As a shooting man, not a gunmaker, I may suggest improvements impracticable to make with present means, but it was not by saying machines heavier than the air cannot be made to rise that the aeroplane was evolved.
It will be found that I have modified and even entirely changed some of my ideas since I published the Art of Revolver Shooting in 1890.
This is of course inevitable: one lives and learns, and I have learned much on the subject since then. Mechanical improvements have altered and eliminated difficulties which I had to teach how to avoid twenty-eight years ago.
On the other hand, new difficulties have arisen which have to be combated.
Those who cribbed from my former writings made a great mistake, and instruction which was quite right for revolvers is wrong for automatics. The position of the thumb, for instance, or the filing of the sights (which, almost without exception, these compilers of books have taken without acknowledgment from my Art of Revolver Shooting), are not applicable to modern pistols.
The best way to learn pistol shooting is to have an expert stand beside you, but, lacking this, the only way is to read a book by an expert.
It is very easy to write and to pose as an expert by the use of scissors, but it is rather hard on those who wish to learn, and also on those whose ideas are taken and used without acknowledgment.
I do not think any expert could write a book on pistol shooting using quotations, as each man has his own system.