Give a Boy a Gun (9 page)

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
.