If They Didn’t Have Guns…
I saw this Tweet from Tucker Carlson this morning, in the wake of the High School shooting in Florida:
Every decent person is horrified by what happened yesterday in Parkland. Every thoughtful person knows something horrible is going on in American society. Tragedies like this happen for a reason and it probably doesn’t have much to do with guns. #Tucker @FoxNews
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) February 16, 2018
Sure, it’s not about guns. If the shooter hadn’t had a gun, they’d use something else, right? A bomb, knife, some other weapon.
Well, sure. They’d try to.
Let me tell you a story….
When The Younger Boy entered High School, it made our lives so much easier. His school was practically across the street from our house. No more driving 2 or more miles over to the charter Middle School he’d attended! He was right there, within a stone’s throw of our house!
He’d been there just a couple days on Monday August 25, 2009. School started early, so I was still at home. We live on one of the busier streets in our town, so a police car or ambulance or firetruck going by, siren screaming was not an odd occurrence. So we didn’t notice the first two that went by. Then more came and we thought, “Must be an accident on Rt 92.”
Then we heard helicopters. My wife went out to look. Kids from the High School were streaming along the sidewalk, across the intersection which was being blocked by police, and over to the fenced playground at the Middle School down the street. We didn’t know what was happening. We quickly got dressed and went over to the Middle School, where a lot of other parents were gathering outside the fence. NOBODY knew what was going on, but we knew that they weren’t letting us in, and they weren’t letting the kids out. Eventually, they let us take our kids home, after each was accounted for.
It wasn’t till later that day that we learned that a former student had come to the school with 10 pipe bombs in a tactical vest, a chainsaw, and a sword. He’d planned to set off the pipe bombs to blow up and kill students and teachers, and use the chainsaw and the sword to kill still more who would be running from the carnage he’d created.
But the first two pipe bombs he lit off were far weaker than he expected. I saw the area where one had gone off, a week or so later. It barely scorched the linoleum. His chainsaw wouldn’t start, and he was tackled by the Principal and a teacher who sat on him till the Police took him into custody.
Because nobody was killed, or even hurt, we could laugh at the loser who had come back to kill the chemistry teacher who had failed him but was so bad a chemistry he couldn’t make a working bomb, and joke that maybe he tried to use an electric chainsaw and couldn’t find any place to plug it in. Easy to joke when nobody died.
But after the shooting in Florida, I realize that probably the one thing that prevented deaths was how hard it would be to get an AR15 in California. And our attacker was only 17, so he’d have had still more difficulty. So, yeah - if they can’t get guns, they’ll use something else. But we don’t sell pipe bombs retail. We don’t have a National Pipe Bomb Association whipping people into a frenzy to buy their pipe bombs before Obama takes them away. We don’t have Charlton Heston proclaiming that we can have his pipe bomb when we pry it from his cold, dead hands.
We have guns. Lot and lots of guns. And in Florida, a kid who’d been expelled from school for violent outbursts and had had multiple police calls about him was able to legally buy an AR15, and lots of rounds of ammo, and he just killed 17 people. If we lived in Florida, instead of California, the loser we joke about might have had a gun, and my beautiful son might be dead, like the beautiful children in Florida.
‘Take away guns and they’ll use something else’. Sure. But maybe my son is still alive because one crazy guy couldn’t get a gun.