(AP Photo/Paul J. Bereswill)

To satisfy your your Wizards fix, DCist is teaming up with Kyle Weidie and Rashad Mobley of Truth About It, who will take turns penning a column on Washington’s professional basketball team every Wednesday throughout the season. You can read Kyle and Rashad on all things Wiz here.

Are we over the snickering, smirks and questions marks when an insinuation of weaponry capabilities is used in the same sentence with Gilbert Arenas’ name? Probably not. But let’s investigate further anyway.

Gun-related terminology, such as “shooting” is, for some reason, entrenched in basketball lexicon. A field-goal attempt is also called a “shot.” When a player does too much of this, he’s a gunner. If a player is particularly adept at making shots from a distance, he’s a long-range sniper (or bomber). I could go on. If you want more, check out this old post by Royce Webb on ESPN’s TrueHoop blog.

With this in mind, let’s talk about how Arenas has seemingly eschewed his gunning ways, in both of the imaginable senses.

The popular perception of Arenas, the basketball player, is that he’s always been a gunner, a high-volume field-goal taker. He has scored in bunches, only because he has taken a lot of shots (29.3 points on 20.9 field-goal attempts per game in 2005-06, for example). I’m not here to refute that Arenas shot an undesirably high amount of times in the past, but accepting that as being related to the stigma that Arenas solely cares about his own offense is to gloss over the finer points of basketball, a la Tony Kornheiser.