Guns Versus Cameras

The choice
between buying a gun
and buying a camera
feels like the choice between
documenting history
and becoming it.

This choice makes me feel like
hope is past tense, that maybe
focusing (the act of bringing an image to clarity)
might be less important than
focusing (the act of breathing to center your aim).

Using a camera is an act of acceptance,
opening an aperture
to allow light to form an image on a digital sensor,
a third eye capturing a moment
for playback, the act of gathering
a story that needs
to be told.

Firing a gun is an act of rejection,
pin striking primer to ignite gunpowder
and throw a slug spinning, screaming
down the rifle like a football spiral,
gravity temporarily denied,
an act of saying,
no
you do not take my life today,
instead I take
yours.

The camera is more expensive
contains lenses precision cut
from glass cylinders.

Captures twenty four
or thirty or sixty frames
per second,
still images strung together
to form the image
of a child running,
a poet reading,
always something in progress.

If you slow it down, you can
watch each image float by.
The best footage creates
a world you never want to leave.

The background
is called bokeh, the lovely
smear that light makes
when it strikes the sensor,
the pleasing blur of memory,
of light, golden,
in the summer afternoon.
The gun is cheaper,
fires sixty or a hundred
or six hundred bullets
a minute.
I can’t keep count.

Contains as many rounds
as the law will allow
each one a human life
taken or saved or taken;
I can’t keep the count.

Ends sentences but not paragraphs,
lives but not stories,
so many
bullet holes, each one,
the shape of a period.
But what
ever really
ends?

When firing your gun,
you must always be aware
of what is behind your target;
bullets have a tendency to
pass through flesh, bone,
and intention.

If you slow it down,
you will become a better marksman,
more competent, more capable
and you may be able to protect
the things that matter most to you,
help you to preserve a world
worth keeping.

Both require
open eyes
and commitment.

Both are called

shooting.