Reflection Questions:
What was your viewpoint regarding firearms, their uses and misuses, and legislation coming in to the project?
Coming into this project, I supported gun control. But I also understand that some guns have purposes and can be used as tools. I don't think people need to have access to certain guns. Some guns were designed to be used as weapons with no other purpose than to kill people, Why else would you need a fully automatic firearm? and I think that guns like this should only be carried by the military and they should stay within the military. There are plenty of other guns designed to be used as tools in different situations, such as rifles and shotguns for hunting, or even a handgun for self defense. Keep in mind that any gun can be used as a weapon, but some guns make it a lot easier to kill people than others because of the rapid rate at which they can shoot, and the amount of ammunition they can hold. I also understand that it isn't the gun that decides to kill people, its the person using the gun, but if we restricted guns like these it could at least make the difference between a shooting and a mass shooting. After the project my view point was the same except researching these fully automating firearms strengthened my opinion that we should not have access to them.
In what ways was that viewpoint challenged by our class conversations, your research, and the exhibition?
In most situations my viewpoint wasn't challenged but re enforced by my peers with similar viewpoints. One situation I can think of where my view point was challenged because it collided with another is when I was researching for our project and I was referring to automatic firearms as weapons rather than tools. For our project some members wanted us to stay away from using words to describe firearms such as weapons, and refer to them as tools or something else with a better connotation. I understood this because I agree that some guns can be used as tools and something isn't considered a weapon until its been used as one. But in my opinion, automatic firearms were designed to be used as weapons and don't really have any other purposes than to be used as a weapon, so I wanted to refer to them as weapons instead of tools because I feel like a gun like that should be treated as a weapon.
What adversity did you face during this project and how did you overcome it/make your way through it?
Overall I thought this project went pretty well but one adversity I had to face was the difference in opinion within my group and the class. I feel like I did a really good job of being respectful of other peoples opinions while still holding strong to my own. I took every opportunity I got to try and talk with people that have different opinions about guns than I do, so I could understand there side better. They also gave me the opportunity to voice my opinion and respectfully listened and we were able to talk about our differences in opinion in a constructive way to try and understand each others sides as best we could.
In what ways did you contribute to your group and the class as a whole?
During the planning stages of the exhibition before the two classes got together, Tanner and I sat down and planned out this whole idea for our section of the exhibition because we were the only two people in our group that were on our class. After meeting up with the rest of our group in the other class, I was stoked that they had came up with a lot of similar ideas to the ones that I did. This made it very easy for me to collaborate on coming up with our final idea. I completed all of the tasks that I had agreed to finishing in order for us to be ready for our exhibition. While we were setting up the exhibition I did whatever I could to assemble things and put things where they needed to be.
What can you point to in the exhibition that is yours (e.g. something you made, researched, etc.)
Probable the biggest thing I can point at that is completely mine in this exhibition are the gun profiles for the sub machine gun, refiles and shotguns, and semi-automatic firearms. I also created some of the signs in Photoshop. Finally I helped with various construction projects in our exhibition such as the safe.