Wyatt Earp or Barney Fife?

While sitting waiting for the rain to end, I’ve been reading about Massad Ayoob, the firearms writer. I have to say that my awe is decreasing by the minute.

If you have anything to do with gun people, you know that Ayoob is nearly worshiped. Saying you disagree with anything Ayoob says is like pouring honey on yourself and jumping onto an anthill naked. You will make a lot of people who don’t really know that much about anything very angry. He has his own Beyhive.

He wrote some books about self-defense. I have at least one of them, somewhere. When I read it, I thought the author was a bad dude who had been in lots of gunfights and stakeouts. He certainly made himself sound like that kind of person. He isn’t, however. Nothing close to it.

Today I read a piece by a guy who has serious issues with Ayoob’s integrity. His name is Shawn Dodson. He says he admired Ayoob, but his opinion changed when he found evidence that Ayoob was dishonest. He and Ayoob had a squabble, and he went through a bunch of things Ayoob had said and posted evidence suggesting Ayoob was not exactly truthful.

Here’s a link: LINK.

Example: Ayoob said he testified in a case involving the FBI when he actually appeared in an administrative hearing before the case went to court. He calls the case Christine Hansen et. al., v. Federal Bureau of Investigation, but on the Internet, it’s actually Hansen v. Webster (1986). The Webster in question was the director of the FBI.

Ayoob said, “I testified. The court listened,” clearly claiming a judge heard what he said. Now, to be fair, Ayoob is a layman. He appears as an expert witness from time to time, but he couldn’t begin to look after or understand a court case. Maybe he really thought an administrative hearing was a court case. I doubt it, though. It was an EEOC hearing. I used to deal with the EEOC’s examiners, and their offices are not located in courthouses. Not in Miami, anyway. I don’t see how anyone could think an EEOC hearing was a court case.

The Miami EEOC office was full of amply proportioned, slow-moving ladies who padded around in house shoes. It was more like their home than an office. There was a sleepy atmosphere to the place. It was conducive to napping. My dad told me to expect this when I visited, and it turned out he was absolutely right. The examiners expected attorneys to spoon-feed them and do all the work. I don’t recall witnessing any hearings. That would have gone far beyond the degree of involvement I was familiar with.

When you want to sue your employer, you have to complain to the EEOC first. Then the EEOC does nothing, and you’re allowed to sue. That means you go across town, to the federal courthouse.

The EEOC is a big joke, to be quite honest.

It appears that an agent named Hansen sued the FBI for sexual discrimination. Somewhere in the mix, she complained about the guns women had to use. Ayoob says it was a class action, so I guess other women were involved.

Here is some of what Ayoob wrote about the case:

I testified. The court listened. The court found in favor of the women, and the Bureau was ordered to “revise and update its obsolete and sexist firearms training.”

The big problem with this statement, apart from the fact that he didn’t really testify in court, is that according to an FBI bigwig, there was no court ruling. How could Ayoob have imagined one? I don’t think he could have. He must have lied. That’s my best guess. The bigwig, [full-time] Special Agent Urey W. Patrick, said the suit was settled and that the FBI made no substantial changes to its firearms policies.

A settlement is not a court ruling. It means you and your adversary make a private agreement and go home. A court doesn’t issue orders after a settlement. There is no way a judge would have said, “This case is settled, but Massad Ayoob, whose testimony I have not read, says your policies are wrong, so I order you to change them.”

The ever-reliable Internet says the DOJ, not the court, changed the FBI’s procedures in 1981, long before the case ended. If the court listened, why did the DOJ make the changes? According to a scholarly paper, the finding that changes needed to be made was made by the DOJ itself.

Special Agent Patrick also said Ayoob was “demolished” as a witness and that he was forced to read a passage from one of his own writings, contradicting something he had just asserted very forcefully.

Ayoob also said this:

When I testified against the FBI in 1980 for the women in the class action suit of Christine Hansen, et. al. V. Federal Bureau of Investigation, I was told it would be the kiss of death to my career. So be it. The women were right and the Bureau was wrong, and I couldn’t have looked my then three-year-old first-born daughter in the face had I not gone there and spoke the truth.

This is not how it works. Ayoob is a career expert witness, or as my evidence professor Mickey Graham used to say, “Witness Having Other Reasonable Explanation.” Ayoob has testified for defendants. In all likelihood, he has never testified on behalf of law enforcement. They have their own experts, who have been to college, on salary.

I’m assuming he’s telling the truth when he says he has done this kind of work. It’s hard to know what to believe now.

If he did work as an expert, it means he worked against cops and prosecutors. It should not have surprised or bothered anyone to see him testify to help a person suing a big law enforcement organization. It was what he did for a living. The FBI case was not an outlier for him. And you can’t ruin your career by testifying as an expert witness. No one cares. No one is even likely to find out unless you, gee…I don’t know…write about it in a book or magazine.

No one told Ayoob testifying would be the kiss of death for his career. Not unless it was his wife or maybe a bartender. No one who knows anything about court cases would say something that crazy.

One notes that it did not kill his career, and that he wrote about it while trying to advance his career. Why would you publicize something you expected to ruin your reputation and force you to give up your livelihood?

I’m not saying it’s virtue-signaling, but it certainly resembles it.

Ayoob also got into it with a doctor (not a gun writer or part time cop like Ayoob) who is held in extremely high regard among forensic experts. The doctor’s name is Martin Fackler, and he founded and ran the Armed Forces’ Wound Ballistic Laboratory. Ayoob tried to argue with him about the JFK shooting, saying the head wound was not consistent with the type of gun and ammunition used by Lee Harvey Oswald. The arrogance is amazing.

Ayoob is not a doctor, lawyer, paralegal, nurse, or, unless he is uncharacteristically hiding a credential, a college graduate. Assuming you’re not an expert, he knows about what you and I do when it comes to autopsies. He still argued in print with one of the world’s leading authorities. Dr. Fackler explained why Ayoob was wrong, and Ayoob continued arguing.

Whom would you believe? Stephen Hawking or the lady who typed his papers?

Ayoob cited another expert named John K. Lattimer, and Lattimer was so disturbed he published a response contradicting Ayoob.

Here are Ayoob’s credentials as well as I can determine them. He was a part-time cop in a tiny Mayberry-like New Hampshire town with a crime rate about 1/6 as high as the American average. He has not been in shootouts. He has not taken down lots of scary criminals. He was never in the military, although he was of draft age during the Vietnam War. As far as I can tell, he only has a high school education. He is not a mechanical engineer, hence he cannot comment as an expert on firearms design or construction. He is not a ballistics expert, because those people are scientists, and scientists go to college. He is just a guy who read a lot about guns and crime and hustled his way into a career as an authority.

He left the Grantham, New Hampshire PD as a captain. Question: how hard is it to become a captain in a town containing about as many people as a Broadway theater? I have relatives in a town in Kentucky that size. If someone there started calling himself a captain, they would still be making fun of him 10 years after his funeral.

I remember a funny story. They tore down the Powell County courthouse and built a new one. The county judge, who was a low-level official who basically handled traffic tickets, had it named after himself: “The Billy Joe Martin Government Center.” You can imagine how long the letters stayed up.

I often disagree with things experts say, but I’m not crazy enough to do it when we’re both talking about something about which I very clearly know comparatively little. Yes, I disagree with the people who pushed the theory that covid would be a devastating plague, but they themselves admitted great uncertainty, and besides, I generally turned out to be right. I wouldn’t argue with them about the physical properties of the virus or the body’s mechanisms for responding to it. I can’t even guess about those things. But Ayoob held himself out as competent to discount the opinions of two renowned experts, regarding well-settled science, in the creation of which they were both instrumental.

He once said this:

“Those of us who have seen violent death up close, who have seen what high-powered bullets can do to living human tissue, have a horror of inflicting that nightmarish, never forgotten damage on a fellow human being.

Obvious question: if you haven’t been in violent confrontations involving high-powered bullets, and you’re not a pathologist or any type of medical professional, how did you ever manage to see violent death up close? My guess is that he was in the car with a full-time cop who went to the scene of a suicide. Or maybe his celebrity status got him into some autopsies. I have been invited to autopsies. Lawyers get invitations like that. Had I gone, I would not write about my experiences the way he did.

Is it just me, or does the quotation suggest that he has been out in the street blasting away at criminals? If I wrote something like that, I would be sure to point out the circumstances so I would not deceive anyone.

The more I read, the less I respect this guy. I think he knows a great deal about self-defense and shooting techniques, just as anyone would after spending decades reading about these things and practicing shooting on safe gun ranges far from criminals. I think his opinions on bullet performance are utterly worthless when there are so many real authorities to go to. His legal opinions are about as valuable as those of a person who drives an ice cream truck.

Given the things Dodson exposed, I can’t believe stories Ayoob tells about himself without corroboration. When he talks about preparing cases with lawyers, we don’t get to hear what the lawyers recall. Maybe they paid little attention to him. Maybe he got fired a lot. Maybe a number of lawyers talked to him on the phone and decided not to hire him, and then he went on to say he “got together with attorneys” on this or that case.

Here’s how the expert witness business works. You have a client, and you think it would help him if an expert testified to the likelihood of various facts. It might be nice if a doctor said your client would never walk again. It might be good if an accountant said the defendant’s actions cost your client 40 million dollars. There is a pool of expert witnesses out there, and they advertise their services. You pick one you know will see things your way, and you turn him loose with the evidence. If ethics matter to you, you don’t tell him what to conclude, but I’m sure many lawyers cross that line.

You can see why my evidence professor called them W.H.O.R.E.S. I’m not saying they’re all dishonest, but many are, and conveniently, they’re dishonest in ways that don’t quite amount to perjury. If there are honest ones, they’re still not breaking their backs to bring out the truth. They’re trying to generate conclusions that will help the parties whose cases they’re involved in.

Go to a trial involving experts, and what will you see? One side’s experts will say A, B, and C are true, and the other side’s experts will “prove” there is no way any of those things could be true. If experts are really experts, and if they’re honest, how can that happen?

The fact that Ayoob worked in this field doesn’t mean he was right about anything or that the parties he worked to help were right. He may have been hired to help the guilty many times, and that’s okay, because that’s something our legal system permits. He never had a client, unless you include the lawyers who paid him. A layman can’t have a client.

The more I think about it, the more surprised I am I didn’t have a change of opinion sooner.

I think much more highly of Jim Cirillo, the New York cop who shot at least 11 people. His conclusions about self-defense are based on brutal experience. His own, not just other people’s. He worked full-time, and not in New Hampshire.

He was obsessed with inventing better bullets, because he knew what it was like to fire an ineffective shot and then try to make up for it while the criminal fired back. The more I think about Cirillo’s writings, the more I think lethal ammunition is important. It makes sense. If you’re really lucky, you’ll hit an assailant once during a confrontation, and if that shot doesn’t do the job, you will be in deep trouble. The odds of a single shot stopping a criminal are not good under the best of circumstances, so you need to do what you can to improve them.

It’s all very interesting. When you listen to fervent self-promoters, you always have to think about the inherent conflict of interest and how it may drive them to give you bad information.