Give a Boy a Gun

by Todd Strasser

  We get to some place that Gary likes, and he stops and says, “Okay, we’ll do it here.” Next thing I know, he’s taking pushpins out of the duffel bag, and we’re supposed to pin all these sheets of paper up to these trees. Like we’re making a multicolored room in the trees that’s all paper walls. This probably takes an hour itself. And then Gary has to very carefully number all the sheets and make notes in a notebook. I have no idea what this is about, but so what? It’s as good as doing anything else, I guess.

  Then Gary says we’re ready, and he goes back to the bag and he takes out this thing and sets it on the ground right in the middle of the paper room we’ve created. Then he tells us to get the hell out of there. I ask him how far, and he says a hundred yards at least. If you want to know the truth, I thought he was nuts. A hundred yards is the length of a football field. It’s pretty obvious by now that he’s got some kind of homemade bomb. But it’s kind of fun and goofy to run off into the woods, so I do it.

  We go running, and before long we’re all bent over with our hands on our knees, gasping for breath. It’s the smoking. And a little while later Gary comes crashing through the trees, and we yell to him that we’re over here.

  The thing goes off before he can get to us. There’s this really sharp, loud thunk! sound, and I swear a hundred yards away I can actually feel the ground shake and the leaves in the trees rustle. Now Gary and Brendan take off back toward the “blast zone.”

  So I get there, and I can’t believe what I’m seeing. First of all, every single piece of paper is blown away. Totally shredded. It’s like a big circle of multicolored paper shreds on the ground around the blast site. Leaves are blown off the trees, so the leaves and paper are mixed together. The whole place reeks of burned gunpowder. Twigs are snapped and some of the smaller branches are broken. You can see that this thing was a lot bigger than it sounded from so far away. Maybe the sound was muffled by the trees and whatnot.

  Now Gary says we have to pick up every shred of paper, and he’s got rolls of Scotch tape so we can paste them back together. And that’s when I figure out what’s going on: We’re re-creating the scene. Like what they did with that 747 that blew up and they couldn’t figure out why.

  So now we have to gather up all these little colored shreds of paper and try to tape them together. The thing is maybe you can do it with some of the larger pieces, but the smaller pieces are impossible, and it’s not like we haven’t been drinking screwdrivers from a plastic half-gallon milk container we brought along.

  Finally Brendan says the hell with it. Gary’s the only one who doesn’t want to stop. If it were up to him, he’d stay out there for a week until every single shred was taped back together. He wants to see the blast pattern, he wants to make sure they built the bomb right. Brendan says, “Look, if we didn’t build it right, you think there’d be all this shredded paper and leaves and branches everywhere?”

  And Gary’s like, “Yeah, but I still want to see.” Brendan and I quit and just sit and drink and smoke and watch Allison and Gary pick and tape and pick and tape until even Allison’s tired of it. You can see it’s hopeless, but Gary is like a fanatic. He just has to see the blast pattern.

  Brendan, Allison, and I go back to the cabin, and the door’s locked, so Brendan gets the tire iron out of Allison’s car and uses it to pry the door open. He pretty much destroys the lock, but we’re too trashed to care. We go in and hang around and eat some of the food in the fridge and watch TV. After a while Gary shows up and he’s like, okay, he’s seen enough. He declares it a success.

  He says we should go, and I say, “Well, shouldn’t we at least fix the door so your uncle won’t have a total fit?” And Gary’s like, “Uncle? I don’t have any uncle.” Can you believe it?

  Anyway, we get in the car and start driving back, and all the way they’re talking about who they’re gonna blow up with these bombs. And it’s a pretty good-size list. The only thing is they really meant it.

  —Ryan Clancy

  TerminX: Pretty awesome 2day, huh? A couple of those suckas in school would put a lot of jerks out of their misery.

  Blkchokr: Plus a few non-jerks.

  Dayzd: Civilian casualties.

  TerminX: Collateral damage.

  Rebooto: U guys need 2 make a smart bomb.

  Dayzd: Smart bomb 4 dumb jocks.

  TerminX: B cool if U could convert that semiautomatic into fully automatic.

  Dayzd: Need a hellfire switch.

  Rebooto: What R U talking about?

  Dayzd: You get a 50-round clip, it’s almost the same thing.

  TerminX: Jungle-clip them. Then it’s 100 rounds.

  Rebooto: Hello?

  Blkchokr: Gunz, Booto.

  Rebooto: :-o

  TerminX: I read the marines use a special version of “Doom” 2 train soldiers.

  Dayzd: 1-shot kills?

  TerminX: Head and upper-torso shots.

  Blkchokr: Seen any good movies lately?

  Rebooto: Read any good books?

  Dayzd: “Unforgiven.”

  Rebooto: O yeah!

  Blkchokr: Weird flick.

  Dayzd: Y?

  Blkchokr: Couldn’t C the message.

  TerminX: When a real man has a problem, he gets a gun.

  Rebooto: U C where they want 2 expand the movie ratings so they have warnings like cigarettes?

  TerminX: Stupid. It doesn’t work with cigarettes.

  Blkchokr: They’re on booze, 2.

  Dayzd: Warning: Uncontrolled firearm use may be hazardous to your health.

  Blkchokr: LOL!

  There are probably about 150 million law-abiding American citizens who enjoy watching football. Myself included. The idea that this incident can somehow be blamed on football is sadly mistaken. These were two sick, disturbed boys. Like many people I know, I also happen to own several hunting rifles and a handgun I keep in my home for personal protection. Is it locked? No, but it’s hidden. If I ever have to defend my home against someone trying to break in, the time it takes me to unlock a gun might just be the difference between the life and death of my children.

  The Second Amendment to the Constitution gives us the right to bear arms. Are you going to change the Constitution? Why stop at the Second Amendment? Why not throw out the First Amendment, too? Who needs freedom of speech? Hey, who needs the right to vote? See where this is going?

  — Dick Flanagan

  A gun kept in the home is forty-three times more likely to kill someone you know than to kill a stranger in self-defense. (Lethal Passage)

  It’s horrible when kids are killed in schools. It’s a nightmare. Obviously, after what happened, I should know. But if you want to save kids’ lives, you’ll save a lot more by raising the driving age than banning guns.

  —Allen Curry

  Death by Car Vs. Death by Gun

  More people die in car accidents than from guns. But the numbers are closer than you might think. In 1995 in many states there were almost as many deaths by firearms as there were traffic fatalities. In the following states there were actually more deaths by firearms.

  State

  Traffic-Related Deaths

  Firearm Deaths

  Arizona

  977

  986

  California

  4,314

  4,805

  District of Columbia

  67

  269

  Louisiana

  899

  1,087

  Maryland

  673

  760

  Nevada

  298

  398

  Virginia

  902

  956

  (Source: Data from the National Vital Statistics system, National Center for Health Statistics)

  It still seems strange to me that I was nobody until Dustin asked me out. I’d be in the girls’ room with Deirdre Bunson and some of those other girls, and it was like I didn’t even exist. I wasn’t on their radar. At my old school you’d
say hi to someone even if you didn’t know them. Here you say hi and it’s like, “Do I know you?”

  —Chelsea Baker

  I’m sure you’ve heard about that fight at Dustin’s house. If you want to know the truth, up to that point, that was one of the scariest things I’d ever seen. The thing is I always knew [Sam] Flach was mean and strong, but this was just beyond anything you could have imagined.

  —Ryan Clancy

  I still don’t understand why Brendan wanted to go to that party. I mean, he must have felt that Dustin was his neighbor and sort of his friend, but Dustin was on the football team, and everyone knew it was a football party. Some people say Brendan was just asking for it. I don’t know. I think it was more like Rosa Parks. He was tired of sitting in the back of the bus.

  —Emily Kirsch

  After Michael Carneal killed three and wounded five in a Paducah, Kentucky, high school, several magazines and newspapers reported that he had imitated a computer-game pattern by quickly shifting from one target to the next.

  We came around the side of the house. You had to go through this gate because Dustin has a pool in his backyard. Brendan and I were going in. Sam and Deirdre were coming out. The thing is it was just, like, bad timing. Sam got to the gate first. He pushed it open and just kept going. Like he wasn’t even going to bother holding it for Deirdre. So Brendan caught the gate and held it for her. Some people say he bowed or touched her on the shoulder or something. I didn’t see it. All I saw was Sam come out of nowhere and get Brendan from behind.

  — Ryan Clancy

  I was in the kitchen and I heard the shouting. I came out, and Sam had Brendan on the ground and was smashing him like a wild animal. There had to be six guys standing around watching. Any one of them could have pulled Sam off, but they didn’t. I had to get Sam in a choke hold and practically suffocate him to get him to stop.

  — Dustin Williams

  Have you ever heard the sound of a fist on bone? It would make you sick. One thing I know for certain, Sam was definitely going for Brendan’s face. I swear if I’d had a gun that night, I would have shot Sam myself.

  — Ryan Clancy

  I went home that night and told my mom there was something really wrong with these kids.

  —Chelsea Baker

  It wasn’t like that in elementary school. I mean, even when two kids got into a fight, they didn’t try to hurt each other so badly. Kids in elementary school are way more open to teachers’ influence than when they get to middle school and high school. Why can’t they teach something in elementary school that could help kids learn how to deal with one another without it always becoming violent?

  — Emily Kirsch

  It was reported that Carneal wounded or killed eight people with eight bullets, despite the fact that he’d never fired a gun before. This was not the case. It was later discovered that Carneal had learned to shoot at a summer camp run by a well-known national youth organization.

  I heard about it in the teachers’ room first thing Monday morning. A little later I saw Brendan in the hall. His nose was swollen, and his lip was fat and split, and his eye was black and blue. A few minutes later I saw Sam. Not a scratch. You never would’ve known he’d been in a fight.

  —Beth Bender

  Boys fight. They’ve always fought and they always will fight. Was Sam provoked? Who knows. We weren’t there. We didn’t see. Forgive me if I sound callous, but this was an incident that took place off school property.

  —Allen Curry

  Michael Carneal was frequently picked on and teased. The intimation that he was gay was even printed in his school’s newspaper.

  Gary was really down. I didn’t know why. It could have been something at home, I’ll never know. We were talking on the phone about what happened to Brendan at the party and how the jocks just stood around and didn’t stop Sam. Gary said he wished they’d all die. I said, “Not really, right?” He said he really, really did want them to die slow, painful, miserable deaths. I said, “While you live to be a hundred?” He said he really didn’t care. He was past the point of caring. He just wanted them to die.

  —Allison Findley

  According to several news organizations, Michael Carneal carried a backpack containing more than five hundred rounds of ammunition on the day he killed.

  The Day It Happened

  Brendan called me around dinnertime. It was definitely weird. I don’t think we’d spoken on the phone since the end of ninth grade. There was a time when I was pretty sure he was interested in me in a romantic way. But I thought that had passed. Anyway, we talked for a while, and I wasn’t sure what he was getting at. Then he told me that about a week before the fight with Sam he’d been rejected by a private military school he’d applied to.

  I know that must sound totally out of character. I wonder if Gary even knew. I mean, why in the world would a kid like Brendan want to go to military school? But I think somewhere inside he knew he was headed for big trouble, and he must have believed that military school might be the way to save himself. And if I’m right, then when he was rejected, it was like he lost his last lifeline. Being rejected meant two more years of living hell at Middletown High. I think he knew he’d never survive it. I think maybe that was the last straw. He lost hope.

  We talked for about twenty minutes, and then he asked me if I was going to the dance that night, and I was like, “No way.” He asked if I was sure, because he’d noticed that I was getting friendly with some of the quote, unquote “popular” girls. I assured him there was absolutely, positively no way I was going.

  And then he said he was glad, and that he’d always liked me. And then he said good-bye.

  — Emily Kirsch

  I can see how Gary might have been thinking about killing himself. Brendan never struck me that way. It was like he was too angry to do that. He wanted to get too many people. But if you put them together, you can almost see the idea coming to them. Deciding to do themselves in, but going to school and taking as many of those guys with them as they could.

  — Ryan Clancy

  “Five days before the shooting, Eric [Harris]’s hopes of becoming a marine were undone after his parents told a recruiter about [the antidepressant medicine Eric was taking]. . . . Friends said that Eric was crushed by the news, and had been growing increasingly depressed as graduation neared.”

  —New York Times, 6/29/99

  To me it was just like any other Friday night. The popular kids were at the dance. Gary and Brendan were gone. I didn’t know where. I went over to Blockbuster. I wasn’t really looking for a video. I was looking for someone to hook up with for a couple of hours.

  —Allison Findley

  It was an unfortunate combination of poor building design and a couple bright minds ingenious enough to take advantage of it. You’ve got a windowless gym with four main entrances, each consisting of double metal doors. You’ve got two heavily armed young men who’ve rigged booby-trap bombs in a way that kept us from getting to the doors from the outside. Inside they chained the doors shut. You want to talk about planning? They brought drinks and snacks for themselves. And flashlights.

  —Allen Curry

  In 1996, 2,866 children and teenagers were murdered with guns, 1,309 committed suicide with guns, and 468 died in unintentional shootings. A total of 4,643 young people were killed by firearms.

  You hear people say the boys were crazy. That it was just an insane, unpredictable thing that doesn’t happen to the vast majority of people. Like getting hit by lightning. Utterly random. But I don’t think so. Every year you hear about kids walking into their school and shooting classmates and teachers. You don’t hear about them walking into McDonald’s and shooting people. They don’t go to the town swimming pool or the movies and do it. Most of these kids live in neighborhoods with elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools. But they don’t go to some other school. They always go to their own school. It’s not random. It’s a message, and the sooner we wake up and list
en, the better.

  — Beth Bender

  Several newspapers reported that Luke Woodham said he kitted because he felt he was mistreated every day. He said he did it to show society: “Push us and we will push back.”

  My father fought in World War Two against the Japanese and the Germans. I realize that it was a long time ago, but when you face a people in mortal combat, it’s a difficult thing to forget. Sometimes at a gun show I see those foreign-made weapons. Some of them come from countries we once considered our enemies. Part of me can’t help thinking that they must be laughing their heads off at us. They don’t have to go to war against us anymore. All they have to do is sell us guns, and we’ll do the job for them. And the darnedest part of it is they make a profit.

  —Jack Phillips

  Blockbuster is right around the corner from school. So I’m in there looking at titles, hoping someone I know will walk in. And who comes in? Emily Kirsch. Like, at first I wasn’t even going to talk to her. I went back to looking at titles. But then I look up and there she is, right across the aisle. So we say hi, what’s up? You know, the regular BS.

  It runs out pretty fast, and there’s that moment when one of you has to come up with something else to say or you’re just going to go off in different directions. And I swear I still don’t know why I said it, but just joking around, I said, “So, how come you’re not at the dance?”

  Like she or I would ever go to a school dance.

  And that’s when she told me about Brendan calling her, and how he wanted to make sure she wouldn’t be at the dance. And it just gave me the creepiest feeling. Why would he say that? Since it wasn’t like I had anything better to do, I figured I’d walk over to school and take a look.