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 first held a rifle in my hands. I’m pretty sure it was a .22 caliber. The memory is hazy. The hunting tool was heavier than I expected. I raised it to my eye level, imagining how it would feel, smell, 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 little salt, pepper, maybe some gravy and potatoes. Yeah, I wondered about it.
“What We Know About the Minnesota Catholic School Shooting”
I was hunting for food, for sport, and for self-defense from them. Crime control.
“We compared gun policy across the country, scoring every state on the strength of its gun laws and comparing it with its rate of gun violence. In states where elected officials have taken action to pass gun safety laws, fewer people die by gun violence. Choose a state to see how it stacks up on 50 key policies, or explore a policy to see how much of the country has adopted it.” “Gun Safety Policies Save Lives” Everytown Gun Law Rankings
“What the data says about gun deaths in the U.S.”
“Nearly 47,000 people died of gun-related injuries in the United States in 2023, according to the latest available statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). While the number of gun deaths in the U.S. fell for the second consecutive year, it remained among the highest annual totals on record.”
Pew Research Center March 5, 2025
“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—those where you stand in front of a screen with a fake gun, rifle, or machine gun and fire nonstop, hoping—really praying—to hit or kill as many images created by coders to look as real as possible so you can feel a thrill or a sense of mission accomplished. Yes, I know it’s not real, but I wonder what it would feel like to experience 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 we fear, sometimes hate, and oppress, we allow ourselves saving grace.
“Witness describes Minneapolis shooting: ‘Most terrifying scene’”
A boy and a girl with a gun kill, shooting boys and girls dead. We all feel a little dead inside.
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