Give a Boy a Gun Read online

— Dustin Williams

  There is an unwritten law here about the treatment of athletes, especially those athletes on the teams that have a chance to go to the playoffs and bring the school recognition and enhance its pride. In our case, that’s football and wrestling. The [unwritten] law states that you may discipline a student athlete up to a point. But it must be an absolutely extraordinary situation for you to do anything that would impinge on that athlete’s ability to play for his team. To do so would be to invite the worst kind of scorn, not just from the football coaches, but from the administration, other teachers, and the town at large. Do a few of the athletes know this and take advantage of it? What do you think?

  — Beth Bender

  With the trend toward two parents working and spending less time at home, the responsibility for raising children and instilling them with values rests more and more on the shoulders of the schools. We are no longer supposed to teach just academics; we are now supposed to rear, nurture, coddle, protect, encourage, discipline, and teach good hygiene and eating habits. If you’re a teacher with six classes of roughly thirty kids each, how exactly are you supposed to do that?

  —Allen Curry, principal of Middletown High School

  My mother says I’m a pack rat. I save everything. I don’t know why, I just do. Gary, Brendan, Allison, and I would get into a chat room and shoot the breeze, and if I thought it was interesting, I’d save it onto a Zip drive. As soon as the cops found out, they got a warrant and came in here and took it all away, but my dad went to court and got some of it back after the cops made copies. After what happened, I went back and started to look at some of the stuff. I thought this one was pretty interesting. Brendan is TerminX. Gary is Dayzd. Allison is Blkchokr, and I’m Rebooto.

  —Ryan Clancy

  TerminX: Burns called me a nerd 2day.

  Blkchokr: Feeble

  Rebooto: That’s the best he could come up with!

  Dayzd: Know what he’ll call a nerd 10 years from now?

  TerminX: Boss

  Rebooto: LOL!

  TerminX: It’s BS.

  Blkchokr: Y?

  TerminX: Jocks go 2 college and play on teams.

  They’re heroes.

  Rebooto: They get hot babes.

  Dayzd: They get babes hot.

  TerminX: They study accounting and pre-law.

  Then they screw up their knees and their career is over. But it doesn’t matter.

  Blkchokr: Y not?

  TerminX: Because they’re still winners.

  Dayzd: We’re losers, with good knees.

  Rebooto: Unless U lose Ur knee.

  Dayzd: Or Ur knee comes loose.

  TerminX: They become partners in accounting firms and law firms, and everyone wants 2 work with them because they were heroes in college.

  Blkchokr: Some go into pro sports.

  TerminX: It’s incredibly rare.

  Dayzd: About as rare as some nerd actually being Ur boss.

  Part of Gary’s Suicide Note

  Mom, I could never tell you how unhappy I was. I knew there was nothing you could do to help, and life has been hard enough on you already. I’m truly, truly sorry that I’m going to put you through so much pain, but I hope that in a year or two you’ll get over it. Maybe you could move away and change your name and even have a new kid.

  You can start over. I wish I could be there with you, but I’m past the point of no return.

  The End of Ninth Grade

  We talked all the time about getting back at the jocks. For every time they called you a faggot. For every time they bodychecked you into a wall. And every teacher who saw it happen day after day and never did anything more than tell those morons to stop horsing around. We would tie them up and use pliers to pull their fingernails off. We would gouge their eyes out and castrate them. We would burn their noses off with propane torches. I know it must sound sick, but that’s how pissed we were. You had these guys breaking the rules and beating on you, and no one tried to stop them.

  —Ryan Clancy

  Brendan learned I had weapons in the house, because he saw me carrying the case to the car one day when I went [to a gun show]. A few days later he came over and asked about them. I opened the case and let him hold a few. He was certainly surprised at how heavy some of them were. I think he said something to the tune of “I can’t believe they’re real.”

  —Jack Phillips, a neighbor of Brendan’s

  I will kill every friggin’ one of them. It’s gonna be Columbine all over again, only better. Harris and Klebold did it right. Blow the friggin’ school, then blow yourself away. I wish I could have met them. Maybe we’ll go underground after Middletown. Help other outcasts kill the A-hole jocks at their schools. Or die trying. This is the new revolution. This is John Friggin’ Brown telling the country we’ve had enough of this crap. This is one for the history books. Keep fighting until they bring you down in a hail of bullets. Mark my words, Littleton was just the beginning.

  —an E-mail from Brendan to Gary

  According to federal estimates, there are about 280 million people and 240 million guns in America.

  The first gun Brendan got he bought from this kid in school. The thing is, if you know anything about this stuff, [the gun he bought] was a piece of crap. I think it was made in Brazil or someplace. Brendan said he paid a hundred [dollars] for it, and I heard someone say that the kid who sold it to him had bought it for, like, thirty. But Brendan didn’t care. All he cared about was having that gun.

  —Ryan Clancy

  Brendan was changing. Definitely getting darker and angrier, although sometimes he’d be the old Brendan, funny and charming and goofy. It was probably about a month after they did the swirly on him when he called up and said he wanted to go up to the park. Usually we’d just sit under a tree near the parking lot and talk and drink, but this time there was someplace he really wanted to get to. You could tell there was something on his mind. We got into the park, and he was like, “Let’s go up on the hill.” It’s a big hill, and Gary and I were really huffing and puffing. I have to quit smoking. We got up there, and he took this gun out of his pocket. Like, first we thought it was a toy, then Gary thought maybe a starter’s pistol. Brendan said it was real, and I asked what he was going to do with it. I won’t use the words he used, but basically he said he was going to blow away some kids at school.

  —Allison Findley

  Virtually all of the semiautomatic pistols manufactured in Brazil are exported because Brazilian law forbids civilian ownership of such guns. (Making a Killing)

  My dad has a 9 mm Glock he keeps on a shelf in his bedroom closet. It’s got that nice black finish like the ones you see on TV. When we used to go on camping trips, he’d put it in the glove compartment of our car. The thing is I know some kids who really have arsenals—like rifles, shotguns, and pistols. I’m not talking about their fathers. I’m talking about them. Although their fathers have lots of guns too. So when Brendan showed me this gun he’d bought, I was pretty much, are you for real? I think he thought I was surprised he had a gun, but I was like, “Give me a break, that’s not a gun, it’s a toy.” Man, I wish I hadn’t said that.

  —Ryan Clancy

  Among students who said they carried a gun, 53 percent said they had obtained the gun from home or family; 37 percent obtained the gun “off the street.”

  Have you ever noticed how the staff wear their walkie-talkies on their hip? I know that’s the logical place for them, but I can’t help thinking of the similarity to the sheriff and his deputies in the Wild West. The way they’re so quick to point that walkie-talkie at kids who are misbehaving. As if it’s loaded with communication bullets. If you don’t respect my authority, I’ll call in the reinforcements. When I was in school, the principal didn’t carry a walkie-talkie. He didn’t need one. We respected his authority. Or we feared it. You can say the staff need their walkie-talkies because there’s no respect for authority anymore. But perhaps there would be respect if the staff weren
’t so quick to rely on threats. I don’t know. Anyway, it probably doesn’t even matter. It’s probably too late now to change.

  — Beth Bender

  [Brendan] was very interested, very respectful. He wouldn’t touch a gun unless he asked first. But he was fascinated by them. He had to pick up each one, get the feel of it, sight it. You know, the very same things gun people do. He was a natural.

  —Jack Phillips

  Gary asked me if I would get him a gun. He’d prepared his argument very carefully. Lots of kids had guns. He’d take a safety course. It was for target practice only. I said I didn’t believe in having guns. As far as I was concerned, there was no place in our home for one. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t cross my mind that he might use it on himself.

  —Cynthia Searle

  You know how sometimes you go to a movie and you come out and for a little while you sort of feel like one of the characters? Maybe you even talk like them? Brendan, Gary, and I went to one of these dumb horror movies. There’s a scene where the killer guy picks up one of his victims and throws him off an overpass, right in front of a big truck going underneath.

  So, it’s night and we were walking home, and Brendan stops on the overpass and watches the cars going by underneath. He just stood there. Gary and I called to him to come on, but he wouldn’t. We didn’t know what he was doing. All of a sudden he starts to throw something. It turned out he wasn’t throwing anything, just going through the motion. But it looked like it to us, and to the cars underneath. There’s this horrible screeching and squealing of tires, and you knew cars were skidding and swerving to get out of the way, and you’re sure any second you’re going to hear a crash, but it didn’t happen.

  I wanted to run, get out of there before someone came up and caught us. But Brendan wouldn’t run. He just walked up to us with a big smile on his face and said, didn’t we think that was the wicked coolest thing?

  —Allison Findley

  Whatever that dark thing in Brendan was, it started to come out in Gary, too. I always thought of Gary as more lost and sad than angry. I mean, I don’t know whether what Gary had came from Brendan, or whether Brendan just brought it out in Gary. I hate to say this, but maybe it would have come out in Gary even if Brendan hadn’t been there. But the two of them together . . . I don’t know, they just fed off each other.

  —Emily Kirsch

  Allison [Findley] worried me too. She came to school in dirty clothes, with dirty hair, and sometimes, to be blunt, she smelled. I was concerned for her, both because I wondered if there was something wrong at home, and because of the way the other girls treated her. She was a bit overweight, but also very well developed. You would hear things. I had no way of knowing if they were true. I hoped they weren’t.

  —Beth Bender

  “Mitchell Johnson’s mother . . . said . . . that she taught her boy how to shoot a shotgun, and then he took a three-week course.”

  —New York Times, 6/14/98

  We hear all the time about the supposed deterioration of the behavior of young people over the past thirty years. Can we really put a value judgment on it? Maybe the behavior of teenagers has changed, but I’m not sure that implies deterioration. We read that with parents working so much and grandparents off in their retirement villages, there are far fewer adults around to influence youngsters. The articles do make one interesting point—that in the absence of real adult role models, violent television and video images have become the substitute role models. I think that’s probably true.

  — F. Douglas Ellin

  At the request of the police, Dick Flanagan and I went back and collected some of [Gary’s and Brendan’s] writings. We were both struck by how certain themes came out, not necessarily in any one piece of writing, but in the body of work as a whole. It was clear that Gary felt weak and defenseless. He wrote often about characters who were teased and picked on. The themes in Brendan’s writings were less clear but much more aggressive. More like you were in some extremely violent video game. The characters in his stories were always getting revenge, always on the attack with weapons capable of terrible destruction.

  —Allen Curry

  Brendan was seriously into [first-person shooter video games]. If you want to know the truth, so were a lot of other kids who didn’t do what he did. But one day Gary and I are in his room with him, just hacking around on the computer and listening to music, and Brendan’s like, “Point and click, point and click!” Like he’s just figured something out, you know? So he goes crawling into his closet and comes out with that crappy little gun, and he aims it at me. I guess he saw the look on my face, because he said, “Don’t worry, it’s not loaded.” Then he dry-fires the [gun] and it goes click, and he says, “See? Point and click! It’s the same thing!”

  —Ryan Clancy

  The average twelve-year-old has seen more than seven thousand murders on television.

  No one is naive enough to believe that violent movies or television or video games can actually make anyone commit a violent act. The real question is, If someone is inclined toward violence, do these forms of media help show him the way to do it?

  — F. Douglas Ellin

  Brendan got into this “point and click” thing for a while. At lunch he’d put his arm on the table and plant his chin behind it so it looked like he was peeking over a wall. Then he’d stick his thumb up and point his finger at the kids he hated. He’d go, “Point and click, point and click. Die suckas.” Like he was picking them off one by one.

  —Allison Findley

  This one was after that school shooting in Idaho.

  —Ryan Clancy

  Several studies have shown that the appearance on television and in the movies of semiautomatic guns like the Bren 10 and TEC-9 boosted sales of those weapons. (Making a Killing)

  TerminX: Gun control is friggin’ stupid. Gunz don’t kill people. People kill people.

  Rebooto: But if people can’t get gunz...

  TerminX: They find a way.

  Dayzd: My granddad’s from WY. Everyone has gunz. U get a .22 at 10 and hunt squirrels.

  Blkchokr: Y?

  TerminX: Y what?

  Blkchokr: Y hunt squirrels?

  Dayzd: Eat them.

  TerminX: U never 8 squirrel?

  Blkchokr: Gross, and neither have U, Trm.

  Dayzd: How come when my granddad was a kid, kids didn’t go 2 school and kill people?

  Rebooto: MayB they nu it was wrong.

  TerminX: U think Klebold and Harris didn’t know it was wrong in Littleton?

  Rebooto: Then Y?

  Dayzd: Nothing better 2 do.

  TerminX: K&H didn’t care. Want 2 know what’s different between now and 50 years ago? Back then kids cared.

  Blkchokr: What about?

  Dayzd: Santa Clauz.

  TerminX: They believed in crap. Don’t ask me what, ’cause whatever it was is gone now. Back then U had a reason not 2 kill people.

  Blkchokr: U don’t now?

  Dayzd: Lethal injection.

  Rebooto: Milky Ways.

  TerminX: No 1 cares anymore. No 1 believes. Nothing 2 care about. Nothing 2 believe in.

  Dayzd: I believe in love.

  Sales of the semiautomatic AKS assault rifle increased dramatically after Patrick Edward Purdy killed five children and wounded thirty more on a school playground in California. (Lethal Passage)

  Rebooto: I’m dyslexic. I believe in doG.

  TerminX: We’re all gonna die. MayB I’ll die before U, but sooner or later U’ll croak 2.

  Blkchokr: Duh.

  Dayzd: I won’t die.

  Rebooto: I’ll come back as an amoeba.

  TerminX: Once U’re dead, U’re gone and 4gotten. But it’ll be a long time before they 4get about Littleton.

  Dayzd: Huh?

  Blkchokr: Trm, U think that’s Y they did it? 2 B remembered?

  TerminX: It’s part of it. Remember Jesse James? Al Capone?

  “Thirty-five years’ experie
nce in newspapers convinces me that teenagers are influenced by the news they see and read. I have no proof of that. It’s my belief. Some children see only the front page of a newspaper, in a box on the street, on the porch or over the breakfast table. I did not want to take the risk that another front-page story about another school shooting might cause some unbalanced fifteen-year-old to add one more disaster to the recent series.’”

  —Nigel Wade, Chicago Sun-Times newspaper editor, on why he refused to run the story of the Springfield, Oregon, shooting on the front page, New York Times, 5/23/98

  Blkchokr: Attila the Hun. Hitler.

  Rebooto: That creep who 8 people.

  Dayzd: Dahmer.

  Blkchokr: Impressed, Dayz.

  Dayzd: I can C it, Trm. The combo plate. Get the buttholes who make Ur life miserable. Plus Ur name in history. And “nothing really matters . . . to me.”

  TerminX: Starts 2 look good. U get them. They get what they deserve. Plus U’re famous.

  Dayzd: Infamous.

  Rebooto: Like President Clinton!

  Blkchokr: O. J. Simpson.

  Dayzd: Michael Jackson.

  Rebooto: That’s sick.

  TerminX: 13 kids went down in Littleton. Who do U remember?

  Dayzd: Klebold and Harris.

  TerminX: I rest my case.

  At the end of ninth grade we had this awards assembly. It was for everything, not just sports. I was sitting with the guys on the [football] team. Principal Curry announced the awards for the speech and debate team, and these kids started to go up on stage. So, you know, these were the brainy kids, and some of them looked okay, but a couple of them were wearing thick glasses and had funny builds. So the guys on the football team start booing. It was just plain stupid. I recall I actually felt embarrassed. I think I even bent my head down so people would see that I wasn’t one of them. But it was like a glimpse at how those other kids must have felt, you know? Could you imagine the speech and debate team booing when the football players got their awards? There would be a massacre.