Spiritual Thought of The Day

So I've decided that, in anticipation of conference this weekend, that I would post uplifting, or at least gospel related topics on the blog. Maybe it will benefit readers, maybe its mostly for me, but here goes.

Last week my mom called me at work and asked me what I learned on my mission. I talked about dealing with disappointment or something, then the call ended. Afterward, I got thinking about what I learned. One thing I remember standing out to me was that the gift of the Holy Ghost (among other things) makes you much more aware of, well everything. Things like the trees growing, flowers, what people are thinking, which route to take to get to your destination, where you should go tracting.

There are lots of good reasons to use the gift of the Holy Ghost, and maybe I'm a little pragmatic, but you can use this gift for practical purposes as well as spiritual. Many times on my mission I would be riding my bike home at 9 pm and the thought would come that we should ride another way to get home. i think there were maybe two times when I didn't follow those thoughts. They both happened in Glendale, oddly enough. I won't tell the whole stories now, but I learned that the Spirit can keep from danger, and sometimes if you stumble across it, can give you directions on how to get out while you still have time to act.

cop killers

when you hear that term used in the media or from lawmakers, they usually talk about armor piercing rifle bullets. But here is an article with facts about cop killers. http://www.stoppingpower.net/commentary/comm_cop_killers.asp
please give it a read and educate yourself.
-Thanks

A new gun!

Kristen got a Smith and Wesson LadySmith revolver, and we went shooting last saturday, and she had FuN! Hooray! We were originally looking for a three inch barreled revolver, but it was out of stock, everywhere in the valley. The Ladysmith was not, and Kris liked the grip so she bought it. I think its a nice looking gun, and having shot it, its pretty manageable. Her hand was a little sore after a hundred shots, but that should be fixable with a shooting glove. The only time I could see that being an issue would be at a 300 round basic pistol class but if we find a good glove for her i think it will be fine. I shot a little low and left, so I need to practice a smoother trigger pull. I had to silence myself a few times because I kept wanting to give her "tips" but i realized that I should just work on my own stuff and let her enjoy shooting hers.

By the way, Kris's gun is not a snubnose, the smaller one is a snubnose. The smaller one was designed to be small, Kris's is designed to be comfortable for people with smaller hands to shoot. And Kris thinks (and i agree) that pink grips are not our style.

Emergency Preparedness

We are prepared. bullets are so expensive these days! A box of 50 9mm american eagle was 15 Bucks! PMC .38s were $18 for 50! Well thanks to the government rewarding us for having a baby, I was able to go stock up for a while. It cost a few hundred bucks but we now have 200 rounds for kristen and 500 rounds for my gun. When I was at the gun store, there was a woman and her friends there looking for a gun to buy. At one point, the salesman was showing her a beretta 92 that had a laser grip on it. He was talking about how the action was so smooth and the bigger grip would make it comfortable to shoot, and Look! it has a laser! But as I watched, it was apparent that it was too big for her. So in this case the larger grip would actually make it difficult to shoot because the recoil would make her wrist twist, instead of going straight back into the web of her hand and through her bones. That's the way a gun should fit in your hand and it allows your whole body weight to absorb the recoil, instead of just your wrist. Then, later he was showing her a walther .22 and saying "This .22 is powerful enough" (I'm assuming to stop an attacker) While I agree that the best way for a new shooter to learn is with a .22, because they are cheap and easy, the only attacker you would stop with one is the Killer Rabbit from Monty Python.
It just seemed a little condescending that, since she couldn't rack the slide on the 92, and the guy wasn't giving her the right technique to do it, then she must be weak so he will now try to convince her that a .22 is powerful enough for her. Or in other words, she can't handle anything more than a .22. Boo on ignorant gunshop clerks.

Glamour

Dad went to Puerto Vallarta to learn how to pose people and take professional looking portrait shots. He had a little studio set up in his living room with some light coming in through the window. He was practicing on Kris and when he took a break he gave me the camera, so I took some pictures. I married a beautiful woman.

GUNS!

Are great! Our ward sponsored a shotgun shoot yesterday, and it was really fun. I discovered that the mini glock is a good fit for kristen's hand. One of the counselors in our bishopric has a glock 27, which is a .40 caliber. Those little glocks are the only ones that feel good in my hand, as well. I thought since it is a double stack magazine, that kris would be unable to reach the trigger, but she really liked the way it fit, and with the heavier .40 cal bullet she said it felt the same as my too-big-for kristen sig 9mm. We also shot our elder's quorum president's F2000, which looks like a squirt gun, this photo is of me commenting on how weird that gun was. If you needed a gun to be really small, then this would work just fine, plus it uses AR15 magazines, so its mags and bullets are compatible with other rifles and bullets that are common in america. Dan had an EOTac sight on it that was sighted in just perfectly. Still, a weird looking gun. Must be a pain to take apart. I keep saying that if i'm ever going to spend that much money on a fighting rifle, I'd like to go for the sig 556, but I'm not going to be making that much money for a while, so I really should not think about it too much until I'm in a position to do something about it. Maybe I should get a job at a PR firm like Dan so I can support my family and pay my debts first. I shot dan's new xcr, and it was pretty sweet, and its a salt lake company, robinson arms. The only guns in our future are ones that kristen will like to shoot, so we can go shooting together and both enjoy ourselves. Like a revolver and a shotgun. I also got to shoot an HK USP compact .40, i didn't like it. The glock was more comfortable, even though its tiny. The HK just wanted to fly back and hit me in the face. My sig was the most comfortable for me. (Duh, thats why I bought it) Shotguns are really versatile and fun, because you can do skeet shooting. The first one i shot was a really lightweight, expensive feeling beretta semi auto. It kicks, not the hardest, pretty kind of hard, it would take some getting used to. Then I shot an old Browning Over and Under that was purchased by the owner's granddad when he was a young go-getter. It was kept in really good shape. Alex calls it the "Peacemaker". It was a little heavier than the beretta, and was much more comfortable to shoot. Until I accidentally shot both barrels at the same time, that was a little bit of a surprise. Billy in the red sweatshirt is holding the peacemaker, and kristen is in the background trying to unjam the beretta.