Give a Boy a Gun (15 page)

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 listen, 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.

—Allison Findley

Only a tiny fraction of the guns manufactured in Japan stay in that country. Japan has very strict gun control laws. The majority of the guns manufactured in Japan are shipped to the United States.
(Making a Killing)

I heard someone scream and then I saw one of them. He was wearing green camouflage clothing and a black ski hat pulled down over his face with the eyes and mouth cut out. At first I thought it was a joke. Guys dressed like commandos and carrying toy guns. But then one of them, I think it was probably Brendan, fired a bunch of shots at the ceiling. It sounded like a pack of firecrackers, but you could hear the bullets pinging and ricocheting off the rafters and air-conditioning ducts. A couple of those big mercury-vapor lights shattered, and glass started to rain down on us. When that happened, most of the crowd dived for the floor.

—Dustin Williams

Do you know what a semiautomatic is? It looks like a machine gun.
Only it's smaller and easier to hide
. It sprays out lots of bullets very quickly. I'm told it has absolutely no use
as a hunting weapon and hardly any accuracy, either. So it serves no purpose in target shooting. Then what is it for? Why is it made? What do the companies that make these guns think people are going to do with them?

—Beth Bender

They were running around and yelling and firing at the ceiling. Bullets were ricocheting all over the place. Glass was shattering. It was, like, total mayhem. They told us to lie facedown on the floor with our hands over our head. That made it hard to see. With all the shouting and firing and running, and with the gym semidark because it was a dance, it was hard to tell how many there really were.

I think I knew almost instantly that one of them was Brendan. And that led to the fairly logical conclusion that Gary would be involved too. I took a couple of guesses at who the others might be. I think a lot of us were surprised when we finally realized there weren't any others. It was just Brendan and Gary. Even with the masks you could tell
who was who because Brendan was thin and Gary was sort of chubby. You wouldn't have thought only two of them could make so much noise and gunfire. At first I couldn't understand why they were running and yelling and wearing masks. Now I think it was just to add to the fear factor. Believe me, it worked.

— Dustin Williams

They were yelling at us to get away from the doors. That the doors were booby-trapped. They herded us all into the center of the gym and told us to lie facedown. Mr. Curry tried to get stern and tough, and started to tell Gary to put down the gun. Gary didn't say a word. He just fired off half a dozen quick shots at the ceiling. Those bullets ricocheted around up there. One of them came back
down so close to my face I could feel the air move. It sounded like that beach scene in
Saving Private Ryan
.

—Paul Burns

“The killers [in school shootings] were able to easily acquire high-powered guns, and in many cases, their parents helped the children get them, either directly or through negligence.
Guns with rapid-fire capability . . . that can spray a burst of bullets in a matter of seconds, were used in the incidents with the most victims.”

—
New York Times
, 6/14/98