“I was out shooting.”

If you didn’t have context, what would you think this sentence was about? Probably not photography. “To take a picture or series of pictures or television images of” is the twelfth out of thirteen definitions of “shoot” in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Language like this is deeply ingrained into slang around the world despite having a violent, threatening connotation. Language like this has origins back to when photojournalists' were reporting from war-zones but now it feels archaic and insensitve.

I can’t count the number of mugs, t-shirts, notebooks that I’ve seen with cameras on the front proudly stating “I shoot people,” a dark play on words. It’s a little unsettling, isn’t it? I think during this particular