| Lessons from Over the Edge |
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This article first appeared in the Network's May 2009 journal. An Interview with Michael Bane by Gila Hayes From inside the gun industry sound a chorus of voices speaking out for gun rights. Speaking to the same concerns, the increasingly influential voice of professional journalist Michael Bane offers a different and valuable perspective. His opinions do not always parallel those of insiders, but the unique insights and counterpoint musings on Bane’s blog, his interviews on Downrange Radio, and programming on Shooting Gallery and The Best Defense are making a difference for armed citizens. Though our readers will know Bane from his discourses on guns, shooting and self defense, some of Bane’s magazine and book credits involve extreme sports, as reflected in the title of what is perhaps his most famous book, Over the Edge: A Regular Guy’s Odyssey In Extreme Sports. While Bane was becoming famous with cave divers, mountaineers, and wind surfers, he was also active in the shooting community, lending his influence to IPSC and IDPA when both organizations were embryonic, as well as participation in shooting sports ranging from bulls eye to cowboy action to sporting clays. Over the years, a number of the major firearms manufacturers have drawn on Bane’s media and marketing savvy. I met Bane when he was managing the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) Media Education Program, and not long thereafter, I joined him on his first filming for the TV program, Shooting Gallery. That original footage perished in a conflict with the original program underwriter, but Bane’s gun-TV concept thrived. Today, Shooting Gallery is arguably the mainstay of the Outdoor Channel’s programming. This season, Bane introduced a new show, The Best Defense, and just in case he might run out of things to do, Bane produces another Outdoor Channel program, Cowboys. When I caught up with Michael Bane recently, we sat down to talk about guns, self defense and his multitudinous projects. To maintain Bane’s unique style, let’s switch now to interview style, and see what is on the mind of this most eclectic member of the firearms community. eJournal: Michael, I’ve been following your work for years and years, and I like to think I was there for Shooting Gallery’s launch. But to go back farther, I also remember reading articles by Michael Bane in gun magazines, and that makes me curious about your transition from print into television. You were literally a straight-up reporter at one time, weren’t you? Bane: I was officially a life-time, professional journalist. Most of my life, I’ve made my living as a free-lance writer. Occasionally [work] contracts were longer here or there, but basically, I wrote articles and books, and my assumption was that I would spend the rest of my life writing articles and books. I was asked to speak at a journalism conference and they asked me how you go from print to electronic. I said, “You walk down the street and wait for a television show to hit you in the head.” Actually, it’s largely by accident. eJournal: How did your “accident” happen? Bane: A friend of mine was hired as the Media Director for the Outdoor Channel. Executives at the Outdoor Channel, two sets of executives ago, said we need a consultant to come in here and tell us what shooting sports we need to cover. My friend said, “Just get Michael. Michael knows about that stuff.” eJournal: True–you’ve been a competitive shooter for a long time, haven’t you? Bane: In fact, I was lucky enough – and it was luck – to be involved in the start of the USPSA, of IPSC, in the United States in the early ’80s, but it was largely by accident. Again. We were shooting the Florida Invitational, which was one of the first really big National combat matches. I got squadded with Walt Rauch, Tommy Campbell, who was then at Smith & Wesson, Dave Arnold who became the first USPSA president, and a couple of other people. We had a break the first day and one guy goes, “We’re going to go to a strip joint and invent a new shooting sport. Do you want to come?” I said, “I don’t know,” and Walt Rauch said, “Get in the car.” None of us had any money, I mean, between five of us at the table, we couldn’t get a pitcher of beer. But we had a yellow legal pad and we outlined what would become the United States Practical Shooting Association. How we would break it up … and I didn’t know anything about all this—nothing! eJournal: Scarcely! You were a shooter and a gun owner already… Bane: Yeah, I was a shooter. I’ve been shooting since I was six. I started bird hunting when I was eight. But bullseye was my first formal competition; I shot it in Long Island in the mid-’70s. In 1977-78, I got a 1911 and started what was then the new Modern Technique from St. Cooper the Divine. It was fun, and I think the thing that was most exciting to me was that it was all new. eJournal: Kind Providence!...So you took your yellow legal pad to a strip club and you, uh, did what? Bane: Created USPSA. Outlined what the sport would be. In fact, the sport is still very much what we outlined sitting there. I started working with those guys and then I fell in with a lot of local people in this area (Orlando, FL) In fact, the Orange County Police Range is sort of where I “made my bones.” I’d been doing a lot of competition shooting in the early ’80s, and I started working with Frank Repast who was the firearms instructor for the Orange County Sheriff and head of Orange County SWAT. He was in the process of changing police training from the classic PPC stand-and-shoot, to scenario-based training. His idea was that he would rather use a range master he trusted. And I kept saying, “I don’t understand, I’m not a cop,” and he goes, “Trust me on this.” I was running detectives through scenarios. The first detective came up. The buzzer went off and he pulled out his Smith & Wesson J-frame and went click-click-click-click-click, and he raised his hand. I said, “Sir, reload your gun and continue with the stage of fire,” and he goes, “My gun’s empty.” [Louder] “SIR! Reload your gun and continue with the stage of fire,” and he goes “You idiot, what are you not hearing?” I said, [Louder] “SIR! Reload your GUN,” and he goes, “I’m done with this crap,” and turned around and walked off. The deal was if you failed qualifications you were off the street. Afterwards, Frank said, “I did not want my officers mad at my firearms instructors so that’s why we had you here. You can never speed in Orange County, because you’ll probably do hard time.” eJournal: And so you had to run away and become a TV personality? Bane: Yeah. But that was fun, because I was involved in the beginning of practical shooting, and that first, great change in police tactics. eJournal: And so you absorbed all of this change and reflected it in your articles. What else led you to where you are today? Bane: I was one of the last people to interview Ayn Rand, the great Libertarian philosopher. I’d been a rock critic in New York City for Rolling Stone, and we were all getting out of New York City because it was scary, and a friend of mine went to Texas and got a job at a magazine. He called me up and said, “I need you to interview some old broad.” And I went, “You mean like some old rock ‘n’ roll person?” And he goes, “No, some old broad named Rand.” “Ayn Rand?” And he goes, “Yeah.” “I’m pretty much out of my league. I’m a rock’n’ roll journalist.” And he goes, “It’s all rock ‘n’ roll, dude.” I went to New Orleans, and she was everything one would expect Ayn Rand to be. At this point she was old, and kind of a crone. She was perched on a high stool, and I was on a low stool. I turned on my tape recorder and I asked my first question, and she looked at me for a long time and she goes, “That’s not good enough, young man, try again.” [Laughing] Oh, gosh. I felt like a fool. She’s one of the great 20th century philosophers! But when I finished that interview, at the very end of the interview, she walks out of the room, she turns around and comes back, and she like shakes her finger at me and she goes, “Young man, you have one thing to do in your life: one thing do to.” “Yes, ma’am?” She goes, “See clearly. That’s all you have to do is see clearly.” And she turned around and left. And I’ve always classed that as the best advice I’ve ever gotten. eJournal: And you’ve applied it to your life— Bane: To everything! If there’s a baseline piece of advice that I’ve built my professional career on, it was Ayn Rand telling me to see clearly. I’ve tried to do that. eJournal: And I think that you have done so, because you are the rare person in this industry that will speak out when the direction we’re collectively taking does or does not make sense. And as often as not, you say it doesn’t make sense, particularly when you’re talking about how we’re spending shooter-retention money. Bane: I think a lot of the problem is when people simply don’t do the right thing. They know what the right thing is and they choose to not do it, or worse, not to speak about it. It certainly is a cliché to say that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to say nothing, but the problem is that we all go along and get along in everything and that never does us much good. But I’ll say this: speaking the truth doesn’t do you much good, either! eJournal: And what about outside the gun industry? Can you tell us about your famous book, Over the Edge? Bane: When I lived in Florida, I was a business writer covering the birth of personal computers, but I was also a wind surfing instructor. One day, I’m writing in my office and I think, “Oh, what the hell, let’s go to the beach.” But it was a 60-mile an hour day on a small body of water; [in those conditions] you’re not really sailing as much as you’re just not drowning. And I survived! I was so pumped up on this experience that I took all my friends to a bar-pizza place and we bought pizza and beer. About midnight, somebody goes, “You know, you ought to make a list of shit that can kill you.” We got a cocktail napkin and a pen from the waitress and we wrote thirteen things that can kill you. In the taxi, after they poured us out of the pizza joint, somebody said, “What are you going to do with the list?” And I said, “I don’t know, I think I’ll write a book about it.” The punch line, of course, is that seven years, all the money I had in the world and one marriage later, I finished the book. eJournal: And that became Over the Edge. I notice on your blog that you have re-published Over the Edge. Tell us about it, please. Bane: Over the Edge changes, on a macro scale, the way you look at life. And it certainly changed the way I look at training, because [in the book] I’m going out and essentially I’m doing events in which the consequences of failure are death. Cave diving is the most classic example. As my friends who continue in cave diving say, “It’s the safest sport in the world because there are no injuries per 100,000. There are no injuries at all. You just die.” And there’s only maybe 2,000 certified cave divers at any point and “X” number die every year and they die because they make mistakes. And mountaineering on high mountains: I was on McKinley in ’95, and Pico de Orizaba, which is a 19,000-foot Mexican volcano, a couple of years later. Mountaineers, and cave divers and really, really, radical hang gliders understand training at a level that we, within the firearms industry, in the training community, didn’t understand. eJournal: How? Bane: Initially, within training, we had a certain obsession with technique. Maybe a lot of that derives from Col. Cooper and Col. Cooper’s disciples, of which I probably am one, but there’s a whole focus on technique beyond understanding what the technique actually did. My cave diving instructor John O’Lorski had this great line: “Let me tell you about training. All you got to do is figure out what keeps you alive. And what keeps you alive, is what you’ve got to do 100% right, 100% of the time. Learn to do that; the rest of the stuff doesn’t matter.” eJournal: Applied to self defense, what do we have to do 100% right, 100% of the time, Michael? Bane: What we have to do right 100% of the time is first understand what the threat is. Before we even get to techniques, we have to understand threats and we have to understand risks. Those are things you would think the shooting and the law enforcement community would understand but we don’t have a clue! It is threat assessment, and the strategy springs from threat assessment, and technique springs from strategy. eJournal: But we often start at the other end... Bane: Right! We started with, “I’m going to learn 50 neat techniques!” eJournal: But do we know what the techniques are for? Bane: Part of the problem in firearms training is that you can learn techniques all day long. As an instructor, you can set up a school where you’re focusing strictly on technique, and because your students aren’t going to go out tomorrow and do something life threatening, you can get away with that. In cave diving or mountaineering, you can’t. What you’re taught in cave diving today, when you go into the cave the next day, your life is at risk. Training needs to get you ahead of the curve; technique cannot get you ahead of the curve. If your focus is on technique, there is too much lag time. You’ll never get to execute the technique, because you’ll be run over by then! You have to be moving farther up in the curve, and one of the things that I learned from mountaineering and cave diving is that everything is about how far ahead of the curve you can get. Because if you screw up you die. You have to teach people the high end of the cycle–awareness, avoidance, all those steps, you know, “Here’s how to be aware of your environment; here’s how to avoid being in a situation.” I think that for the most part you can head off bad things, and this comes back to cave diving and mountaineering: risk divides up into subjective and objective risk. Subjective risk is risk over which you have some control. Objective risk is when God says, “You’re it.” If you think about risk that way, what you say is, “I want to control what I can control.” Let’s say I can minimize my risk on the street by 50%, 60%, 70% by being aware and avoiding. That’s important because it allows you to focus your techniques on the little area of risk that you can’t get around. An example being: A couple of years back, I’d just been filming at the National Tactical Invitational, and we’d run probably a dozen 7-11 simulations there at the National Tactical Invitational, right? I go home and Denise, my girlfriend says, “We need milk.” I stop at the supermarket in Nowhere, Colorado, which is where I live. I walk in the supermarket; there are three street people, two women, one man, sitting on the floor. The largest one, in biker drag, stood up and as he stood up his right hand went to his left side in his leather jacket. I saw the hand come up and I said, “Well, I’ll be damned. He’s going to draw.” And I simply outdrew him. My hand went in my leather jacket and I won. The guy was taller than me, maybe six-four or -five, and I had a mouse gun, a Colt Mustang .380. The most amazing thing was that he didn’t laugh. He put his hands behind his head and said, “What do I have to do to stay alive?” I put him on the ground and I left the scene because I’m not a police officer. I went immediately to the police, which was across the parking lot. To me, that’s a case of pure objective risk! It wasn’t that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, it’s just that shit happens. eJournal: But you had your eyes open and could see the risk, so you got ahead of the curve, which is where a lot of people would have failed. Now you’ve launched a self-defense show on the Outdoor Channel about getting ahead of the curve. Why don’t you tell us about it? Bane: I wanted to put a show together that was not a gun-tip show. Most shows are gun-tip shows. Shooting Gallery is a gun-tip show. It’s a good gun tip show, but it’s still a gun tip show. But every other show that I saw that said it was about personal defense was a gun tip show. On The Best Defense, Rob Pincus, Mike Janich and I want to teach you what we know and how we go through the world. I’ve seen violence happen really quickly. That’s part of being a reporter. I was a police reporter; I’ve been in war zones; I’ve traveled a lot in the Third World; I was on the Granada invasion. I get to talk to a lot of Special Forces guys and they’re really interested in these lessons because they understand the need to be ahead of the curve. They understand that if they can be just two degrees higher on the curve, they win and they go home that night. eJournal: What a great affirmation of the kinds of things you’ve been doing with your life. I see your administrative assistant waiting for you, so I suppose I ought to let you go. Thank you so much; it’s been a wonderful visit. I know our readers will enjoy hearing from you this way, and we’ll all go watch The Best Defense… Bane: Watch Shooting Gallery, too! Lots of weird things there! eJournal: We’ll watch for that! Thank you, Michael! Copyright © 2008-2010 Armed Citizens' Legal Defense Network. All rights reserved. Reproduction without written permission is strictly prohibited. |
