He’s got a gun in his right pocket
or is he just glad to see his mom & pop he’s six years old & he already knows that it’s all just cops & robbers cowboys & Indians crips & bloods rivalries where red is just a color on grey sidewalks & body outlines are the graffiti of the day
Image by Victoria_Watercolor from Pixabay
He’s got a gun in his right pocket
older than his age heavier than his soul longer than he’s been alive trained since he could see you tube & that time his mom & pop took him down to the corner bodega to sit in the street bleachers to watch the shootout between the latin kings & the black guerrillas as they battled over the rights to rob the bodega owned by refugees from north korea on the first of the month before welfare cashing time when the benjamins are lined up single file ready for their cue
He's got a gun in his right pocket
& he knows how to use it since all those instructions were injected into his soul through his eyes & ears by cereal boxes & fighting videos & music videos & episodes of star wars & dungeons & dragons flooding the unsocial social media where the tick-tock-time is running out before you’re dead
Image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay
He’s only six years old with a gun in his right pocket
ready for his close-up the one where he holds that big ass cannon with both hands legs spread wide for balance his right eye focused down the barrel aiming for the heart of a people who are too busy working five jobs for rent money for the golden home in the sky that will never come while they drown in their own misery
Image by YasDO from Pixabay
He's a six year old boy with a gun in both his hands
laughs as he pulls the trigger pressing harder than the wishes he wished at his sixth birthday party when he blew away those candles & this time he blows away his teacher back again the wall motherfucker because well he saw it on that new damn streaming service that his big brother siphoned off their next door neighbor who siphoned it off from the neighbor across the street ain’t technology grand
and now the blood smears the blackboard wall & the cries of despair are not heard because no one believes this is real.
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
Just a girl with her dog and gun (Image by klimkin from Pixabay)
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.
How An AR-15 Rifle Works: Part 1, Components
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
How An AR-15 Rifle Works: Part 1, Components
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.
National Public Radio. May 29, 2022. Headline. School Shooters: Understanding their path to violence is key to prevention.
Top 10 Movie Shootouts of All Time
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.
Just a boy with his gun (Image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay)
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.
Hollow Point Bullet Through Gelatine
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.
Top 10 Most Violent Video Games
“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.
Buffalo Shooting Eyewitness: “It’s not the gun. It’s the person with the gun…”
A boy with a gun kills. Shoots boys and girls dead. We are all a little dead inside.
On Second Thought 