Greg Gibson: Survivor Apocalypse – Part II
II – History
In 1978 my sister Wendy died, as we say, by her own hand,
which had a revolver in it, which was pointed at her heart when she squeezed
the trigger. (Women tend to go for the heart; men the head.) She purchased her
gun at a pawn shop the day before her death – an unfortunate impulse shopping
decision that would be just as easy today, in many states, as it was in Nashua,
New Hampshire in 1978. Most people who survive a suicide attempt never try
again. If she’d decided instead to hang herself she would have had only a 60%
chance of success. Poison, 40%. Cutting, 2%. With a gun the chances of success rise
to 90%. Though it’s not success, is it?
Fourteen years later, in December 1992, my
eighteen-year-old son Galen was killed in a school shooting at Simon’s Rock
College in western Massachusetts. He was the random victim of a disturbed
fellow student who’d bought a used semi-automatic rifle at a local gun shop the
afternoon of the shootings. The killer modified his gun to accept thirty-round
magazines, which he’d ordered, using his mother’s credit card, along with 180
rounds of ammunition, from a mail order company in South Carolina. Purchases of
the gun, the ammunition, and the aftermarket accessories were perfectly legal,
and they’d be be just as legal now, in many states, as they were in 1992.
These events have given me the unusual perspective of
having spent forty years closely watching nothing happen. Or, watching a lot
happen, most of which involves people getting killed by guns and politicians
doing nothing about it. Let us observe a moment of silence. Let us attend to
the buzzing of flies.
