wedge mechanism that locks securely into the M-LOK slot when the mount is pressed into position.
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In 2025 Springfield Armory introduced the full-size SA-35 and delivered the look and feel of the P-35 while adding several welcome upgrades. They have just announced a 4-inch smaller version. The obvious change is barrel and slide length: 4″ versus the standard 4.7″. The slide is shortened to match the barrel. A notable mechanical change is a full-length guide rod with a .255-inch diameter that narrows to .199-inch, paired with a flat recoil spring instead of the classic round-wire spring.
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Performance isn’t measured in haste; it’s built through a deliberate, repeatable process. Speed and accuracy are the natural result of disciplined execution. You should be profoundly focused not on the outcome but on the process leading to that result. Such focus is built by developing the mental discipline required to make every round a demonstration of tactical patience.
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Guns & Ammo Throwback: Jeff Cooper vs. Terrorism
So here we are in the “Age of Extortion!” Our local friendly felons have finally discovered what has long been taken for granted in what we used to call “more backward countries” — that crime does pay, in millions. All you need to do is threaten to do something terrible and people will throw money at you. You don't need any particular talent or skill to get rich this way, and you don't need education or training. The only requisite is nastiness, and that is no rare quality.
We can speculate at length upon why this foulness has come upon us so strikingly at this point in our history, but I doubt that any incontrovertible conclusion will result. My own suggestion is simply overpopulation. Like rats, we get testier as we get crowded. By simple arithmetic, if the proportion of goblins to people in our society remains constant, doubling our population doubles the number of goblins. And they reinforce each other as their numbers rise.
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Legacy Arms: The Finest Luxury Shotguns
True legacy arms are far more than the sum of their parts. Whether displayed at home or abroad, at the club or the cabin, a masterpiece sporting arm makes a defining statement in any gathering, an object of pride for its owner and an absolute standout for every collector, shooter, and fowler who appreciates the best of the best. While 99.99 percent of us will never own such a piece of art, we can certainly appreciate their craftsmanship.
For hundreds of years, high-end sporting guns were reserved for Europe’s wealthy elite. The introduction of the break open, breechloading action along with the invention of the hammerless boxlock and sidelock actions gave rise to a trove of classic European designs, including legacy arms from storied European manufacturers such as Purdey & Sons, Westley Richards, E. J. Churchill, and more.
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The Law of Unintended Consequences
If I were practicing law, I would give that advice to all my clients who were criminals. After all, not much good can come from telling lies to the police, and certainly not much good comes to the criminal if he confesses to committing the crime. So, while well intentioned, the advice to keep your mouth shut until your attorney arrives has some potentially severe unintended consequences for the innocent.
Still, the question of what to tell police merits consideration, but because each self-defense incident will be unique, the question cannot be answered uniformly or with a one-liner. What you should do or say if you shoot a burglar in your home in self defense is likely different than what you should do or say if you shoot someone in the middle of a parking garage late at night during a robbery attempt. Why? Because the circumstances and events differ. Your decision to shoot comes in response to actions by the perpetrators, and events unfold differently during those dissimilar attacks. As you know, one size does not fit all, and neither does one uniform statement to the police–or no statement at all–work effectively in all cases.
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Pistol red dots make shooting faster, more intuitive, and more accurate—but they come with choices. This short resource explains four things every shooter should understand when picking a pistol optic: Footprints, Reticles, Dot Size, and Closed vs Open Emitters.
Footprints: The physical dimensions as well as bolt / screw pattern that determines if a dot will mount to your slide or adapter plate. Match footprint → no adapters → clean install. Some guns will require the use of adapter plates.
Reticle types: Dot, dot + circle, multi-reticle options — simplest often works best for pistols.
Dot size: Measured in MOA (minutes of angle). Smaller = precision, larger = quicker to find and track.
Closed vs Open Emitters: Closed (window) = more protected optics; open = wider field of view but more exposure.
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Shot in the Back! Justified or Not?
Prosecutors have criminally charged police officers when the officer has shot someone in the back or when the officer shot someone falling down, stating that these shots were unjustified. There is a fine line between shots that are a lawful response to a deadly threat and shots that are fired after the deadly threat ceases. The only time a private citizen defender (or law enforcement officer for that matter) may use lawful deadly force is when another is threatening or using unlawful deadly force. When the threat has ended, the defender must stop using deadly force. Of course, the problem lies in determining exactly when the threat has ended. The fact that basic human nature often causes an attacker to reflexively turn away from the defender’s gun compounds the difficulty of making this determination.
Dynamic, deadly encounters can happen very quickly and a private citizen’s use of deadly force in lawful self defense can be over in moments. However, close legal scrutiny on the defender’s decision to start and stop shooting can result in the aftermath taking years to play out.
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