Free Give a Boy a Gun by Todd Strasser

several magazines and newspapers reported that he had imitated a computer-game pattern by quickly shifting from one target to the next.

    We came around the side of the house. You had to go through this gate because Dustin has a pool in his backyard. Brendan and I were going in. Sam and Deirdre were coming out. The thing is it was just, like, bad timing. Sam got to the gate first. He pushed it open and just kept going. Like he wasn’t even going to bother holding it for Deirdre. So Brendan caught the gate and held it for her. Some people say he bowed or touched her on the shoulder or something. I didn’t see it. All I saw was Sam come out of nowhere and get Brendan from behind.
    â€” Ryan Clancy
    I was in the kitchen and I heard the shouting.I came out, and Sam had Brendan on the ground and was smashing him like a wild animal. There had to be six guys standing around watching. Any one of them could have pulled Sam off, but they didn’t. I had to get Sam in a choke hold and practically suffocate him to get him to stop.
    â€” Dustin Williams
    Have you ever heard the sound of a fist on bone? It would make you sick. One thing I know for certain, Sam was definitely going for Brendan’s face. I swear if I’d had a gun that night, I would have shot Sam myself.
    â€” Ryan Clancy
    I went home that night and told my mom there was something really wrong with these kids.
    â€”Chelsea Baker
    It wasn’t like that in elementary school. I mean, even when two kids got into a fight, they didn’t try to hurt each other so badly. Kids in elementary school are way more open to teachers’ influence than when they get to middle school and high school. Why can’t they teach something in elementary school that could help kids learn how to deal with one another without it always becoming violent?
    â€” Emily Kirsch

    It was reported that Carneal wounded or killed eight people with eight bullets, despite the fact that he’d never fired a gun before. This was not the case. It was later discovered that Carneal had learned to shoot at a summer camp run by a well-known national youth organization.

    I heard about it in the teachers’ room first thing Monday morning. A little later I saw Brendan in the hall. His nose was swollen, and his lip was fat and split, and his eye was black and blue. A few minutes later I saw Sam. Not a scratch. You never would’ve known he’d been in a fight.
    â€”Beth Bender
    Boys fight. They’ve always fought and they always will fight. Was Sam provoked? Whoknows. We weren’t there. We didn’t see. Forgive me if I sound callous, but this was an incident that took place off school property.
    â€”Allen Curry

    Michael Carneal was frequently picked on and teased. The intimation that he was gay was even printed in his school’s newspaper.

    Gary was really down. I didn’t know why. It could have been something at home, I’ll never know. We were talking on the phone about what happened to Brendan at the party and how the jocks just stood around and didn’t stop Sam. Gary said he wished they’d all die. I said, “Not really, right?” He said he really, really did want them to die slow, painful, miserable deaths. I said, “While you live to be a hundred?” He said he really didn’t care. He was past the point of caring. He just wanted them to die.
    â€”Allison Findley

    According to several news organizations, Michael Carneal carried a backpack containing more than five hundred rounds of ammunition on the day he killed.

The Day It Happened
    Brendan called me around dinnertime. It was definitely weird. I don’t think we’d spoken on the phone since the end of ninth grade. There was a time when I was pretty sure he was interested in me in a romantic way. But I thought that had passed. Anyway, we talked for a while, and I wasn’t sure what he was getting at. Then he told me that about a week before the fight