The Weapons Cache: Guns and Gun Control

Howdy folks!  Before I get into the gun toting action of this blog too far, I wanted to share with you about A Round of Words in Eighty Days.  Some of you know that I participate in this event and on Wednesdays with my Mashup you can find a list of my goals for the week with the event.  Well... just to let you know the second round started today!  Woo hoo!  So if you are looking for a writing community to help you to reach your potential this is a great place to stop.  We have several published and unpublished authors who want to support you and help you to reach your dreams.  So give it a shot.  Now that we've finished that, it is on to the guns!



Even though I've been a soldier for the past twelve years I never really got into guns.  Now I know there are folks out there who are thinking that this is some sort of crazy sacrilege, but it is the truth.  I've always thought they were neat, that they were powerful, but I'd take a sword any day over a gun.  Swords in my book are just cooler.

That is probably how a lot of folks feel about guns, because I remember when I was younger seeing the character to the left in a video game called Final Fantasy 7.  A great game and a great story, but some of the science they had in the game was dead wrong.  Like Barret here.  Notice the chain gun on his right arm.  That isn't something that could ever be attached to a person because it wouldn't ever work.  It is a nice idea, but it wouldn't function in real life.  The reason that comes to mind most immediately is that the recoil on such a weapon is incredible.  He would be thrown back every time he tried to fire such a weapon.  There is a reason why police officers hold guns in two hands and a person with a rifle puts it up to their shoulder.  You can't fire accurately when you can't control the weapon properly.

For example, I'm sure all of you have seen this: the sidehold.  Kay, this doesn't work because one, the gun is pointed down.  Two, he doesn't have the proper support to actually aim his fire.  And three because he's put it on its side he can't aim it because the weapon is designed to be aimed when  everything is horizontal rather than vertical.  This is not cool, nor is it neat.  The way this man is holding this weapon shows his disrespect for the weapon and carelessness for human life.

Through my training in the military I've developed a moral sense of how a weapon should be handled, and I think if everyone followed these rules we would have no need of gun control laws.  I'm going to share with you a version of these rules from the Marines and then I'm going to break it down in the style of the OG.

The four rules of safety for a firearm are as follows:

1. Treat every weapon as if it were loaded.
     This means that you should treat it as if it were loaded at all times.  I've seen folks who have pointed guns at other people because they think its funny.  I'm sorry, its not.  Please don't point a gun at me, because I don't know if it is loaded or unloaded.  And you should only point a weapon at someone or something you intend on killing.
2. Keep your finger straight and off the trigger, until you intend to fire.
     This is such an important rule.  Triggers do not take a lot of pressure to pull.  Consider it only takes a little strength in one finger to pull most triggers.  And if you have your finger in the trigger well and someone surprises you, guess what, your gun just went off.  This is even worse when you consider a hairline trigger, that takes hardly any pressure to cause the hammer to drop.
3. Never point your weapon at anything you don't intend to shoot.
     When you point your weapon at someone you don't intend on shooting, you start a habit of being careless with a firearm.  You should NEVER be careless with a firearm.  Consider the purpose of a gun for most folks is to kill.  Do you want to make anyone feel like you are out to kill them?  I certainly hope not.  This might seem a little repetitive.  Did I mention this above?  Yeah, I did.  Put a star next to rules one and three.
4. Keep your weapon on safe until you intend to fire.
     You know what this really means?  Be familiar enough with your weapon to know when it is on safe and on fire.  This means you might need to find out what all the parts are and what they do.  The diagram to the left is a good start to understanding a gun a lot better.  But I'm certain if you Google it, you can find much better examples.

Now honestly if we actually had most folks follow those rules, we would have little need for gun laws.  If we actually would spend time learning the correct principles behind how to use these we wouldn't have the government dictating who and who can't purchase a weapon as much as they do.  Say what you want about Obama and Democrats wanting stricter gun laws, I believe that we have a great amount of say in the laws we have in our country.  And when we don't take responsibility for our actions, others will do so for us, because they want to protect their families from those who might hurt them because they do not have the good sense to be responsible.

Government has the purpose of guiding and protecting us as people.  And just like a gun when we choose to ignore the proper use of the government, or abuse its power, we deny ourselves the freedoms that we would otherwise blessed to enjoy.  That's part of the reason that I've chosen to be a soldier, it is because I care about the freedoms that I have and I'm willing to kill, and even die to protect those freedoms.

Most people have guns for similar reasons to that.  They have them to protect their homes, nothing more.  The gangsters from Los Angeles and New York we see have them to protect their families too.  Misguided though they are, they want to protect what they feel is theirs.  Hunters use them to provide for their families.  So even though this weapon has the purpose of killing, it can provide through its proper use several blessings.

Do you own a gun or a rifle?  I didn't until recently.  My adopted Dad, purchased me a Mosin Nagant for Christmas.  It is a beautiful weapon with a maximum effective range of 2000 yards.  I'm really looking forward to getting out to a range to learn better how to use it.  Because I refuse to be an uneducated gun owner.  When you hold the power of life or death in your hands, it is crucial that you understand how to use it, and even more important that you can use it properly.

Well another month has come and gone.  I'm sad to see March gone, but April looks like it is going to be a beautiful month to be honest with you.  I feel like I'm going to get a lot of writing done and that's always a good thing.  Another good thing is that we have a winner for our giveaway last month.  And that is: Carmen Esposito.  Congratulations!

Unfortunately, I need to be responsible.  My family has fallen on some hard times financially, so I cannot do this for the month of April.  Perhaps in May things will be better and I'll feel like we can afford it, but not this month.  My apologies.  But I'm sure if you look around my blog you'll always find a good book to read, cause I like to recommend books.

Well that's all I have for now.  This is Jayrod Garrett, the First OG keeping it real with a few questions for you.  For those of you who are gun nuts out there: What would you recommend for a good pistol?  And for those of you who barely know anything about guns: How do you think gun safety education would benefit us as a society?

The Birth of the Diversity Blogs

This past weekend I spent at a writers symposium called, “Life, the Universe, and Everything.”  (Or LTUE for short.)  It is a wonderful program with many of the large names in Fantasy and Science Fiction who attend.  And each year that I attend I get so much out of it.  I learned about all sorts of subjects from “Plots, Subplots, and Foreshadowing,” to “Writing Humor.”  And I felt blessed for the opportunity to be there.  Only as I looked around I noticed something was missing.  I saw Tracy Hickman, L. E. Modesitt, Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dave Farland, and various other standards in the industry.  I met them and enjoyed their company and for some reason I felt like I didn’t belong.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to say I shouldn’t be writing, but I felt the same way I do when I go to church.  Like a speck of pepper in a sea of cream.  All of the big name authors there were white.  Most all of the folks I saw come to the symposium were white.  No hispanics, no asians, and no blacks were in attendance from what I saw.  Recognizing such a poor mixture of diversity in the group of people I aspire to join made me realize something.  This is part of the reason we see such a lack of diversity in the science fiction and fantasy markets.  It isn’t because the people are racist, or they are focused only on the tropes of elves, dwarves, and orcs, but because there isn’t enough diversity in the community.

Between this and a conversation with a man I met at the convention by the name of David Powers King (read his blog, its pretty solid), I realized that I need to start blogging not only how I feel about various things going on in our culture, but about diversity in the various cultures that we have in our world.  Talking about Gay Marriage, Being Black Enough, and what Freedom is are important aspects of the culture we live in and themes to approach in literature, but it isn’t enough.  I want to write about how the Native Americans known as the Inuit live from the perspective of one of their own, or about hispanic culture from those trying to get a college education who are living in it, and introduce people to the rich heritage of black spirituality.  We have so many opportunities to recognize the diversity around us, not only in terms of race, but sexuality, gender, morality, and religion.  And I want to be a voice for helping writers to begin to recognize that.

I heard back in high school that drama was the mirror of man.  Well writing fiction is a form of drama, and I want to see the diversity of the world that I live in reflected better.  Now I’ve been trying to build an audience of late, and I realize that my journey here to develop better fantasy and science fiction will not happen without a community effort of some sort.  I can write about these things all I want, but without you sharing your thoughts and feelings with me, this won’t ever really get started.  And offering you my opinion probably isn’t enough.  So I’ve started an excellent book called the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin.  She is a black fantasy author who plays against the traditional methods by telling the story in first person and having a black female protagonist.  At the end of this month I plan on putting each person who comments on my blog into a hat and sending three of them a copy of this book.  Think of it as my way of saying thank you for having a conversation with me.

So my question to you is?  What do you want to hear about?  I have plans of talking about the hypocrisy in religion, sharing my own conversion story to becoming LDS, and about what it really is like to be an eskimo.  But I know there are a lot of other ideas out there for cultural diversity and thematic writing and rather than search all of them out by myself, I want to hear from you.  Lets become a team and discover the miracle of the diversity of the world we live in together.