Plowshares Into Swords: Musings of a Different Drummer

INTRODUCTION

Plowshares Into Swords is a compilation of over a hundred articles formerly published in SWAT Magazine under the Training & Tactics masthead.

It is an overview of life pertaining to the field of weapons and tactics training, as seen through the eyes of the author. While the writer’s opinions are expressed in every vein imaginable, ranging from bitter to acerbic to humorous, each and every chapter has one major objective in mind—to promote rational dissemination and analysis by the reader.

Since the author is—by self-admission—possessed of an intemperate disposition, and has developed a somewhat jaundiced view of mankind over the years, the intent of the writings was not to gain the reader’s approval or agreement. The sole objective was to promote thought—no more, no less.

As Socrates stated:

I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think.

Louis Awerbuck

December, 2012

THE CHEMICAL COCKTAIL

No matter what switch, lever, or knob you turn, twist, or depress first time out in a rental car, odds are it will cause the windshield wipers to operate.

This stems from two root causes: - (a) unfamiliarity with the equipment, and (b) Murphy’s Law, which, amongst other things, ensures that no matter how much you try to look cool in public, you will always look like you were a monkey at a Mensa convention.

In the theatre of war, the fighting thespian can’t afford this situation – or he dies. In the airport parking lot you have two choices. You can either flush beet red from embarrassment while you slowly lower yourself below dashboard level, safe from the mocking public eye, or you can glare and snarl at everyone in the immediate vicinity and bluster your way out of the situation.

The difference between an airport and a battlefield is that at the airport all you lose is face. On the battlefield you lose a lot more – blood, skin, and physical limbs and organs.

It is oft quoted that you should train like you fight, and fight like you train.

This is a great concept, except that most people haven’t had the benefit of multiple personal confrontations, and have to rely on training like OTHER people have fought. And the cardinal downside to this is that nobody knows what ACTUALLY transpires during a conflict, because perception is not the same as reality.

This is how the discrepancy creeps in: -

Supposing, for arguments’ sake, that you’re attacked by a couple of Neanderthals hell-bent on using your carcass for a trampoline. Obviously this is justifiable cause for the use of defensive deadly force. Managing to extricate your pistol from its container, you fire two rounds. One of the cretins is hit dead amidships in the boiler room, the other takes a round exactly between the running lights.

Both immediately pop their clogs and assume room temperature before they hit the deck. All ensuing legal proceedings aside, what follows is hours – and sometimes days – of critiquing and personal psychoanalysis of the occurrence. And whether this is your first time, or whether you’ve been around since Moby Dick was a sardine, you WILL go through this repetitive train of thought. And you could very well unintentionally arrive at a conclusion SUBCONSCIOUSLY incorrectly constructed to prove a false premise.

If, for example, you’ve trained in the use of the defensive pistol on the basis of sighted fire techniques, your thought processes in the aftermath will run something along these lines: -

Crook Number One ended up with a perfectly-placed inverted third nipple and Number Two wound up with Triple eye sockets. I have trained for several years, having foreseen that this unfortunate incident may one day befall me. Since the impact of the two projectiles were surgically inserted while I was under pressure, and since I’ve trained with sighted fire techniques only, I must have used sighted fire during the incident.

Eventually, after mentally rehashing the incident over and over, you convince yourself that you saw every minuscule striation and constructive feature of your pistol’s front sight in perfect focus when the Terrible Twins hopped off the twig.

This may not necessarily have been the case. And while this may, indeed, have been what really occurred, the point is that you’ve mated up several assumptions to prove a possibly flawed premise. You may actually have used a point-shooting technique to light up one or the other – or even both – and not realized it.

While the above sighted/unsighted fire conundrum is obviously ONLY AN HYPOTHESIS TO ILLUSTRATE A POINT, and is in no way meant to start the same nauseating argument festering for the umpteenth time, the underlying objective is to point out what occurs to the human body during a violent confrontation.

Your pulse rate elevates and your breathing shallows. This results in Modern-day Man in a loss of blood to the limb extremities, so-called Tunnel Vision, and a distortion of auditory senses and a spatial distortion of time and perception. The last two are the biggies as regards the maybe right/maybe wrong personal aftermath debrief, because obviously in the above hypothetical incident Mr. Tunnel Vision and Mr. Fumblefingers never made it to this particular party, or Our Hero couldn’t have got the results he did.

However, because of the instant pulse rate and oxygen flow changes mentioned above, combined with what’s commonly called the Chemical Cocktail, (an almost instantaneous dump of natural body-produced chemicals like Dopamine, Cortisol and Adrenaline), you WILL experience a change in normal auditory functioning and perception of time passage.

Even if you’re cold-cocked with no advance warning, and the fight is over in two seconds, the chemical dump will occur almost immediately afterwards and the force-fed natural drugs – and their effects – will cloud your later perceptive memory faculties. The drag racer subjects his body to instant physical G-Forces, the gunfighter gets hit with instantaneous biological changes.

Nobody, but nobody, has any concept of how fast or slow a stop-watch is ticking during the actual period of force exchange – and you may either hear minute sounds, major noises, both, or neither, but your auditory senses WILL be different to what they are when you are not under high duress.

Ergo, what it all boils down to after this long-winded diatribe is that nobody in actuality really knows what happened during the fight. Which also has to mean that as a trainee you are dependent on the honest but conceivably unintentionally distorted version of what to expect in your own future confrontation.

Yes, if you’re inexperienced, you can save yourself years of blood, sweat and tears by learning from the hard-won lifelong experiences of the battle-weary (and these days you’d better make sure you’re listening to the honest soldiers, and not two-bit armchair commandos) – but you have to think for yourself and analyze everything you hear and read.

In a deadly force confrontation you can’t afford to hit the windshield-wiper button when you’re trying for the ignition switch.

THE FINE ART OF DECEPTION

Whores and mercenaries.

You may not approve of their morals or professions, but at least they’re honest and, for the most part, very good at what they do.

Everybody else, at some time or another, lives a life of deceit. And while deception is an invaluable tool on the battlefield, most people learn to use it from an early age for all the wrong reasons, and don’t cultivate it to be used when it’s really needed for survival.

It usually starts at the age of three or four years, primarily to solicit distasteful human moralistic reactions, such as jealousy – the I have more toys than you have variety. The inevitable progression from there leads to the My daddy can beat up your daddy, closely followed by the My prom dress costs more than yours, and finally ending with locker room lies about imaginary amorous conquests.

The upshot of these terminological inexactitudes – at worst – is that ten years later, in retrospect, everybody knows you’re a jerk and/or a liar. No big deal – nobody gets hurt physically, and you have the perfect formative grounding for becoming a shyster lawyer or politician.

On the other hand, if you take deception at face value, and don’t delve deeper into the subject matter, you may very well lose a valuable asset from your fighting repertoire, be it firearms, blades, or weaponless physical confrontation – and nobody is ever weaponless unless you choose to be. Guns, clubs, and knives may well be material weapons, but abstract weapons like wits, demeanor, and attitude are just as important, if not more so.

Obviously if somebody has you lined up in his rifle scope two hundred yards away, being the undefeated heavyweight boxing champ doesn’t do you much good as far as delivering retaliatory physical force goes. But that doesn’t mean you have to give up and resign yourself to being a bullet magnet. If you look like a target and act like a target you’ll probably be a target.

And that’s where the art of deception comes in.

From the Trojan Horse to the present day, the fine art of lulling the enemy into a false sense of security has been – and still is – a priceless fighting tool. The modern version of the Trojan Horse is obviously camouflage, but the big trick is to use psychological camouflage – otherwise known as deception – to achieve your mischievous objective. Merely donning camouflage clothing doesn’t hide you from trained prying eyes. If the enemy spots a piece of Ghillie suit artfully wending its tortuous path through the woods, he might just suspect that somebody has encased himself in said clothing. If it walks like a duck, and acts like a duck, there’s an outside chance that it’s a duck. And this is not good news for you if it’s duck season, because the last sound ever heard from you will be desperate squawking recorded on duck tape.

On the other hand, if it’s deer season, and you know there are a dozen forest rangers within quacking distance, why not walk like a duck and act like a duck? No deer hunter in his right mind is going to give you a second glance.

Translated into generic everyday life, this might mean that a car bumper sticker which reads Protected by a dozen shotguns and I’ll kill you if you look at me sideways is probably not demonstrating the epitome of looking low-key and/or innocuous. At best, somebody sooner or later will most likely break into your car looking for eleven free shotguns. At worst, you may unnecessarily prod some hothead into looking for trouble, just to see if his three gallons of testosterone can drown your twelve twelves.

If you don’t want to stand out in a crowd, rather use a decal which reads Bumper stickers are stupid. That way everybody figures you’re an idiot, and if they figure you’re an idiot there are only two outcomes: - either they’ll leave you alone, or else you have a huge psychological advantage if a fight ensues. What do you have to lose? Your worst-case scenario is that your children will be born naked.

The problem starts during puberty. Most males want to look like Conan, which means you become a permanent target for every second-string pussycat trying for the Alpha lion position in the pride – and sooner or later one of them will get you. From there on out the only future in store for you is hyena dinner.

While there’s an old axiom that it’s better to live as a lion for a day than to be a sheep for a lifetime, there’s no disadvantage to being a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Merely because somebody chooses to look like a sheep doesn’t mean he isn’t a wolf wearing a woolen sweater.

It may behoove you to live a simple, unnoticed, productive life as a dung beetle, rather than to look like a Greek god for ten minutes and then spend the rest of your life as the community target.

The sorry truth is that after you’ve swallowed all the steroids and packed on the good-looking, but useless pretty biceps, when all is said and done, all adult human males have the same upper body length from neck to waistline – so you may look pretty, but you’re the same sized target for a bullet – except that you’re the first one the enemy tries to take out.

There’s nothing wrong with being physically in shape, but if you’re serious about survival, do you want to be first or last mental choice on a predator’s dinner menu? The trick is to melt into the crowd – to be one of the grey millions.

The same scarecrow will keep the same birds out of your cornfield day after day. Stand on the fencepost yourself with a twelve gauge, and you may blow a dozen birds out the sky on Day One, but there’ll be more birds returning than you have ammunition – over the long term – and that’s what a fighter has to look at.

Over the long term the deceptive scarecrow will achieve more overall than the one-day wing shottist.

Deception can work for you or against you – like so many other things in life, it’s how you use it.

A long time ago in a far-off land, after several platoon leaders had been killed, it finally sank in that enemy snipers were going for whoever was standing next to the soldier with the radio antenna. Either mount the antenna less conspicuously, or give everybody else a fake antenna. You lose a lot fewer team leaders.

Likewise, it’s never the people with the pretty expensive guns or two-day flashy knife artists you have to worry about. They’re the equivalent of the prom bitch and the locker room liar.

Look out for the mild looking guy with the bifocals and the old worn pistol, or the twelve-year-old barrio kid with the rusty hacksaw blade. They’re the whore and the mercenary – the last two honest people who have deception down to the Nth degree.

They get the job done, they’re never out of work – and you’ll never see it coming.

THE FERRIS-WHEEL FIREARMS CIRCUS

It’s not that I don’t trust my fellow man – it’s just that I’ve never been bitten by a dog.

So while I may only have the intelligence of an expired license plate, if I was invited to dinner by a family of cannibals even I would think twice as to whether my name was on the guest list or on the menu. After surviving many years of rusty blades inserted into your back by humans, and no bite marks from doggie dentures, one tends to doubt any claims emanating from peoples’ mouths until proven to be fact.

While Diogenes traipsed around with a lamp looking for an honest man, today you need a pair of 12 volt Surefire flashlights and a spare box of batteries. And even though this writer obviously has a jaded outlook on life, coupled with the personality of a crocodile, one has only to read the everyday claims from firearms manufacturers to wonder whether some of them may possibly be injecting a couple of teensy-weensy little terminological inexactitudes into their advertising.

The latest discovery in the ferris-wheel firearms circus is the sudden overwhelming plethora of single-action .45 caliber semi-auto pistols – 102 years after John Browning designed the weapon. In itself there’s nothing wrong with that. It merely indicates that a proportion of the shooting and/or buying public has taken a second look at an old base design and figured it warranted another go-round. What does loosen a couple of roof shingles on one’s kennel, however, is that they apparently all have to have a redesigned extractor, a guide rod, minimal-tolerance slide-to-receiver fit, and a custom-fitted barrel bushing to improve accuracy

Let’s think about this.

For sixty years the original extractor worked one hundred percent in less than ideal conditions on battlefields around the globe. Then some really good gunsmiths decided to tune the extractors to perfection, and again, in itself, that showed integrity – because the originals like Armand Swenson and Bob Chow were perfectionists, and they were at the top of their game. Unfortunately, they were often followed by a gaggle of backyard mechanics who didn’t know what they were doing.

Yes sir, I surely can tune your extractor with a Leatherman file and a pair of pliers – and for only forty dollars. Guess what? Now that grandpa’s perfectly-functioning World War I relic doesn’t work anymore, we’ll redesign the extractor system, so that it will maybe/perhaps/possibly work as reliably as John Moses B’s original untuned product.

Ever watched a dog chasing his tail? When he finally latches onto it with his choppers, you now have a circular pooch. Now there’s something that’s guaranteed to snatch first prize at the Westminster Dog Show.

Then there’s the ubiquitous guide rod, usually constructed from some mysterious Martian material scooped out from under Elvis’s face by a NASA robot. You know – to stop that pesky recoil spring from binding – we all know what a common problem that is. Pardon my single-digit IQ, but is there anybody in the Milky Way Galaxy who’s EVER had a Colt .45 auto malfunction because of a recoil spring binding?

And that close hand-lapped – for hand-lapped read expensive – zero-tolerance slide-to-receiver fit, guaranteed to ensure one-inch groups at 50 yards. Who’s going to actually perform this breath-taking feat of marksmanship in a firefight? You want one-inch groups from a .45 auto, I’ll give you one-inch groups. Hell, I’ll give you half-inch groups at a hundred yards from any .45 ever made – just don’t ask me to fire a second bullet. Yes sir, I’ll certainly take your word for it about the one-inch group claims – while I’m dining on my can of Alpo.

And those tight tolerances are sure nifty when you’re fighting your way out of a gunfight from hell on some Godforsaken rain-soaked, mud-ridden island that nobody’s ever heard of – because your two thousand dollar paperweight isn’t going to work under those conditions. All you need in battle is a pistol that works every time and will put rounds into somebody’s carcass until they cease to be a problem. Who cares how pretty it is?

Let’s not forget about that tight-fitting barrel bushing either. Let’s see – that’s two grand for the pistol, plus another ten thousand dollars for the hospital fees to fix the double hernia I incurred trying to rotate the tight bushing during an attempt to field-strip the pistol. Of course you are supplied a 50-cent plastic wrench to facilitate this process when you buy the pistol – at no extra cost.

I have my abacus in front of me, and this isn’t computing. Two thousand dollars for the pistol, another ten grand for the doctors, staples through my nether regions to stop my herniated guts from spilling out onto my loins – and a two-pound paperweight. For this I received a four-bit plastic wrench which I can use for a nose ring.

What a bargain.

How about if I buy a two hundred-dollar Makarov which actually works, stuff a couple of lead pills up somebody’s sinus cavity, and appropriate his Fabergé Firearm? Total cost – two hundred dollars. Makes sense to me.

Is it too much to ask 102 years later that you can buy a pistol for a little less than the price of a Ferrari – and actually have it make that bang-bang noise and spit out some lead projectiles when you stroke the trigger? This is supposed to be a reliable life-saving working tool, not a Rembrandt painting.

Sarcastic? Yes. Disillusioned? Yes. But, if some feathers are ruffled by this article, remember that people don’t have feathers – chickens have feathers. And too many Dogs of War are dying because their chicken doo-doo fancy equipment doesn’t work.

Gotta go, there are some loose shingles on my kennel that need fixing – and I have the perfect tool to use for a hammer.

THINGS AREN’T ALWAYS WHAT THEY SEEM TO BE

So I buy a can of shaving cream, and it has this caveat boldly emblazoned on the side: - Warning – can may explode if heated.

And I begin to wonder what had prompted this attempt to evade future litigation. Obviously some mental giant had attempted to scrape off his chin spinach using the family fireplace for a bathroom basin, or he’d nuked a can of shaving cream in a microwave oven to get that nice warm lather we keep hearing about.

After ruminating about Man’s stupidity for a while, I started remembering about the time I stabbed myself in the butt with a boot knife, and the time I became entangled in strips of fly-paper along with all the other insects, and the time I was entrapped in a roll-down sectioned garage door, and the time I managed to insert one of my toes into a shotgun barrel and hobbled around until I managed to find someone to detach me from the weapon, and the time....

And I came to the realization that (a) maybe I’m not the only genius on the planet, (b) it’s easy to surmise on what some so-called idiot may have done, and last but not least, things aren’t always what they seem to be.

Translated into firearms training terms, systems and techniques which at face value appear to make sense are often irrational, and some ideas which seem to be ludicrous often have strategic validity.

One such technique is the old standby of keeping the gun barrel in line with the shooter and the potential target when scanning or assessing a threat area. In other words, if you are visually checking an area in front of you left of center, the gun muzzle direction should be left of center, if the visual scan is to your right, the muzzle shifts to the right, etc.

The theory behind this practice is that it’s quicker to bring the sights to bear on a target on which you are already physically lined up than to swing the gun on to target if you see the threat when the gun isn’t already lined up in the general direction of the problem. Unfortunately, as is so often the case, the truth belies the fact when one separates a static firing range exercise from a street fight.

And the reason is because of reaction time.

If you are sniping someone, you will, in fact, be quicker, but this is the rare occasion when YOU are picking the time, YOU are picking the location, and YOU are deciding when and where Mister Bullet Magnet is going to take his last waltz into your projectile. For the most part, however, you will be reacting to a visual stimulus, and reaction time is reaction time is reaction time. Actually bringing a firearm to bear onto a target takes approximately one-sixth of a second, irrespective of initial gun muzzle direction, ONCE VISUAL TARGET IDENTIFICATION HAS BEEN ASCERTAINED. One-sixth of a second never has and never will make any difference to the outcome of a gunfight.

What can – and does – affect the outcome is your initial reaction time to the threat, varying anywhere from two-fifths to three-fifths of a second response time to a visual stimulus. This reaction time will vary from person to person dependent on age, physical fitness and how finely tuned you have honed your reactions to a certain life style. There are some people who will grab the chicken by the throat every time, and there are some who will wind up with a handful of tail feathers and chicken poo.

Try this one on for size: -

Place two shooters of equal physical ability and reaction time shoulder-to-shoulder in front of a bank of five paper targets. The targets are numbered one through five, from left to right, positioned about six or seven yards in front of the side-by-side shooters to avoid any possibility of cross-fire during the experiment. The left-side shooter stands by in a Low Ready position, gun muzzle depressed just below the waist level of Target Three. The right-side shooter starts with his gun muzzle angled off to the right of Target Five, but his eyes are locked on the chest area of Target Three.

On the verbal command to fire, both shooters are to fire one quick accurate round into the thorax of Target Three.

Result? Both shooters impact the target in the desired impact area almost simultaneously.

Taking the experiment one step further: -

Starting the shooters in Low Ready, physically angled as before, the start signal will be an audible call for a hit on a specific target number from One to Five.

Result? Simultaneous hits again, because the shooters now have to find the target, which soaks up visual reaction time before they can shoot. The actual mounting time of the gun on to target is to all intents and purposes irrelevant, as it takes only the aforementioned one-sixth of a second, IRRESPECTIVE of initial muzzle direction relevant to the five targets (or a single target for that matter).

There’s an old party trick where you hold a banknote vertically suspended between thumb and forefinger and your buddy stands by with his sweaty little paw directly below yours. The object of the exercise is for him to catch the money between his thumb and forefinger as soon as you let go of the green stuff. He never will catch it, because his reaction time is way behind your action, even with his beady avaricious eyes locked on to the money and your fingers.

If, like yours truly, you have no life, you can hold the dollar in one hand and catch it yourself every time with your other hand, because you know EXACTLY when you’re letting loose of the currency with one hand, and you’re playing your own action off your own reaction.

Yes, small things amuse small minds – but it’s the small things that can also get you killed. Don’t accept anything at face value until you’ve analyzed it – it’s going to be your gunfight when the real bullets start flying, not your instructor’s.

While I have no doubt that somebody with the IQ of a rocking horse heated up a can of shaving cream on a barbeque grill somewhere, with all my superior intelligence I sure wish I hadn’t stabbed myself in the butt with my own knife....

I AM THE BULLET

The humble bullet. Treat it with the respect it deserves—or pay the ultimate price.

I am the bullet – and I have no conscience.

You will treat me with respect because once I leave, you have no control over my actions. Once I’m gone I will do as I please, governed only by the laws of physics.

And the next time you see me I will have done my work, bringing on your life a potential gamut of emotions ranging from pleasure, satisfaction, and exhilaration to anger, pain, grief, and regret.

Use me wisely and with discretion, for I can snuff out the flame of a king’s life as easily as I can bring delight to a ten year-old’s face by recording for posterity a first bullseye on a humble paper target.

It took the fire of a crucible to conceive me, but now I’m no longer molten metal – and therein lies the deceptiveness of my power. When I was cast in the mould of hot lead you knew I was dangerous, but now you underestimate me as I lie in the womb of the cartridge case, a solidified metal teardrop the size of your fingernail. Beware, for the day I’m born I will go from womb to tomb in the fraction of a second. For me there will be no childhood, no puberty, no adulthood – just a nanosecond of flight before I find my terminal resting place.

You must be mother, father, teacher, and priest, because you will guide me on my short life’s path. I am but an emotionless inanimate object with no heartbeat and no conscience. Once the hot gases of propulsion give birth to my destination, they will also signal my death knell, for I will have no childhood, no puberty, no adulthood. Instant birth to instant rest, with but a momentary tick of the clock of time to bring pleasure or pain.

The responsibility for my actions rests squarely on your shoulders. You conceived me, you entombed me in a cartridge case with my brother primer and sister gunpowder, slaves to your bidding.

If you didn’t cast, size, lube, and load me yourself, you bought me just like you bought Mister Gump’s box of chocolates. But unlike the box of chocolates, with me what you see is what you get. I am the corked bottle encasing a quiescent genie. Once the genie is free, you know exactly what potential can be unleashed – but you had better choose your three wishes wisely.

The acquisition of firearms and ammunitions is sequential, one way or the other. Rarely does one initially have a vast supply of ammo of a specific caliber and subsequently acquire a firearm to use or expend this supply. While we often buy a secondary or tertiary weapon for this reason, usually one purchases the gun, cleaning equipment, accessories, and a storage unit – be it a case, bag, or gun safe – before any thought is given to what ammunition is going to be obtained and used in the weapon.

And after spending a king’s ransom on all this equipment, you head for the local gun emporium and spend a pittance on a case of the cheapest garbage military surplus ammo you can find.

Then when you miss you blame it on me. When you accidentally discharge a firearm because you neglected to extract me from the chamber, you blame it on me. When I plow my way through bone and muscle, and fail to incapacitate a madman, you blame it on me. But when you achieve the result you wanted, then it’s because of your masterful ability, and I’m forgotten – used, expended, and spent.

Such is my lot – Man’s ingratitude and lack of respect for the humble bullet. Because you paid for the ammunition, I become your possession; but you don’t own me – I own your soul. I will make you or break you in my short lifespan.

The slightest marksmanship error on your part and I will embarrass you in front of your peers. The slightest lapse in concentration while manipulating a firearm and I will take an innocent life. I will ricochet off a windshield, a belt buckle, or a baseball cap bill when you’ve been told I should have penetrated the material – and I will just as easily over-penetrate an apartment wall and forever snuff out the future of a defenseless child.

Doctor Mann spent a lifetime trying to find out why I didn’t always perform as external ballistics would demand I do – and he went to his grave with my secret intact. But you insist on imbibing alcohol and firing bullets into the air in a puerile Yuletide celebration, understanding nothing of the physics of my flight path – or my power to change your life forever.

You will spend endless hours discussing the merits and demerits of my size and velocity, but when all is said and done, it really doesn’t mean anything. The truth of the matter is that once I depart from your gun muzzle you no longer have control over me – and I, too, no longer have control over my own destiny.

The next time you see a humble unfired bullet remember that without me your gun is as useless as fingers on a rooster. And once loaded, I can be as dangerous as a drunk in rush hour traffic. Once my power is unleashed, there can be only two results – delight and satisfaction, or disaster and horror. And this will reach fruition in the blink of an eye, for I have no childhood, no puberty, no adulthood.

Treat me with respect, for I am the bullet – and I have no conscience.

TRUST YOUR INSTINCTS

He says it’s a pessimistic outlook, you say it’s realistic.

But irrespective of whether you think the cup is half full or half empty, the fact remains that not everything one learns during firearms and tactics training is as sensible as it may appear at first glance.

If something strikes you like an epiphany, at least mull it over and reconsider your opinion after about a 24-hour period. This will enable you to take a more objective view of the tactic, strategy, technique, or whatever it was that set your little heart a-flutter.

Many is the time that a second, more methodical study of subject matter reveals hidden pitfalls in a premise which at first glance had looked like an infallible system. That’s why Monday Morning Quarterbacks