Free Give a Boy a Gun by Todd Strasser Page B

Sometimes at a gun show I see those foreign-made weapons. Some of them come from countries we once considered our enemies. Part of me can’t help thinking that they must be laughing their heads off at us. They don’t have to go to war against us anymore. All they have to do is sell us guns, and we’ll do the job for them. And the darnedest part of it is they make a profit.
    â€”Jack Phillips
    Blockbuster is right around the corner from school. So I’m in there looking at titles, hopingsomeone I know will walk in. And who comes in? Emily Kirsch. Like, at first I wasn’t even going to talk to her. I went back to looking at titles. But then I look up and there she is, right across the aisle. So we say hi, what’s up? You know, the regular BS.
    It runs out pretty fast, and there’s that moment when one of you has to come up with something else to say or you’re just going to go off in different directions. And I swear I still don’t know why I said it, but just joking around, I said, “So, how come you’re not at the dance?”
    Like she or I would ever go to a school dance.
    And that’s when she told me about Brendan calling her, and how he wanted to make sure she wouldn’t be at the dance. And it just gave me the creepiest feeling. Whywould he say that? Since it wasn’t like I had anything better to do, I figured I’d walk over to school and take a look.
    â€”Allison Findley

    Only a tiny fraction of the guns manufactured in Japan stay in that country. Japan has very strict gun control laws. The majority of the guns manufactured in Japan are shipped to the United States. (Making a Killing)

    I heard someone scream and then I saw one of them. He was wearing green camouflage clothing and a black ski hat pulled down over his face with the eyes and mouth cut out. At first I thought it was a joke. Guys dressed like commandos and carrying toy guns. But then one of them, I think it was probably Brendan, fired a bunch of shots at the ceiling. It sounded like a pack of firecrackers, but you could hear the bullets pinging and ricocheting off the rafters and air-conditioning ducts. A couple of those big mercury-vapor lights shattered, and glass started to rain down on us. When that happened, most of the crowd dived for the floor.
    â€”Dustin Williams
    Do you know what a semiautomatic is? It looks like a machine gun. Only it’s smaller and easier to hide . It sprays out lots of bullets very quickly. I’m told it has absolutely no useas a hunting weapon and hardly any accuracy, either. So it serves no purpose in target shooting. Then what is it for? Why is it made? What do the companies that make these guns think people are going to do with them?
    â€”Beth Bender
    They were running around and yelling and firing at the ceiling. Bullets were ricocheting all over the place. Glass was shattering. It was, like, total mayhem. They told us to lie facedown on the floor with our hands over our head. That made it hard to see. With all the shouting and firing and running, and with the gym semidark because it was a dance, it was hard to tell how many there really were.
    I think I knew almost instantly that one of them was Brendan. And that led to the fairly logical conclusion that Gary would be involved too. I took a couple of guesses at who the others might be. I think a lot of us were surprised when we finally realized there weren’t any others. It was just Brendan and Gary. Even with the masks you could tellwho was who because Brendan was thin and Gary was sort of chubby. You wouldn’t have thought only two of them could make so much noise and gunfire. At first I couldn’t understand why they were running and yelling and wearing masks. Now I think it was just to add to the fear factor. Believe me, it worked.
    â€” Dustin Williams
    They were yelling at us to get away from the doors. That the doors were booby-trapped. They herded us all into the center of the