I am not sure if this thread belongs in this area, so I apologize in advance for ticking anyone off…
I have been shooting for quite some time (about 22 years…90 something percent of my life). I love taking out new shooters. I have been shooting with a coworker of mine for about 2 years. He is a shooter, but has always been a bullseye shooter, and didn’t know that you can train by standing 3 yards from a human-sized target. I have done a lot of working with him changing his grip (making it more “modern” and aggressive). This coworker used to be really big into martial arts, namely, tae kwon do. He is a very…deep…human being. He loves reading about martial arts philosophy, and believes whole-heartedly in things like zen archery/marksmanship, chi, and things of that nature.
Basically I am looking for a good book that I can buy for him that will make a connection between martial arts and combat or defensive style shooting. The deeper, the better…he loves it.
I admittedly haven’t read many shooting books, but this book was recommended a companion material to an advanced shooting course I took: J Michael Plaxco’s Shooting From Within
Whether it meets your criteria of ‘deep’, I can’t say. There are no koans, but I think it is deep insofar as it’s more about extracting your maximum level of performance in not just shooting but in anything you do.
Kyudo? It’s hard to guess what people will actually read so three that come to mind that cover a bit of a spectrum from thesis to memoir:
On Killing - Grossman
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why - Laurence Gonzales (survival not necessarily in a firefight)
The Bush War In Rhodesia - Dennis Croukamp
Brian Enos’s Beyond Fundamentals delves into the Zen aspect of competition shooting. (The rest of the book is excellent as well.) Don’t expect anything about combat or defensive shooting, though.
Brianenos.com forums even has a subforum on Zen. (Again, the focus is strictly on competitions in the Benos forums, and not defensive shooting.)
With Winning in Mind: The Mental Management System by; Lanny R. Bassham
This book may be directly up your co-worker’s alley. It’s pretty ‘Zen’. Though it has more to do with human performance than anything else, it is written by a guy who dominated international rifle shooting, winning 22 world individual and team titles, setting 4 world records and winning the Olympic Gold Medal in Montreal in 1976.
I’ll second this book recommendation. My father recommended it to me when I started shooting and it has done wonders for me. I’ve practically self taught myself how to shoot handguns on this book alone. My father used this as his only resource for help when he was shooting IPSC back in the early-mid 90s. Not bad for a beginner to read a book and rise to the ranks of Grand Master on his own in just a few years.
I would go with" On Killing", by Grossman and “Understanding Firearm Ballistics”, by Rinker
This way you can convey the mindset and disipline along with the technical understanding assosiated with marksmanship.
