For those of you who are wondering why I haven’t posted - I’m busy. Too busy to write? Sadly, yes, at least on the blog. I’m working on it though. I’ll be back as quickly as I can get some people trained up. In the mean time, here’s a reminder of where I was last year, and where several hundred thousand of your fellow citizens are this year. BOOOM!!!

The entry was published in the 2006 World Almanac, and I was paid $225 for it, if memory serves correctly. But that isn’t what is important. What is important is that we’re still at war, and there are other people out there doing the job I was doing at this time one year ago. Some of them will not come home. Reach out and tell them you care about their lives. You can start at Milblogging.

See you soon, my fellow denizens of the electronic universe.

When I resumed my civilian job as an information technology manager after my return from Iraq, I started a new tradition, which I follow devoutly. That tradition is to purchase a Starbucks venti latte every morning on my way into the office. When you frequent a business every single day as a customer, you begin to notice the other regulars. One of them is the man with the broken face.

He is also a devout man, in a way that is very different from my own consistent ritual of purchasing that delicious venti latte. My ritual began because the lattes available in Iraq (they have lattes in Iraq?) was horrible by my standards. All the milk we had available was ultra-pasteurized, and while I drank it, I didn’t necessarily enjoy it as much as good old-fashioned American style milk. It kind of tasted like cardboard to me, so I promised myself I would enjoy my “real” lattes if I ever made it home in one piece. Since I did, I kept my promise to myself.

I don’t have the faintest clue what promise the man with the broken face might have made to himself, but I can certainly make an educated guess based on my observations of his existence on my morning Starbucks runs. First, let me describe him. He is a man about my size. That is to say he is a small man, by American standards. He probably stands about five feet six inches tall and is of normal build for that size. But when you take a moment to look at his features, you realize something is very different. This man has a face that only a mother could love. His eyes are on different planes. One is sunk in deeply and askew. There are also deep and significant craters all over his frontal facial features. There are ridges where none should be, and flat areas where most of us have ridges.

The man with the broken face sits at a table with his golden retriever, reading from a well-worn Bible. His lips move as he mutters passages to himself, and he often pauses in prayer. I do not know what he is praying for, but his dog waits patiently as he goes through his morning meditations.

I often wonder if the man with the broken face has peace in his heart. I ponder to myself; is he praying for a new face or world peace? Is he praying for a lovely wife who will overlook his twisted visage and love him for what lies in his heart, or is he asking God to punish those who cannot help but stare openly at the things that make him obviously different from other humans around him?

I have a crooked chin. I used to worry about it, until I realized that it really didn’t matter. I’m sure people sometimes see me from a profile view and make a mental note that one side of my chin juts slightly lower than the other. It took me years of self-reflection to stop wondering if other people were judging me because my chin is less than perfect. When I see the man with the broken face, I hope he is at peace with his own imperfections. Maybe one day, when I’m running early instead of late, I’ll introduce myself and shake his hand.

It’s easy to sum up a person based on the physical and much harder to take the time to measure a person’s character, but the character is so much more important. As time passes, and we age, our characters are what we will be judged by. People will study Mother Teresa, Mahatma Ghandi and Thomas Jefferson long after they have forgotten about Paris Hilton, the Back Street Boys and Anna Nicole Smith.

With the recent departure of my departmental number two at work, my free time has dropped from little to none.

I will mention in passing a few developments that have meaning in my life. I am only a few credits away from a bachelor’s degree in information technology. That is exciting, as I have been working on the degree nights and weekends for five years (minus a year off for war duties). I’ll move on to a graduate degree, but I haven’t decided what yet.

I bought my wife a Beretta Tomcat as her primary carry gun thanks to a recommendation from Gringo Malo. I wish she was as excited about shooting it as I am, but not everyone loves shooting for the sake of shooting. My wife used her .22 only once that I am aware of when she came upon an opossum which had just been run over and was suffering. She fired an entire clip into the wounded creature in order to end its pain. I hated that little .22 - it had three safeties on it. Three! If you are clumsy enough or forgetful enough or careless enough that you need three safeties on your pistol, you shouldn’t have a pistol. That’s just my opinion, and I’m glad I sold that gun to someone who liked the idea of three safeties.

Last but not least, my post requesting a Tasmanian pen pal has borne fruit, and I am in the beginning stages of a correspondence that I hope will prove educational and interesting in the long term.

Have you ever been reflecting on how quickly you run out of time to do something? I have run out of time to do almost everything I enjoy most. Luckily, I know that these things tend to come in cycles and so I do not despair when the work pace becomes outrageous. I will make up for it by stealing back minutes here and hours there at some point in the future.

A lot of Americans call this holiday the Fourth of July. I call it Independence Day because, for me, this day is a celebration of the ideas that make the United States of America a great nation. For many of you, this day means no work, shopping, fireworks and cool beverages on a hot day. All those things are fine. However, I need something deeper from this national holiday. I need reinforcement of what it actually means to be free to make my own choices. That’s why today, I packed up some of my guns and went to the range.

I spent about four hours practicing marksmanship. First, I worked on the 25-yard pistol range. I shot my Kel-Tec P-32 first. The P-32 is a fun little gun, but I would hate to find myself in a situation where my life depended on it. It’s quite accurate for hitting a human sized target in the chest area at the 25-yard distance - I can do so with about 90% accuracy. The problem with the Kel-Tec P-32 is that it (mine at least) jams quite frequently. I was using PMC .32 Auto ammo and it is possible that the pistol simply doesn’t like that round. Since PMC is out of business, I’ll try switching to something else next time. The Kel-Tec is a great ankle carry, but only as a backup until I figure why it jams so much.

Next I shot my HK .45 USP Compact. The USP Compact is a well engineered weapon, with no useless “safety” features at all. It’s highly accurate at 25 yards. I managed to put 9 of 10 rounds in the target today, but I pulled one round by breathing while pulling the trigger. Darn it! If I had to pick any single handgun to be stranded on an island full of cannibals with, it would be my HK .45 Compact. Why? It never, ever jams. The trigger pull is just right, and I like the factory sights. It’s as accurate for me as my longer barreled SA XD .40 Tactical at 25-yards. Let’s move on to that weapon.

I love the way the XD .40 Tactical feels in my hands except for one thing - the stupid rear safety. A grip safety is completely unnecessary for experienced shooters. If I don’t have a good grip on the pistol, then I deserve what I get when the trigger is pulled. I wish Springfield Armory would remove this “feature.” The only safety needed on a pistol is a good trigger guard. I don’t mind the trigger safety as much, although I prefer pistols without it. I am not going to drop my pistol or accidentally catch the trigger on something. The XD .40 is fun to shoot though, and it’s accurate enough to make a good primary carry weapon. I would stake my life on the pistol any day. I hit 10 of 10 at the 25-yard mark today with the XD.

Last but certainly not least, I fired about 75 rounds through my Bushmaster Varminter today. I warmed up at 50 yards and shot five groups of five rounds each. Then I went out to 200 yards and squeezed off another 40 rounds. Every one hit my Big Burst target, although I didn’t have very tight groups at 200. I’ll get better once I buy a spotting scope so I can adjust my shots better from one trigger squeeze to the next. The Varminter is my favorite weapon to shoot. I love the way it feels and the confidence it inspires at 500 yards.

The right to privately own guns is the one that keeps all the rest in place. Today, on Independence Day, I reminded myself of that fact. I was all by myself on the range, and that kind of worries me. I wish more Americans realized that without guns in private hands, good intentions wouldn’t be enough to keep us making most of our decisions without some bureaucrat constantly interfering in the name of someone else who has no stake in the life he or she is interfering with.

Some words have the irrefutable power of truth behind them, despite the fact that they exist only as collections of zeros and ones suspended on magnetic metal platters floating in time and space.

A Nation of Cowards is such a collection of words.

Is your life worth protecting? If so, whose responsibility is it to protect it? If you believe that it is the police’s, not only are you wrong — since the courts universally rule that they have no legal obligation to do so — but you face some difficult moral quandaries. How can you rightfully ask another human being to risk his life to protect yours, when you will assume no responsibility yourself? Because that is his job and we pay him to do it? Because your life is of incalculable value, but his is only worth the $30,000 salary we pay him? If you believe it reprehensible to possess the means and will to use lethal force to repel a criminal assault, how can you call upon another to do so for you?

Do you believe that you are forbidden to protect yourself because the police are better qualified to protect you, because they know what they are doing but you’re a rank amateur? Put aside that this is equivalent to believing that only concert pianists may play the piano and only professional athletes may play sports. What exactly are these special qualities possessed only by the police and beyond the rest of us mere mortals?

One who values his life and takes seriously his responsibilities to his family and community will possess and cultivate the means of fighting back, and will retaliate when threatened with death or grievous injury to himself or a loved one. He will never be content to rely solely on others for his safety, or to think he has done all that is possible by being aware of his surroundings and taking measures of avoidance. Let’s not mince words: He will be armed, will be trained in the use of his weapon, and will defend himself when faced with lethal violence.

In a society that increasingly subcontracts out the right of self-defense, against the principles outlined clearly in the founding documents of that society, is a nation in need of education. No one is more motivated than the individual whose very existence is threatened to protect said existence. So why would we let someone else, a stranger, take over the responsibility of protecting our very existence? Because we are taught to do so.

I do not find myself willing to subcontract out the responsibility for protecting my own presence here on this Earth. Rather, I am am the prime advocate of me. And that is why I spent another Saturday on the range. I sold a .22 caliber pistol to someone this weekend. He is a soldier, like myself, but he is also a typical American in this new nation of ours - educated to respect authority and trained to sublet his life out to others.

He asked me who he needed to register the gun with. “No one,” I said. In this state, you have the right to carry a gun in your vehicle, or to keep one in your home. You are allowed to defend your existence with a firearm. He had a hard time believing me. Much like his assigned bureaucrats must have, I used the technique of repetition to reinforce ideas in his brain - the center of his existence. While he practiced with the ammunition I had purchased on his behalf, and I practiced with my larger caliber weapons, we talked about the basic ideas that every American should have an awareness of.

“When do I have the right to use a gun in self-defense?” he wanted to know. “Anytime you feel like you are in danger,” was my answer. “What will the authorities think?” he asked. “That really doesn’t matter,” I told him. Then I explained that I would rather take my chances with a jury than I would with a being not bound by allegiance to the laws of man. He understood I think. He is starting to break the mental chains we are all wrapped in as soon as we enter the public education system of this United States of America. I hope he will practice often with his new gun.

Now, dear reader, I direct your attention back to a most potent compendium of logic, that essay entitled A Nation of Cowards. Read it. Then read it again. Who is in charge of your life? Ask yourself if you are brave enough to take ultimate responsibility for your own existence.