I have a gun.

No I don’t.

Well, I do, but it’s not a real gun.

It’s kinda like a play gun, the kind they give you as a present at Christmas.

You know the kind, shiny and heavy like it could shoot real bullets. The best ones were cap guns. The cap was a little blister of gun powder spaced out and multiplied on a roll so you could go “Bang!” and the mechanism would advance the roll to the next one and you could go “Bang! Bang!” until the roll was gone and you needed to replace it with fresh ammunition.

Sometimes we’d take the little blisters of gun powder and open them out and pile them up to make a big bang, but mostly we just shot each other.

Neighbors would complain about the noise. “You’ll wake the dead!” That always seemed strange to me, the way old people talk. Why would they say that?

They also complained about the smoke. Adults like to complain. Because every time you shoot a cap, there was a puff of smoke, and a lot of bangs made a cloud. That’s why when cowboys were out on the range shooting each other, they would turn their gun up to their face and blow across the barrel with a puff of air that said with satisfaction, “I shot my gun.”

When I was little, I could puff my barrel and be a cowboy like the movies.

I never knew why we got guns for Christmas. I guess it was so we’d get used to shooting. Then we could join the army.

Anyway, my gun.

It’s not a real gun. It’s not even like a real gun, sort of a made-up gun like a bad dream, and it’s maybe just cardboard and it’s silent, doesn’t go “Bang!” You have to say it.

But my gun is so dangerous I have to be careful.

I can point it across the room and pull the silent trigger and the plant across the room bends over at the waist and hangs down.

I take my gun outside and shoot it silent at a pile of leaves and they spring up in the air.

I point my gun up at the sky, and a dead bird falls down at my feet.

So I have to be careful.

I mean, I’m not stupid like the dumb guy you see in the movies. I just watched the re-make of The Lady Killers, and the dumb guy, because the gun clicked and didn’t shoot, he points it at himself to see why and shoots himself. I mean, I’m not that dumb.

Guns seem to be everywhere and you just can’t get away from them. People even bring them to school when they’re not supposed to. People would say, “Show us your guns,” and then they’d make a muscle.

There was this guy who made a comic book. He drew the pictures and wrote the story and printed it up and sold copies of it for five dollars in front of the church. It was called, “Addicted to War,” and he gave me a copy free. I read some of it, and maybe someday I’ll finish it to see how it turns out.

I saw this other book which was a real book called “Johnny Got His Gun.” I didn’t read that one either.

Anyway, my gun. I don’t understand it, because it’s not a real gun, and it changes like I’m dreaming. Now it’s just like the finger gun we used to point at each other, sometimes just one finger, but two fingers made it look more gun, and we’d go “Bang!” and fall over on the floor and adults would walk through the room and shake their head and say, “Kids!”

Like they never were once!

Anyway, I know enough not to look down the barrel of my finger, because it might go off.

I don’t know why people are so obsessed with guns.

I’m not. I’m a nice person.

I’m like a doctor. I found out that doctors have to say they’ll “do no harm” or they can’t be doctors. So I say that too and I believe it because I like people the way I’m supposed to.

I mean, when a doctor takes his knife which is like a gun and could kill you, he gives you something so you sleep through it.

I’m like that, I always want to “do no harm.”

I can’t run for government because they don’t have to say that, and if they do, they don’t always mean it.

Anyway, my gun.

I must have been dreaming it, because now I’m looking at my fingers, carefully, not pointing, and they’re not guns.

So I guess I don’t have a gun after all. I want to keep it that way.