My Three Guns

I have owned three guns in my day.

The first was a Crossman pellet gun

passed down from an elder brother

When I was about 10 years old.

To it and my triumphal acuity fell

Many little birds and creatures.

Lizards and rats bled from the sting of its sudden

Technical speed.

Even a hummingbird was stilled and examined

With little regret.

My second gun was a semi-automatic Remington 22 caliber

With a fiber glass stock and a scope for long-range accuracy.

This was impressive and made me feel better armed,

Able to shoot many imaginary foes in quick succession.

I took it with me one summer

When I went to work on my relative's sandhill ranch.

I showed it with pride to my cousins and uncles.

I carried it with me when we rode the pasture.

But it never interrupted anything living

Until one day, in the pickup with my uncle.

He spotted a badly diseased cow

Which he had been observing for the past month or two.

With the cruelty of wisdom

He invited me to shoot it with my most wicked,

Excellent, semi-automatic rifle.

"Really? Sure..." I said, with an awed enthusiasm.

The cow watched us passively from a rise only yards away.

I pointed it out the window, sighted the cow's head

And fired, confident it would drop like the many little crumpled

B irds of years past.

Instead it stared stupidly in our direction.

Bang! A second shot and perhaps the cow flinched

But didn't even amble away.

Sickly it stood its ground.

Bang! Finally it staggered but stood.

DIE! DIE! I screamed silently.

Bang! And finally it fell in a heap of flesh and hide.

My uncle, lesson taught,

Didn't pause to examine but started the truck

And drove on across the grass-green hills.

"It was really sick. Nothing to do."

I heard meadowlarks through my tears.

My third gun, a 20 gauge Winchester pump shotgun was my pride

On many a hunt for pheasants, ducks, geese and grouse.

I remember at the end of one long day of duck hunting

We had trudged back to the truck

Parked a couple of hundred yards from the lake,

When I spotted a lone duck flying in from the distance.

I quickly loaded.

My father said, "Don't bother it is too far."

I raised the gun, followed the duck and fired in front

Of it, knowing where it would be when it flew into the cloud

Of pellets and death.

It dropped

Instantly

like a bag from the sky.

I knew then I had achieved real skill

Delivering death from a distance.

But thirty years have passed and I wonder

Where have my guns gone?

They have disappeared like

The lives of the creatures they stilled.

The pellet gun was mercifully beyond repair

The shotgun was stolen.

I can't recollect what happened to the 22.

I do remember the deaths I inflicted.

I add the following poem by Jorge Luis Borges because I like the poem and I believe it makes an interesting philosophical point. Objects of human manufacture can have a tendency. Guns about the house will eventually kill someone......it is their intention.

A dagger rests in a drawer.

It was forged in Toledo at the end of the last century. Luis Melian Lafinur gave it to my father, who brought it from Uruguay. Evaristo Carriego once held it in his hand.

Whoever lays eyes on it has to pick up the dagger and toy with it, as if he had always been looking out for it. The hand is quick to grab the waiting hilt, and the powerful obeying blade slides in and out of the sheath with a click. This is not what the dagger wants.

It is more than a structure of metal: men conceived it and shaped it with a single end in mind. The dagger that last night knifed a man in Tacuarembo and the daggers that rained on Caesar are in some eternal way the same dagger. The dagger wants to kill, it wants to shed sudden blood.

In a drawer of my writing table, among draft pages and old letters, the dagger dreams over and over its simple tiger's dream. On wielding it the hand comes alive because the metal comes alive, sensing itself, each time handled, in touch with the killer for whom it was forged.

At times I am sorry for it. Such power and singlemindedness, so impassive or innocent its pride, and the years slip by, unheeding.

What kind of insanity is this? Proof positive of NRA dementia.