Give a Boy a Gun (24 page)
Authors: Todd Strasser
10/12/95â
Blackville, South Carolina
A sixteen-year-old kills one teacher and
wounds another, then kills himself.
10/23/95â
Redlands, California
A thirteen-year-old kills one student and wounds another.
11/15/95â
Richland High School, Lynnville, Tennessee
Seventeen-year-old Jamie Rouse opens fire with a rifle in a crowded school hallway. He kills one student and one teacher, and wounds one teacher.
2/2/96â
Frontier Junior High School, Moses Lake, Washington
Fourteen-year-old honor student Barry Loukaitis kills two students and one teacher, using two guns he took from an unlocked cabinet at home and a .25-caliber semiautomatic pistol from the family car.
2/28/96â
St Louis, Missouri
A teenager is shot to death on a school
bus and the driver is wounded. The assailant uses a .38-caliber semiautomatic handgun.
2/19/97â
Bethel, Alaska
Sixteen-year-old Evan Ramsey kills two students and wounds two others with a 12-gauge shotgun left unlocked in his home.
10/1/97â
Pearl High School, Pearl, Mississippi
Sixteen-year-old Luke Woodham kills his mother, then goes to school and kills two students and wounds seven others.
12/1/97âHeath High School, Paducah, Kentucky
Fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal opens fire on an early-morning prayer circle, killing three girls and wounding five other students. He uses a .22-caliber Ruger semiautomatic handgun he had taken, along with two shotguns and two rifles, from a neighbor's house. He carries five hundred rounds of ammunition in his backpack.
12/15/97
-Stamps High School
Fourteen-year-old Joseph Todd kills two students.
3/24/98â
Westside Middle School, Jonesboro, Arkansas
Eleven-year-old Andrew Golden and thirteen-year-old Mitchell Johnson kill four students and one teacher, and wound ten others. They arm themselves with three handguns taken from Golden's parents' house, and four handguns and three rifles taken from Golden's grandfather's home, where they were left unlocked.
4/24/98-J. W.
Parker Middle School, Edinboro, Pennsylvania
Fourteen-year-old Andrew Jerome Wurst shoots and kills a science teacher and wounds two students and another teacher at an eighth-grade graduation dance. He uses a .25-caliber handgun registered to his father.
5/19/98â
Lincoln County High School, Fayetteville, Tennessee
Jacob Davis, an eighteen-year-old honor student, kills a student allegedly dating his ex-girlfriend.
5/21/98â
Thurston High School, Springfield, Oregon
Fifteen-year-old Kipland Kinkel kills his parents and then goes to school and kills two students and wounds twenty-two others. He uses a .22-caliber semiautomatic Ruger handgun, a 9 mm Glock handgun, and a Ruger semiautomatic rifle with a fifty-round clip. The rifle was purchased for him by his parents. The handguns were his father's.
6/15/98â
Armstrong High School, Richmond, Virginia
Fourteen-year-old student Quinshawn Booker shoots and wounds a basketball coach and a volunteer aide. Another student was the intended victim. He uses a
.32-caliber Llama semiautomatic handgun.
4/20/99â
Columbine High School, Littleton, Colorado
Eighteen-year-old Eric Harris and seventeen-year-old Dylan Klebold kill twelve students and one teacher and wound twenty-three others, then kill themselves. They use a TEC-9 semiautomatic handgun, a 9 mm Hi-Point semiautomatic carbine rifle, and two sawed-off shotguns.
4/28/99âW. R.
Myers High School, Taber, Alberta, Canada
A fourteen-year-old student kills one student and wounds a second. He uses a .22-caliber rifle.
5/20/99â
Heritage High School, Conyers, Georgia
Fifteen-year-old T. J. Solomon wounds six students. He uses a .22-caliber rifle and a .357-caliber handgun. Both had to
be sneaked past a school security officer and two other security staffers.
2/29/00â
Mount Morris Township, Michigan
Six-year-old Kayla Rolland is shot to death by a six-year-old classmate.
Anyone looking for one simple black-and-white answer to the problem of school violence involving guns will not find it here. Like Beth Bender and Dick Flanagan, I have no one answer. But I do have suggestions: The manufacture, importation, and possession of all semiautomatic assault-type weapons should be banned. The sale of handguns should be restricted to the military and law enforcement agencies. Children should be taught from the earliest age to respect one another's differences. Schools should enact zero tolerance for teasing. Students' achievements off the field should be valued as highly as those on the field.
If these changes are going to occur, they will have to start with you, the young person reading this book. If this story has moved
you, then it will be your job to keep these ideas alive, to examine your own life and your own school, to keep these issues in the forefront with open discussions and debate. Mine is the generation that will see true gun reform continually stalled by lobby-fattened politicians. Yours is the generation that may someday have the power to make the real changes that will save young lives.
If you would like to read and explore more about these issues, the following are some valuable resources:
Friday Night Lights
, by H. G. Bissinger (Addison-Wesley, 1990), explores the lives of high school football players in a small Texas town and brings to light the conflict between sports and education.
Making a Killing
, by Tom Diaz (New Press, 1999), explores the gun industry's efforts to increase profits by constantly introducing
deadlier weapons to the gun-buying market, and shows how powerful gun lobbies work to impede the government's efforts to control gun use.
Lethal Passage
, by Erik Larson (Crown, 1994), follows the actual history of one semiautomatic, from its creation to the day a sixteen-year-old schoolboy uses it to kill one teacher and severely wound another. Despite being written long before the shootings in Jonesboro, Paducah, and Littleton, the book predicted such incidents.
Hall, Stephen S., and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. “The Troubled Life of Boys.”
New York Times Magazine, 22
August 1999.
Labi, Nadya, et al. “Two Boys and Their Guns.”
Time
, 6 April 1998.
Sullivan, Randall. “A Boys Life.”
Rolling
Stone
, 17 September 1998; 1 October 1998. Wilkinson, Peter, and Matt Hendrickson. “Humiliation and Revenge: The Story of Reb and VoDkA.”
Rolling Stone
, 10 June 1999.
The Violence Policy Center. “Start 'Em Young: Recruitment of Kids into the Gun Culture.” April 1999.
The Violence Policy Center. “Young Guns: How the Gun Lobby Nurtures America's Youth Gun Culture.” March 1998.
Many of these sites can also provide printed pamphlets and other materials.
The Violence Policy Center
Information on guns and youths
Million Mom March Foundation
Stopping gun violence
Student Pledge Against Gun Violence
Organized to stop violence in schools
Pax
Stopping gun violence
Coalition to Stop Gun Violence
Stopping gun violence
Center to Prevent Handgun Violence
Stopping gun violence
Ever since his 1981 bestseller,
The Wave
, based on a true incident in which a teacher conducted an experiment in peer pressure with his students, Todd Strasser has been concerned with problems of teenage stress and violence. With the recent rash of shootings in schools, he feels compelled once again to address these issues, as well as how the availability of guns can affect the emotional decisions of teens.
Strasser has written many award-winning novels for teenagers, including
How I Changed My Life, How I Spent My Last Night on Earth
, and
Girl Gives Birth to Own Prom Date
, which became the feature film
Drive Me Crazy
. A novelist for more than twenty-five years, Strasser speaks frequently at schools about the craft of writing and conducts writing workshops for young people. He lives with his family in a suburb of New York City.
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First Simon Pulse edition April 2002
Text copyright © 2000 by Todd Strasser
SIMON PULSE
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Page 1: Copyright © 1999, USA TODAY. Reprinted with permission.
Page 7: From an article in The Christian Science Monitor, which ran on May 26, 1999, and is reproduced with permission. Copyright © 1999 by The Christian Science Publishing Society. All rights reserved.
Pages 9, 13, 14, 21, 38, 53, 58, 60, 83, 88, 91, 124, 131: Copyright © 1998/1999 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.
Pages 15, 26, 30, 95, 98: From Rolling Stone, “Humiliation and Revenge: The Story of Reb and VoDkA” by Peter Wilinson and Matt Hendrickson, and “Guns and Violence: An Editorial” by Jann S. Wenner, June 10, 1999; and “A Boy's Life” by Randall Sullivan, September 17, 1998. Copyright ©1998/1999 by Straight Arrow Publishers Company, L.P. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
Also available in a Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers hardcover edition.
Designed by Steve Scott
The text of this book was set in Electra.
CIP Data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN-13: 978-0-689-84893-3
ISBN-10: 0-689-84893-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-1521-3 (eBook)