John Dean “Jeff” Cooper was born in Los Angeles in 1920.  He started shooting at the age of eleven and joined the R.O.T.C. at Los Angeles High School at the prospect of free 22 ammunition for team members.
At Stanford, he majored in Political Science, joined a fraternity and lettered in fencing.  After his first year, he was joined by his high school sweetheart, Janelle, and they dated all through college.
From Stanford he moved immediately in Marine Corps Basic School as an honor graduate in 1941 and spent the next few years in the Pacific War.
Concluding naively that the war had been won, he resigned his commission in 1951, only to sign up again quickly for Korea, during which action he spent much of the time in sensitive operations in Asia.  After Korea, he once again reverted to civilian status.
In California in the late 1950’s he invented the sport of practical pistol competition, and, with a lot of help from his friends, perfected the Modern Technique of the Pistol.  Thereafter he pursued this art extensively in Latin America, the Phillippines, the Near East, Africa, and the United States, and conducted various schools in England and on the Continent.
While in California he went back to school and earned an M.A. in history from the University of California at Riverside.
In 1975, their children being grown and gone, Jeff and Janelle moved to Gunsite Ranch in Arizona and founded the American Pistol Institute (now Gunsite Academy) which teaches crisis management with all small arms to private citizens, the law enforcement establishment, and the U.S. Armed Forces.
It may be safely stated that today Gunsite Academy constitutes the fountainhead of modern smallarms doctrine.

While Gunsite was a significant accomplishment, its impact went far beyond the physical facilities and the numerous people that it has trained, and continues to train. The success of Gunsite spawned a number of similar establishments that copied the basic concept of training for self defense (and to some extent for related competitions, more on this later). Prominent examples were Thunder Ranch, run by former Gunsite operations officer Clint Smith and the Chapman Academy run by long time friend and competitor Ray Chapman, to mention only two of a significant number that sprang up to meet a new found need for this kind of instruction. In addition to fixed facilities, there were numerous other instructors who were disciples and students of Jeff Cooper as well as former instructors at Gunsite, toinclude Randy Cain, Bill Jeans, Pat Rogers, to name only a few, who taught around the United States a different facilities to meet the needs of those who couldn’t afford to travel to the fixed facilities.
If the growth of training for firearms in self defense was widespread after the success of Gunsite, an even bigger impact came from Jeff Cooper’s impact in the formation of the International Practical Shooting Confederation, where he formed the organization and was its first president. This was the first organization to formalize the use of small arms for competition that revolved around fast, accurate fire in a scenario based setting that required movement, tactics, and self defense weapons with minimum power levels. While target shooting had been around for a long time, this was a major step towards competition based on principle originally created by the Southwest Combat Pistol League, of which Jeff was one of the drivers and organizers. IPSC has grown into a worldwide organization that currently has chapters in 106 countries (https://www.ipsc.org/). The United States offshoot (or chapter) the United States Practical Shooting Association ( https://uspsa.org/) currently has over 450 clubs in the United States. The huge success of IPSC/USPSA, and partially when it diverged from some of Jeff’s tenets, spawned other shooting sports organizations that roughly followed the same lines with respect to shooting fast and accurately in scenario driven courses that mimicked to some extent self defense problems. The most notable is the International Defensive Pistol Association (https://www.idpa.com/) which currently has over 450 clubs in the USA and over 70 foreign countries. And these are only the major organizations that can trace their origins to the work of Jeff Cooper. There are numerous others that are sprouting up all the time, to include Action Shooting International (https://asi-usa.org/) and Steel Challenge Shooting Association ( https://scsa.org/), all of which can trace their lineage back to the original work of Jeff Cooper.

Jeff served on the Board of Directors of the National Rifle Association and then as a member of the Executive Council, was the founder and lifetime honorary chairman of the International Practical Shooting Confederation, and served for many years as Editor-at-Large for Guns and Ammo Magazine.
The author of numerous books, both technical and autobiographical, Jeff died at the age of 86 at his home (the Sconce) at Gunsite in September of 2006.  His final resting place, along with his wife Janelle, is in the Arizona Pioneers’ Home Cemetery in Prescott.