Give a Boy a Gun (10 page)

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' experience 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.

— Dustin Williams

We moved to Middletown at the end of ninth grade, so tenth grade was my first year here. It's so different from my old school. You expect it to be different, but what surprised me was the
way
it was different. It's just a lot more rigid here. It's like, are you in the popular crowd or not? There was a popular crowd at my old school, too, but they were still nice to most people. They didn't act like if you weren't one of them you didn't deserve to exist.

I remember coming home after the first week and telling my mom I didn't like it.
Some of the kids just weren't nice at all. They'd push and curse in the hall, and it didn't seem like any of the teachers really went out of their way to stop it. Mom said to lie low. I've always been pretty good at making friends, and she knew I'd find some at Middletown High. She said I only had three years to go. I remember thinking it sounded like an eternity.

—Chelsea Baker, a transfer student to Middletown High School

“There has never . . . been a cohort of kids that is so little affected by adult guidance and so attuned to a peer world. . . . We have removed grown-up wisdom and allowed [children] to drift into a self-constructed, highly relativistic world of friendship and peers.'”

—Prof. William Damon, Stanford University,
New York Times
, 10/3/99

One thing I don't think a lot of people on the outside realize is how incredibly hard a football team trains. The hours of practice on the weekdays and weekends. Learning forty or fifty plays in your playbook, plus each week studying the films of the team you're facing that Friday night. On top of that you've got schoolwork. And the weight and strength training you have to do on your own just to survive out there. The pressure is huge, and to be honest, there are guys who . . . well, the only way they have to blow off steam is fighting.

— Dustin Williams

I always felt Brendan and I had a special connection, even after the point, around the beginning of tenth grade, when we didn't talk much anymore. Maybe it went back to seventh grade, when we were both new. Maybe it was because we were both quote, unquote “outcasts.” Anyway, you know how Brendan always seemed to attract trouble. There was just something about him. Every slight, real or imagined, made his fur go up. And he couldn't back down. I mean, it wasn't like he was trying to prove how tough he was. I really think there was something in him. He was helpless to resist it. Even when he was scared silly, he had to stand up to it.

—Emily Kirsch

A lot of what they're saying about the football players is a load of crap. So what if we wore our jerseys to school on game days? All we were doing was trying to get some school spirit going. I've got news for you. You're out there on the field banging heads with some 220-pound lineman for four quarters, you
need some support from the stands. But it wasn't like it was a rule. If you didn't want to have school spirit, that was your business. But some of those guys went further than that. It was like they wanted to destroy school spirit.

— Sam Flach

It's important that you look at this realistically. The issue of school spirit is certainly a factor in the tensions between these two groups of kids, but you have to believe it's been blown out of proportion. You're not going to have cheerleaders for the chess team. You're not going to fill the bleachers with fans who cheer when a kid from Middletown takes his opponent's rook. Even the chess players don't want that. Of course we want to produce scholars and we take pride in our National Honor Society members. But that's a matter of school pride, and it's different from school spirit.

— Dick Flanagan