An Armed Man Is a Citizen; Unarmed, He is Merely A Subject
Preface:
It is not common for one to enjoy rereading something that he wrote a decade previously. Times change, styles change, attitudes change, and most of all people grow, both intellectually and emotionally. It is therefore with gratification and some little surprise that I was able to reread Principles of Personal Defense at the request of the publishers, and to discover that I felt no need to change anything of importance. It stands as it stood, and insofar as it spoke the truth ten years ago, it speaks it still.
The booklet is essentially a digest of a presentation I developed while working in Central America before the Communist takeover there. This part of the world has always been turbulent, and the need for individual self defense has remained fairly constant ever since the departure of the Spanish in the early part of the nineteenth century. Individual conduct in lethal confrontation is not, however, something that is confined to any one locale or era, and if there are principles guiding its conduct-and I believe there are-those principles do not change according to geography, history, or sociological whim. If a principle exists it must be immutable, for that is what a principle is a truth standing apart from the mood of the times.
If I were to rewrite this pamphlet completely, the only thing I would change would be those few personal anecdotes that appear within it. I would update them to include only those that have taken place within the last year or so. As it now stands, the anecdotes are all at least ten years old, but the more I look at them, the more I realize that there is no need to change them, because the experiences that have more recently come across my desk, and in which I have lately been involved, simply corroborate what has already been set down. These experiences could be rewritten to include nothing that happened more than one year ago and we would have the same story. Thus it has not been necessary to do any extensive rewriting.
By Jeff Cooper

