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View From The Home Front
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by CJ Songer, February, 2005
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Firearms and Fiction??!
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One of the truly great perks about being a writer and a shooter is being able to cross-feed. Now, cross-feeding isn’t generally considered a good thing in relation to firearms because it usually means that your ammo‘s in sideways, but in this case, I’m talking about being in a position to give out firearms information to people who wouldn‘t otherwise come across it. Many mystery writers and readers know very little about shooting and guns (and many don’t want to know, thank you very much, but that’s a whole ‘nother column.) It’s gratifying to be considered trustworthy enough, though, to be called on as a resource when fellow authors decide to be bold and include a gun or two in their story-lines.
Peggy Tartaro, of the Second Amendment Foundation, has taken this cross-feeding concept even further. For the past five years, she and SAF have hosted a Firearms and Fiction seminar to which they’ve invited a variety of mystery writers. Why? Well, Peggy and her mom are both avid mystery readers, and I can attest that it’s incredibly jarring when the heroine goes flitting out in the middle of the night in search of the killer without taking any real-life precautions such as wearing her trusty Snubbie and carrying a Surefire -- or when the hero, confronted by an armed terrorist, kick-boxes his way to victory rather than drawing a sidearm, because his past life as a cop/war-vet/scarred P.I. has led him to feel that gun use is wrong. Peggy reasoned that it was modern-day writers’ lack of time and lack of access to firearms that was keeping fictional gun-ownership to a minimum, so she decided to do something about it. This past November, my husband and I were among the crew she assembled in Las Vegas to assist with this year’s crop of mystery writers. Among the instructors she brought on board were Gila Hayes of the Firearms Academy of Seattle, a well-known police trainer and writer of self-defense articles and books; Alan Gottlieb, founder of the SAF and chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms; Ken Jorgensen, marketing director for Sturm, Ruger & Co.; Gary Mehalik, communications director for the National Shooting Sports Foundation; Keeva Segal, marketing specialist for Taurus USA and Rossi firearms; Torrey Johnson, a criminalist with the Las Vegas Metro PD; and the three Tartaros themselves: father Joe, editor of the New Gun Week and president of SAF; son Mark, a retired Buffalo PD officer and training instructor for the Erie County Police Academy; and daughter Peggy, board member of CCRKBA and editor of Women & Guns magazine.
The notion was to start off the first day in the comfort of one of the Imperial Palace Hotel’s meeting rooms with some classroom instruction about the history of firearms, their purposes and uses, and how they’ve evolved through the ages. From there, we moved easily along to demonstrations and discussions of firearms safety and operation, myths about guns, as well as concealed carry and the use of deadly force, forensic evidence, “ballistic fingerprints” and so on. For most of the writers, this was their first introduction to any of this, and their questions came fast and feverishly. It was purely a delight to watch them absorb the information, and to hear them revolving plot ideas on the breaks and at dinner while they figured out how they could incorporate what they were learning. The true test, though, would be the second day when we all drove out to the Desert Sportsmen’s Range for a day of practical shooting.
The writers were eager, but they were nervous< | ||||||||||||||