Some readers close to my age will remember the “choose your
own story” books from decades past (I’m assuming that they are no longer a
thing?) where you’d read a story up to some watershed moment, and then the
narrator would give you the opportunity to choose the course of action that you
thought the main character should take based on a series of multiple choice
questions. Sometimes, the choice would
lead to an enhancement of the plot, which then lead to other choices;
sometimes, the choice would lead to catastrophe and the untimely end on the
story.
The thing was, given enough choices, you could read the book
15 times and get a different story out of it every time. The books were novel (pun intended) but the
stories were usually of the “pulp fiction” variety: one dimensional,
meaningless tripe.
But what it that wasn’t the case? And what if there wasn’t an endless number of
choices, but just two? What if a “choose
your own adventure” story was written about the most terrible phenomenon of the
day – mass school shootings? This is the
darkest thing I’ve ever written, and I’m a little afraid that it will seem
insensitive to the people who’ve really experienced tragedy in a school
shooting. It isn’t intended to be. It is intended to be a dark look at reality,
and an expose of who the real friends of school shooting victims are, and who
they are not.
The story starts by introducing the villain. He’s a pathetic mess of a person: mentally
ill and on the brink of doing something awful.
He gets instructions from his dog, or some shit like that, to go kill
children because it will make him famous and make society realize how it had
failed him so that they could all feel his pain before he died. He also knows that he wants to die. He doesn’t want to be captured or
killed. He wants to take his own life,
because in his mind, it is just more tragic that way, and makes him more
sympathetic to the people that he knows will feel sorry for him.
He doesn’t really know that well how to use a gun, but he
gets one in one of several nefarious ways.
He either steals it or kills somebody to get it or something like that,
and then gets in his car to go to the school.
It’s at this point that the book stops and gives you your
first choice in which way this is to pan out.
The question is:
Do you want to the school shooter to enter a school in which
no one is equipped to resist his violence in any meaningful way, and the
students are made to huddle in a corner praying that he doesn’t come into their
room?
OR
Do you want some person at the school to be trained and
properly motivated to resist the bad guy in every way possible? In other words, do you want an armed teacher
or resource officer to be on hand and ready to respond?
The anti-gun group would choose option #1, because to them,
putting a gun in a school is just beyond the pale. Here’s how that would pan out:
The slithery thing inside his head was still squirming and
thrashing around in his skull when he walked through the front doors of the
school. He knew that it was only going
to be a matter of seconds before someone saw him; saw the shotgun in his hand
and cried out, and then it would start.
The thing thrashed a bit in excitement, continuing to bore holes in his
brain like some hellish termite, and he knew that there was only one way to
stop it. He longed to stop it now, but
he knew that he had a job to do first.
He had to make them all know.
They all needed to know, and the only way that he could think to do
that, in the fleeting, wonderful moments when the thing gave him a chance to
think, was to punish them. If he hurt
them enough, maybe they’d know. Maybe
they wouldn’t, but he had to try.
A young woman appeared from a side hallway about ten feet in
front of him, concentrating on some sheet of paper in her hands, and she didn’t
even notice him. She never even knew
what had happened, because the first round from the shotgun tore her upper
torso and neck to pieces. He didn’t even
notice the shotgun buck in his hands when he slapped the trigger, but he did
notice the blood – it was fucking everywhere, and the sight of it made the
slithery thing inn his brain thrash about in delight. Blood splashed down on the concrete floor
like spilled paint, and as he cocked the shotgun to replace the spent shell, he
knew that he’d made the right choice.
This was going to be fucking amazing!
His heart raced in his chest, the excitement and thrill of actually
accomplishing something for once running like a drug in his veins.
He was faced with a choice now. To the left was classrooms, full of
children. To the right, the office, with
administrators and principals. Children
vs. adults. The slithery thing squirmed,
deep inside his brain, and he knew the answer.
It always had the answer, that slithery mess, as horrible as it
was.
Children, then.
He turned left, and as the alarms started going off throughout
the building, he entered the kindergarten wing.
As he entered the door to that wing, he heard doors locking
up and down the hallway, but he knew that didn’t matter. One blast from the shotgun and the first door
swung open easily with a kick from his right foot. As the door swung open, he racked another
shell into the chamber and smiled.
“Avon calling!” he exclaimed, excited, as he began to pump
round after round into the huddling mass in the corner of the room.
Screams. Crying. Pain.
The shotgun clicked on an empty chamber after six rounds. It only held seven. He had the pistol on his hip, too, which he
could bring into play, but he felt no pressure to hurry. He had time.
He reloaded the shotgun and continued firing. The teacher was dead. The children were helpless. He had time.
By the time the police showed, and he was forced to blow his own brains
out, and the slithery thing with them, thank Christ, he would have killed a
hundred kids.
Turns out he was off the mark by a bit. Turns out that he was only able to kill 60 by
the time the police got there and mounted a resistance. He was a bit disappointed when he squeezed
that trigger, and the last thing that went through his mind, other than the
bullet, was that he wished he’d had more time.
The news media had a field day, waving the bloody shirts of
the students before they’d even gotten the bodies out of them. As the news went on and on about the shooter’s
mental problems and day by day, hour by hour history, the next shooter watched,
interested, in his home, his own slithery thing wiggling away inside his
brain. The stage was set for the next
time.
So there’s option #1.
This is the option that the anti-gun crowd would choose. Don’t tell me that this is unfair, because
the anti-gun crowd would have seen the bad guy not get the guns in the first
place; there is no conceivable way that any of the laws proposed by the
anti-gun crowd, in the history of anti-gun law proposals, could have kept this
guy from getting a shotgun and a pistol.
I can walk less than two blocks right now and get a gram of cocaine, and
it has been illegal for decades. Guns,
even if they were banned tomorrow, would be so widely available for decades to
come that anyone saying that “if only” their law had been passed, the tragedy
would not have occurred are idiots.
The anti-gunners don’t want guns in schools. They fight against that idea to the point to
where a
North Idaho school district boardmember was fired for even suggesting it a few weeks ago. They want option #1, because
no other proposal from them could stop option #1. The fact is, they are ignoring a reality that
says, time and time again, that you can’t keep bad people from getting guns,
and you can’t stop them from using them to horrible effect. Ignoring reality is the same thing as
accepting it, in actual effect, so they’ve essentially accepted that for their ideological
dislike of guns, it is worth allowing children to die.
Option #2 starts the same as option #1, but adds a little
backstory, first. It goes a little
something like this:
Robert Smith was pushing 40 now, with a bit of gray at his
temples and wrinkles in the corners of his eyes, but he was still physically fit. He worked as a basketball coach for the local
peewee team, and ended up doing a lot of running with the girls to keep up as
they played. That, in addition to the
weekly runs in the woods locally, and he’d kept in good shape. That, coupled
with his quiet, dependable nature, and the fact that he was a man, he supposed,
too, was probably the reason that Mr. Johnson, the school’s principal had come
to him when the school had started its pilot program of arming certain teachers
and training them to deal with crisis situations. He cast a glance at the little black safe
mounted to the side of his desk as he went about grading papers while his 6th
grade class worked on a math test that morning.
It made him a little uncomfortable at times, he had to
admit. He’d always been into shooting
and shooting sports. He was an on-again,
off-again hunter. More off than on,
recently, since hunting season fell at a horrible time for teachers to try and
get any time off, so he was a weekend warrior these days more than he’d
probably like. He’s always owned
pistols, and had used them through the years, but hadn’t ever had any cause to
expect that he’d ever have to use one for real – you know, to actually shoot at
someone with it, like some damn cowboy in a Hollywood film.
But he’d figured that the chances of ever having to do so
were pretty low, and he agreed with the overall gist of the plan, which was to
say that when seconds count, the police are only minutes away, and that the
only thing that stood between the kids and the shooter during that time were
the teachers. He figured that one way or
the other, if a bad man ever started shooting up HIS school, he was going after
the guy, anyway, so he might as well have a gun of his own, and therefore a
chance at survival.
Still, it was kind of weird.
A gun in a classroom just seemed out of place. Even though it was locked away and not
obtainable by anyone but him and Mr. Johnson, due to the biometric locks on the
safe, it still seemed like the presence of the thing in the room was much
larger than the little black box would indicate. It was also strange that the district not
only issued him the gun, but 250 rounds of ammunition for it per year, so that
he could practice and keep up with his certification. He earned the certification during a
summertime class that he took, which actually earned him credit hours towards
keeping his teaching certificate. Also
odd, even though it made sense. The
class taught him the things that Law Enforcement officers learn about
responding to crisis situations. It gave
him the training and tools he’d need to mount a reasonable defense while his
panicked lizard brain took over and all he had was to fall back on instinct and
training. It gave him the ability for
his resistance to actually mean something, and so he took the class, and agreed
to the responsibility because, let’s face it, he already HAD agreed to the responsibility. What kind of man wouldn’t go try to save
children? He was going to, gun or not,
so he might as well have the gun. Right?
Then, he heard the shot.
At first, his mind wouldn’t allow him to accept that what he’d heard was
actually a shot. He thought maybe
someone had dropped something heavy, but that thought didn’t even register
before the intruder alarm went off. The
admins in the office had panic buttons under their desk, which they were to
trigger if an armed intruder ever entered the building. It automatically locked all of the exterior
doors to the building, but Robert knew that would be useless if the bad guy was
already inside. The shot had come from
the entry way, so he knew that he was, indeed, already inside.
The drills that they’d done throughout the year were already
working, as, hearing the alarm, his students nearest the windows jumped up and
pulled the shades down, and the boy nearest the door to the classroom set the
deadbolt and pulled down the relite shade.
The gun was already in Robert’s hand as he started towards the door, his
students moving to the opposite side of the classroom, huddling behind his
desk.
Robert saw a boy he knew was a leader amongst his peers, and
told him that he was in charge, and responsible for keeping everyone down and
quiet, and then stepped out into the hallway.
Robert heard a series of rapid fire shots from the kindergarten
wing. He knew it was perhaps 10 seconds
for him to get there, so he began to sprint, pistol held out in front of him,
at ready, as he’d been trained. As he
opened the door to the kindergarten wing, he saw a man at the other end of the
hallway, standing at the entrance to one of the kindergarten rooms, feeding
shells into his shotgun. Robert took a
shot at him, pulling left as he did so to make sure that if he missed, the
bullet hit the cinderblock wall instead of going into the classroom and maybe
hitting a kid. Better to miss. At least he’d get the shooter’s
attention.
The shooter dropped the shotgun, and wheeled towards Robert,
his eyes wide with surprise. He mouthed
the word “NO!” as he drew a pistol on his hip, but Robert didn’t hear the
word. All he could hear was his own
pulse hammering in his temple. Robert
fired again, once again pulling left and missing. The shooter’s pistol was coming up when Robert
fired a third shot. The shooter’s gun
fired at the same time, but his bullet struck the linoleum tile 20 feet in
front of Robert, while Robert’s bullet caught the shooter low and on his right,
maybe hitting his pelvis or a kidney, possibly.
Robert fired again. The shooter
did likewise. Both missed.
The shooter, dazed from Robert’s one hit, slipped behind the
cinder block wall leading into the boy’s restroom. And Robert held fire,
waiting to see what was going to happen.
Robert heard one more shot, and he was pretty sure he knew what had just
happened.
He waited for an eternity there, covering behind that
cinderblock wall, to see if the shooter stirred, but after 5 minutes of nothing
from the bathroom foyer, Robert moved forward to see what had happened. His suspicion was confirmed – the shooter had
killed himself there in that bathroom foyer.
The total body count, not counting the shooter, was 6. Four kids, two teachers. Robert had no way of knowing this, but he
saved 54 lives that day. All he knew was
that he felt like vomiting.
The news media barely reported the incident, because the
shooter wasn’t a conservative, and he had been stopped by another armed
individual. The futility of going into a
school with ill intent and making a name for yourself became apparent to the
next guy, watching the short, abbreviated news report from his home. Maybe he’d just kill himself. It seemed easier.
If you doubt any of what I just told you to be an accurate
accounting of reality, look at
Arapahoe for option #2, and Newtown for option
#1.
