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Seventeenth, the NRA announces they will have no comment until the details become clear. Also out of sympathy for the victims. Pro-gun legislators neglect to return calls from news organizations.
Eighteenth, politicians decree a national dialogue about gun control. This dialogue centers on automatic and semiautomatic weapons, plus high-capacity clips and magazines for same.
He also carried a Glock .10, a pistol so big it’s issued to rangers in Greenland, should they encounter polar bears.)
Nineteenth, the NRA drops the other shoe (only it’s more like a combat boot), proclaiming itself dead-set against any changes in existing gun laws.
They also single out the failure of mental health professionals to ID potentially dangerous persons, even though most US senators and representatives with A ratings from the NRA don’t want to see a single...
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The NRA doesn’t come right out and say the victims are also to blame for thinking they could live in America without a gun on their person or in their p...
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Twenty-first, any bills to change existing gun laws, including those that make it possible for almost anyone in America to purchase a high-capacity assault weapon, quietly disappear into the legislative swamp.
Twenty-second, it happens again and the whole thing starts over.
“He seemed to be carrying out the scenario of a book he had been reading.” The book was Rage. Dustin Pierce didn’t kill himself or anyone else. He threw out his guns and emerged with his hands up. What he really wanted, it turned out, was to see his father. And for his father — maybe for the first time — to really see him.
That was enough for me, even though at the time, the Loukaitis and Carneal shootings were the only Rage-related ones of which I was aware. I asked my publishers to pull the novel from publication, which they did, although it wasn’t easy. By then it was a part of an omnibus containing all four Bachman books. (In addition to Rage, there was The Long Walk, The Running Man, and Roadwork — another novel about a shooter with psychological problems.) The Bachman collection is still available, but you won’t find Rage in it.
All four had easy access to guns. Most of the weapons they used were in the home. Cox bought his at Wolfe’s Gun Shop in his hometown of San Gabriel, for $400 — easy-peasy. The clerk had no reason not to sell it to him; the boy said the semi-auto was a present for his father and was old enough under California law to buy a firearm.
Ryan Lanza’s mother bought her guns, as so many people do, for home defense. When young Lanza wanted them, he killed her.
Yet I did see Rage as a possible accelerant, which is why I pulled it from sale. You don’t leave a can of gasoline where a boy with firebug tendencies can lay hands on it.
Adults do not forget the horrors and shamings of their childhood, but those feelings tend to lose their immediacy (except perhaps in dreams, where even old men and women find themselves taking tests they have not studied for with no clothes on).
The book told unpleasant truths, and anyone who doesn’t feel a qualm of regret at throwing a blanket over the truth is an asshole with no conscience.
As far as I’m concerned, high school sucked when I went, and probably sucks now. I tend to regard people who remember it as the best four years of their lives with caution and a degree of pity. For most kids, it’s a time of doubt, stress, painful self-consciousness, and unhappiness. They’re actually the lucky ones. For the bullied underclass — the wimps, the shrimps, and the girls who are routinely referred to as scags, bags, or hos — it’s four years of misery and two kinds of hate: the kind you feel for yourself and the kind you feel for the jackwads who bump you in the halls, pull down your
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American politics has managed to catch itself in one of those fiendish Chinese finger pullers we used to buy in the dime store when we were kids, and as a result, two muscular and capable hands can do no work.
We’re like drunks in a barroom. No one’s listening because everyone is too busy thinking about what they’re going to say next, and absolutely prove that the current speaker is so full of shit he squeaks.
Even if I were politically and philosophically open to repealing the Second Amendment (I’m not), I don’t believe that repeal, or even modification, would solve the problem of gun violence in America, particularly violence of the sort that’s at the root of that problem. Although I need to add that I also believe strict gun control would save thousands of lives.
Let’s talk about reality. The death toll at the Sandy Hook school was 26, and I mourn every one of them, but the number of homicides in Chicago last year exceeded 500. That’s 200 more than the number of American troops killed in Afghanistan during the same period. And let’s remember that our troops volunteered to go in harm’s way. Their bodies come home to parades and flag-draped coffins. The dead of Chicago — 107 of them children, some just waiting to get on the school bus — don’t get the hero treatment, but they are just as dead.
