A Good Guy With A Gun

Dedicated to My Father

Barry Friedman
1916-2014
 

This was our last collaborative project together

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Second Amendment of the Constitution

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. …

NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre

At ten-sixteen, March 16th, the door to Emory High School’s classroom 1-D burst open. A moment later a camouflage-clad figure burst into the room. He stood at the threshold holding an AR-15 assault rifle with an extended banana ammunition clip in a firing stance.

For ten seconds the entire roomful—students, teachers
—were in freeze-frame silence. Then someone whimpered. Still no one m
oved.

T
he shooter swept the rifle barrel until it reached the third seat, first row. A staccato of shots riddled the chest of the young boy in that seat. Only then, amid
horrified cries and screams, the other 20 students scrambled off their seats, frantically ducking under them or lying prone on the floor. The shooter took aim at the exposed back of a student in the fourth row splintering the desk and piercing his spine with a fuselage of bullets. The next victim was a boy in row five, then two in row seven, one in row eight, and on and on it went
. One boy in a seat close to the shooter ducked under the shooter’s rifle and ran
head-long into the corridor amidst a hail of shots
. The shooter continu
ed to fire spasmodically at the rest of those in the room.

Clay Shupe, the school’s newly hired Armed Guard had been standing near the back entrance to the school when he heard the shots. He raced down the hall toward the commotion with his Glock revolver out of its holster in fire ready position. The student who’d escaped bolted toward him and Shupe fired hitting him squarely in the chest. Hearing cries from classroom 1-D he stepped over the fallen boy’s body and sprinted to the classroom’s door.

The shooter, who was standing just inside the threshold, turned to face Shupe. A grin crept over his face and he lowered the rifle barrel. Showing no emotion, Shupe raised the gun toward the shooter and fired point blank into his head.

Mercifully the carnage had ended. At least eight students lay dead.

Police Chief Lewis Gibbons leaned against his patrol car watching the students and teachers file rapidly out of Emory High under the protection of shotgun armed police with body shields. Practically everyone had a cell phone held to his or hers ear.

He spoke into the mike on his epaulet. “Hank, is it all clear in there?”

“Yes sir. We’re still not sure whether there was one shooter or two. We’re looking into it now. We have eight people down now, I repeat eight people down; all appear to be dead. The guard says he thought there were two shooters. There’s was one down with an assault rifle in the classroom, and one down in the corridor. The guard said he shot the kid in the hall when he lunged at him. He said he saw a gun in his hand.”

“Okay, we’ll secure the area.”

The street was now cluttered with police cars, their overhead bubblegum lights flashing red and blue. A SWAT team was crouched alongside the police cruisers waiting for a signal to go in. Horns blared from cars with frantic parents blocked by barricades at each end of the street.

Gibbons raised a bullhorn. “Everyone can relax now, folks. It’s all over! I’d like the teachers to take the students to the gym and wait for the parents to pick them up.”

“Got all your pictures, Sam?” Leslie Hart, medical examiner for Emery County called over to Sam Fowler.

Fowler gazed down at the body he’d been photographing. “Got all eight.” He shook his head slowly. How could something like this happen again? What would it take to stop these massacres at schools, shopping malls, theaters?

He’d heard the rantings of those gun control nuts;
We’ve got to prevent mentally disturbed people from getting guns.
As though that was remotely possible….. Today,
anyone
can
buy a weapon. Fowler let out a deep sigh. He wished he had the answer.

Forensic techs had drawn outlines around each of the seven students and the shooter. They lay sprawled in several areas around the classroom, except for the body of the shooter which was draped over the threshold, and the other in the corridor.

Hart said, “Okay, bag ‘em.”

Homicide detectives Rick Woods and Grant Howell squatted, peering down at the partially ajar back door to the school. Although the door and frame were metallic, the area around the lock was bent and the door had been jimmied open
. On the ground just below the door was a tire iron. Clay Shupe stood behind them and pointed. “You can see the marks where he
must have jimmied this open.”

Woods looked up at the guard. “Where were you when this was going on?”

Shupe’s face turned red. “I was at the back entrance investigating this break in here. I can’t be everywhere at once!” He shot back.

Woods held up a hand. “Okay, okay, calm down. No one’s accusing you of anything.”

The three men entered through the back door. Classroom 1-D was the closest to the back entrance. The bodies had been removed but the blood-smeared floor, splintered desk tops, bullet ridden walls, and the litter of books and papers made a gruesome scene. The horror was magnified by the drawn outlines of the bodies on the schoolroom floor.

Forensics had already picked up the empty shell casings and bullet fragments, marking the sites with small flags, red for the shell casings, white for the bullets.

While Shupe looked on from the doorway, the detectives counted the markers.

Woods said, “I’ve got fifteen shells.”

Howell had another eight.

“There’s another casing out in the corridor where the other kid was shot, but no sign of a gun.” He glanced at Shupe who was tight-lipped, gazing at the floor. It had been from his gun.

After Howell had taken a number of pictures from different angles the men left by the back door.

As they approached their Crown Victoria, Woods turned to Shupe. “Do you know the names of the shooters or any of the victims?”

Shupe said, “I think the classroom shooter was a kid named Billy Edwards and the other one was a kid named LeVon something-or-other. I don’t know who the victims were.”

“Thanks. We’ve got a lot of work to do. We’d like you to come downtown and fill us in on everything you know. Give us a time line.”

“Right Now?”

Woods shook his head. “No, the school people will want to talk to you first. And I’m sure the media will too.” He smiled. “Going in there, facing a kid with an assault rifle like you did was pretty brave. You’re gonna get the real hero treatment.”

“Look, I just did what I had to do. Anybody sees someone pointing a gun at them would do the same thing.”

“So I guess the NRA got it right”, chimed in Howell,
“
The only thing that
can
stop a bad guy with a gun is a
good
guy with a gun”.

Florida State Representative Hugh Smith stood before the State Legislature, pleading his case for passing the new armed school guard initiative, referred to by most as
The Good Guy With A Gun Law
. It mandated stationing armed guards in every school throughout Florida’s school’s districts.

“Look what’s happened at Columbine, Wisconsin, Oregon, and now Newtown Connecticut, Smith went on. America is gripped in frenzy over these gun deaths, and the only thing that these
liberals
propose is to make new laws to take away our guns”. He glanced down at the words in NRA brochure on the dais and paused, “The only way to stop a
bad
guy with a gun is to confront him with a g
ood
guy with a gun! Gentlemen, I think we’ve spent enough time debating this issue. We’ve heard from our liberal friends there on the left of the aisle who only want to strip us of our Second Amendment rights. With all due respect, none of their proposals will prevent evil or deranged individuals from killing off the young kids who represent our heritage.”

“ I call for a vote!”

“Hear, hear!” Shouts from the Republican-held majority rang through the chamber.

The Speaker rapped his gavel. “You heard the gentleman from Victoria County. Are you ready to vote?”

A chorus of “Ayes” filled the room.

“Opposed?”

A scattering of “nays” from the left side of the aisle made the point moot.

The Speaker banged his gavel. “The motion before this House is:
Armed Guards shall be placed in all public schools in the state.
Clerk, call the roll.”

Half an hour later the clerk turned to the speaker. “Mr. Speaker, the vote is 118 ayes and 2 nays.”

The State Senate vote mirrored that of the House. The Goo
d Guy with a Gun
measure had passed.

Within a week of the State Legislature’s vote, a special meeting of the Emery School District convened to affirm the hiring of armed guards at all the district schools. Theirs was chosen to be the pilot program for the new law. Of the sixteen school board members, there were only two dissenting votes. Maureen Scott, one of the dissenters, argued that we need fewer guns in our schools, not more. She contended “We can’t always know who is the good guy and who is the bad guy, sooner or later a good guy with a gun is going to shoot an innocent person!”

Her impassioned plea to the other school board members convinced only one other member. The others overwhelming supported the program.

Orange Grove, Florida is a small community ten miles east of St. Petersburg. It consisted of a number of orange groves that had been purchased by real estate speculators in the 1990’s. They had built up the community during the real estate boom that followed and it now had two elementary schools, a middle school and a high school.

For most of that decade and the next, the community had been almost exclusively White. But after the Real Estate Crash in 2008, a number of upwardly mobile black families bought newly-foreclosed homes at the depressed prices
.

By 2013, the population of black students in Orange Grove schools had swelled to more than thirty. Race relations at the schools were for the most part good, but this was still the South. Some White families hurt by the economic recession, expressed strong anti-minority views. There was an undercurrent of resentment, encouraged by those in the Tea Party, toward anyone who felt the government owed them something—food stamps and healthcare being the most visible culprit.

The previous year there had been a few racial incidents within the school district—one at a football game with a rival community in which a fight between White students and Black students had forced the suspension of both teams for the rest of the season. There were also a growing number of home robberies that some had attributed to roving gangs of Blacks.

Politically the community was solidly Red Republican, with strong support for the Second Amendment and guns. Any Democrat who proposed gun control had metaphorically put a gun to his head.

In 2013, Orange Grove became one of the pilot school districts to implement the
Good guy with a Gun
Law
. Originally the governor wanted to permit teachers to carry concealed firearms into their classrooms, but after a resounding howl from the school teachers, they settled on hiring at least one armed guard for each of schools in Orange Grove.

In a tight economy with a large segment of the population out of work, the idea of a full time job, with benefits, that let you carry a firearm, was just too good to be true. Not surprising then, there were over 200 applicants for each of the four jobs. Although it was well into the school year, there was a lot of pressure from parents in Orange Grove, whose vivid memories of the Newtown shooting were still fresh, to fill the positions as soon as possible.

Harris Alton, Chairman of the Emery School District, leafed through a sheaf of job applications on the mahogany desk at which he sat. Facing him was Clay Shupe, a stocky well built, man in his early fifties. His head was shaved, his chin jutted forward as he sat, his hands twitching in his lap.

Alton pointed at the papers. “It says here that you were in the Army,”

Alton continued to read from the paper. “Iraq, Afghanistan— three tours.” He looked up.

Shupe nodded and shrugged.

“It says that you left the service after thirteen years.” He said continuing to read through the resume before him.