So I've been working my way through Jeff Cooper's Commentaries. So far I'm on Vol. 4, No. 4 (from March 1996).

One thing that should probably be stated right out the door is that Jeff Cooper's preferred home defense weapon is the shotgun. He speaks highly of the Lupara - what most of us would call a coach gun, an 18" barreled side-by-side, specifically with hammers - and states that his choice is a pump-action with one round of low-brass #6 birdshot followed up by 00 buck. So I don't think he's necessarily fond of the proposition of using a rifle of any variety for home defense.

Having said that, the Colonel seems to mention somethings over and over again and I was hoping to get some input on them from other folks.

- His definition of a "street sweeper" is a lever-action rifle.
- He repeatedly points out that he believes the Lee-Enfield No. 4 rifle is a superior arm to the SKS for the common man. It appears that at least part of this is due to him believing that a handful of men with bolt action rifles can rapidly upgrade their armaments by seizing them from the dead.
- He states - in developing the rules for practical rifle competition - a desire for there to be only one division for competition, not separate divisions for manually-operated firearms and self-loading firearms. He has quoted an individual as saying, "I shoot a bolt-action instead of a semi-automatic because I do not want to wait for the bolt," which fits into his larger view that a rifleman with a bolt action rifle should have already operated the action by the time his (or her) sights are back on target and that, therefore, the semi-automatic rifle does not possess a practical advantage over the manually-operated rifle. (He also states that he sees no advantage in speed to a lever-action versus a bolt action - speaking for myself, I believe that I can run a bolt action faster than I can run a lever-action.)
- On a semi-related note, he felt that the Armed Forces of Haiti were, as individual soldiers, better armed than the American soldiers and Marines then poised to invade - as the Haitians were armed with M1 Garands and the Americans with M16s. (The AKM and M1 Carbine also shared Cooper's enmity with the M16.)

Clearly, we have the benefit of nearly 20 years of advancements in technology and almost 15 of those years spent actively engaged in conflict and thus have a pretty good grasp on what does and does not work in combat. Perhaps the most obvious is that of the manually-operated rifle versus the automatic, at least in a military context: The British, afterall, dumped the bolt-action L96A1 in use with infantry squads in favor of the semi-automatic (not select-fire) LMT L129A1 for their designated marksmen while the US has bought the M110 and the CSASS, and many people are reporting good results from 5.56mm marksman rifles.

So bearing all this in mind... does the Colonel's advice and opinion still hold water? Is there still a place in the batteries of individuals and within irregular forces for bolt action fighting rifles? Or has the concept been thoroughly outmoded by self-loading rifles from the M1 Garand to the M16 and AK-74 to the SCAR-H and M110?