A collage of quotes, verses, medical testimony, videos, and images in observation of the American genuflection before the most religious of symbols, the Gun (this includes rifles, bazookas, hand grenades, RPGs, and all other weapons of war thought to be perfectly legitimately used for non-military purposes in pursuit of self-defense or the overthrow of the government).
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
United States Constitution Second Amendment
A gun. A rifle. A weapon. I was twenty-one or twenty-two when I held a rifle in my hands for the first time. Pretty sure it was a .22 caliber. The memory is faint. The hunting instrument was heavier than I thought it would be. I brought it up to my eye level, fantasizing what it would feel like, smell like, and how the animal might feel as the bullet entered its body. What would it taste like after we cut it up and cooked it? With a bit of salt and pepper and maybe some gravy and potatoes. Yeah, I wondered about it.
New York Times. May 28, 2022. Headline. Gun in Texas Shooting Came From Company Known for Pushing Boundaries
“All firearms come with three main groups of parts. Each weapon has an action, a stock, and a barrel. These are universal truths. The action is the internal part of the weapon. Inside the action you will find all the moving parts that are used to load, shoot, and eject either shells or cartridges.”
Gun Anatomy 101: The Universal Parts of a Gun- SecretsofSurvival.com
I was hunting for food. For sport. Self Defense from them. Crime Control.
Washington Post. May 28, 2022. Headline. Uvalde: 90 minutes of terror, a failed police response and shattered trust.
National Public Radio. May 29, 2022. Headline. School Shooters: Understanding their path to violence is key to prevention.
I’ve seen police raise their guns to detain a person. An off-duty police officer left a .38 in a holster in a bathroom. I found it while I was cleaning. I was afraid to touch it. It was heavier than I imagined it would be. Fear gripped me. But, I enjoy a war film—an action thriller. Murderous path to excitement, my eyes transfixed, and the rush of blood through my veins. Yeah, it’s pretty cool in America.
CNN. May 29, 20022. Headline. ‘These are our children.’ 80 minutes of horror at Robb Elementary School
“When bullets enter a human body, they don’t just pierce tissue, they shatter bones and dislocate limbs.”
PBS NewsHour. February 17, 2018. What a bullet does to a human body.
Video games are not my thing. I’ve played a few. You know the kind where you stand in front of a screen with a fake gun or rifle or machine gun and you fire incessantly hoping, praying really, to hit, kill, as many images created by coders to look as real as possible so you can feel a thrill, a sense of mission accomplished. Yes, I know it’s not real but I wonder what it would be like to feel that sense of power.
“Typical entrance wounds are ordinarily round in shape with a circumferential margin of abrasion surrounding the defect produced by the bullet (Figure 1, A and B).4 The margin of abrasion is a scraping or scuffing of the skin caused by the bullet as it pushes inward. The margin of abrasion may be concentric or eccentric. When a bullet penetrates the skin nose on, it produces a concentric margin of abrasion—that is, a ring of scraped skin of uniform thickness—because it enters perpendicular to the skin. When the nose of a bullet penetrates the skin at an angle, it produces an eccentric margin of abrasion, that is, a ring that is thicker in 1 area. The thick area of an eccentric margin of abrasion indicates the direction from which the bullet came. In addition, the thicker the margin the shallower the angle of the bullet was as it struck the skin.”
Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine. September 01, 2006- Practical Pathology of Gunshot Wounds.
We see what we want to see so we can feel and think better about the world around us. To be safe from those whom we fear, sometimes hate, oppress, to allow ourselves saving grace.
A boy with a gun kills. Shoots boys and girls dead. We are all a little dead inside.
On Second Thought 