GUN CONTROL

GUN CONTROL

By Lowell Yaeger

“…from my cold dead hands.”

                                                - Charlton Heston

Sandra Hackett was a card-carrying member of the one percent, overburdened with what jaded, poorer people would call White People Problems. There was this huge house to keep clean, two SUVs to keep maintained, appointments to keep (hair/nails/yoga/shrink), and the 3-year-old apple of her eye, Stefan, who was keen on stirring up trouble. If, on the night of September 19, 20--, you had told her she only had about an hour left to worry about all her problems, her terror-to-relief ratio would probably run somewhere along the lines of 60:40.

                She was trying to make dinner (it was beef stroganoff night, except for Stefan, who seemed to subsist wholly on juice boxes and Goldfish crackers) when her husband, David, entered the house. It was that pre-twilight hour when everything outside glows slightly, and shadows become long and foreboding. It was also the usual time for David to come home from his job at the hospital, so Sandra didn’t think anything of it when he let himself in and proceeded directly to the basement.

                Outside, someone set off a string of firecrackers. The kids in this neighborhood love to make noise, Sandra had found. The small detonations were followed by a bloodthirsty cry of unmistakable savagery. She assumed it was kids (Christ, Stefan’s going to be a hellion just like the rest of them, I just know it) and continued to stir the ground beef in its pan.

                She heard David farting around underneath her, in his “rumpus room,” as she liked to call it, and felt a twinge of anger. Shouldn’t she get a kiss, or at least a wave or a perfunctory “Home, hon,” before he ran downstairs to his den? This had better be imp—

                David came back up the steps and all of her thoughts stopped; her brainwaves hit a baseline of terror and confusion that made all rational thought impossible. Maybe it was the gun in David’s hand, the Smith & Wesson Model 27 his father had given him years ago when they bought the house. Maybe it was the look on David’s face, a rictus of exertion that made it seem as if he were having a heart attack or passing an extremely large bowel movement, or maybe both. Maybe it was the eyes buried in his bright red face, eyes that were scared and sad and, worst of all, a little resigned.

                Maybe it was many of those things, or all of those things, but probably not. The thing that really caused her to shut down was the fact that David was aiming the gun at her. This close, the barrel looked enormous.

                She started to say his name, but all that came out was a little gasp. It wasn’t enough. David wasn’t a great shot, didn’t go to the gun range, didn’t think of the gun’s very existence 99% of the time, but he was at point blank distance, and that meant when he fired the pistol, beef stroganoff became brain stroganoff. Her body slumped to the floor, the final look on her ravaged face one of utter perplexity.

                More detonations sounded from outside. David didn’t notice. He loaded another bullet into the chamber and went looking for his son.

                What happened across town at the 119^th Precinct headquarters in Dalton, Connecticut (the sign at the expressway exit cheerfully reminded commuters that if they lived here, they’d be home by now) would have summoned the press in droves, had the press not been experiencing their own unique problems on the night of September 19. To put it succinctly, everyone on duty went ape shit. That’s not the technical term for it, but by the time September 20 rolled around a few hours later, those who applied technical terms to things were neck-deep in a rising tide of inexplicable violence.

                Officer Matt McDaniel was experimenting with the department’s perpetually-on-the-fritz Keurig machine when two other officers bolted past him. One of them struck him a good one in the upper arm with his elbow, but didn’t slow; McDaniel was not his target. At least, not yet.

                The two officers (McDaniel couldn’t identify one of them right away, but the other was Gus Chalmers, a 17-year veteran who didn’t even go on patrol with his ticket book anymore, he was so laid back) rounded the hallway corner, which meant they were only going one place: the weapons locker. McDaniel forgot all about the Keurig and ran off in the other direction, towards dispatch. Something was up.

                Something was up, all right. Everyone in dispatch was on the phone. The switchboard glowed like a nuclear power plant approaching meltdown, and the volume of conversation was so high that he couldn’t make out any one voice. A young girl of about 22, a new hire, looked at him and shrugged as she continued listening to her headset.

                There was a huge explosion somewhere behind him; it sounded like a thunderclap confined to a janitor’s closet. McDaniel had been on the force six years now, and although Dalton wasn’t a hotbed of violence, he had heard enough gunshots to recognize the sound of a double-barreled shotgun going off. Working on reflex, he dropped to his knees, one hand pulling his service revolver from its holster on his thigh.

                He turned. Dispatch was located at the end of a short hallway; at its other end was a T-junction which led to either the armory (left) or the rest of the complex (right). There was a huge amount of blood on the floor at the T-junction, and someone just out of sight around the corner. This person was lying down on the job (taking a siesta was the insane thought that went through McDaniel’s rapidly working brain), only his department issue shoes visible. The shoes belonged to either Gus or the other, unrecognized officer, but McDaniel never found out, because just then an arm appeared above the shoes, tossing an active tear gas canister down the corridor toward dispatch. It rolled right past McDaniel’s horrified blue eyes and into the dispatch area. It was the last thing he saw, because the unrecognized officer (his name, for the record, was Randall Lopez, and he usually worked a different shift) took aim with the 28 gauge Winchester Model 37 he held in both hands and blew a tremendous hole through McDaniel’s neck.

                Inside dispatch, the operators were crawling around on the ground, hacking and coughing and throwing up. They made easy targets. Lopez walked up and down the rows of cubicles, calmly executing every last one of them. The expression on his face was one of sweet relief. When Vera Adams, a member of the accounting department, walked into this scene of carnage carrying a Kel-Tec P-11 semi-automatic pistol she had liberated from the weapons locker, she aimed it at Officer Lopez’s stomach.

                Lopez actually had the temerity to hold up one hand and say “wait,” but Ms. Adams was under the same impulse that had caused the armed officer to slaughter twelve innocent people; he might as well have been speaking Swahili. She shot him three times, his body dancing as the slugs pounded into him. His narcotic, vaguely fugue-like smile transformed into a rictus of mortal agony as the life ebbed out of him.

Vera, a 72-year-old grandmother who attended church every Sunday, lowered the gun to her side and left the room in search of more things to kill.

Colonel Waldo Reynolds had an itch he couldn’t scratch. He had woken up with it and it had wormed its way through his brain while he went through his daily duties at Paula Air Force Base.

Reynolds was a clinical Air Force psychiatrist, which meant he spent most of his time behind a desk, filling out paperwork, making phone calls, and, occasionally, listening to one of his “birds” as they sat across from him and assailed him with their miseries. The colonel wasn’t a math man – he had nearly flunked statistics in college – nor was he a betting man, couldn’t see the value in it. But he’d probably bet half, if not all, of his take home pay on the fact that ninety five percent of his patients didn’t have anything legitimately wrong with them. They just liked to complain.

Of the five percent or so who were truly afflicted with something you could find in the DSM-V, most were kept in line with a regimen of antidepressants and semi-regular talking therapy. (The bottom line, the one percent, usually so unstable Waldo had no idea how they got into the service in the first place, were given honorable discharges and told to go home.) One of those patients, a young man named Alex Tworkowski, was very much on his mind today. He didn’t know why.

Tworkowski was stuck with a raging, textbook case of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Everything had to be in perfect alignment around him at all times, or he got unbearably anxious. He would seize on thoughts, sometimes normal ones, sometimes ones that made no sense, and think about them “until my brain is just about exploding.” Corners, such as the place where the walls met the floor, and their cleanliness, tended to dominate his thinking. He told Colonel Reynolds he felt like he had an itch between his shoulder blades no backscratcher could satisfy. The itch, he said, was buried somewhere in his mind.

On September 19, 20--, Reynolds had discovered he could relate.

Reynolds was a pragmatist; he was also a psychiatrist. He saw Tworkowski’s condition as a medical problem, the result of an improper balance of brain chemistry. He let Tworkowski drone on and on about his boyhood in Iowa, working on the farm, the car accident that took his father, blah, blah, none of it adding up as precipitants to his disorder. God had given his brains a stir on the assembly line, that was all. After about seven months of therapy and different medicine combinations, a 200 mg dosage of Zoloft every night was finally making things more bearable.

Right now, sitting at his desk in the mid-afternoon, nineteen days after September had ushered fall into this section of the country, Reynolds could not stop thinking about Tworkowski. Or guns. Mostly guns. Tworkowski was kind of a side thing at this point, actually. Once Reynolds found he could identify with the nervous young pilot who always, always, put on his pants left leg first, thoughts of Tworkowski became rather academic.

Big guns, little guns, rifles, shotguns, submachine guns. He could almost feel them all around him, little blobs of psychic heat. Everyone on the base carried some kind of firearm, and as he listened to people walk by in the corridor outside his office, he wondered what kind of firearm they were carrying. A semiautomatic? A revolver? A bazooka?

Thinking about it made the itch of it a little better and a little worse. When he was a boy, Reynolds had developed a severe case of eczema on the backs of both knees, and now he remembered how those spots had itched, and how scratching them had both relieved and aggravated the itch. The result was a vicious cycle of stimulation-satisfaction that left him with bloody fingernails.

These ever-revolving gun thoughts were kind of like the eczema. As the afternoon drew on and he neglected his duties, he grew increasingly likely to cut himself his own Zoloft prescription and walk over to the base pharmacy. But something told him that wouldn’t cut the mustard. It would be like putting ointment on the itch, as he had done with the eczema as a child. It might do the trick, but it wasn’t as satisfying as digging in and scratching.

He did not know when he removed his Jericho 941 semiautomatic pistol from its shoulder holster, couldn’t recall putting it on his desk, had no memory of loading it. He was staring at it lovingly for over an hour when, about half a minute before all hell broke loose, the door to his office opened. It was Tworkowski. He was carrying a rifle, but Colonel Reynolds didn’t have time to identify what kind. His last thought, before he was riddled with bullets, was that Tworkowski didn’t have an appointment today.

Bruce Ecklund was a certified Federal Air Marshal, listed with both the Transportation Security Administration and the United States Department of Homeland Security. He had spent the first twenty years of his working life as a detective for the New York Police Department. When he retired, he couldn’t make ends meet anymore with just his pension (what pension, ha ha), so he took this job, and now lived much of his life in a small space high above the planet, protecting the sheep from wolves in turbans. He had been on the job seven years, and had yet to find a situation problematic enough that it required him to draw his sidearm.

On September 19, he was stationed on Delta Flight 37 from LAX in Los Angeles to Logan in Boston. Without knowing why, without even fully being aware that he was doing so, he had walked into Walmart about an hour and a half before the plane was scheduled to take off and bought several boxes of .357 SIG pistol cartridges for his sanctioned firearm, a SIG Sauer P229. He had stashed them in his carry-on bag, along with a t-shirt that said “Property of the Green Bay Packers” and a battered Dean Koontz paperback.

Now he was thousands of feet in the air, a carpet of clouds below the fuselage’s windows, probably above Colorado or who cares? Who cares? He had been thinking about what he was going to do all day, the way a kleptomaniac thinks lovingly of the things he will steal, the way a chronic masturbator floors it home from work to station himself in front of the computer. It should have bothered him; it should have terrified him. But it didn’t. The lines in his mind between action and consequence were down, perhaps permanently.

He thought of them as sheep, and he the shepherd. Usually he meant that in the nicest way. These people, whose continued existence was fundamental to something or someone, were his charge, his flock. They had to be protected from the wolves. The wolves came in many forms. They came with guns, they came with box cutters, they came trying to blow up bombs contained in their shoes. Sometimes they wanted the plane; sometimes they wanted the passengers. They were out there, and if 9/11 had taught Ecklund anything, it had taught him that the price of freedom was eternal vigilance.

Not today.

Today, he was the wolf.

Once the drink-and-pretzel service was over and the central aisle of the Boeing 747 was empty, Ecklund removed his SIG Sauer P229 from its shoulder holster and placed it on the tray table in front of him. He opened up his carry-on satchel and removed the boxes of ammo, placing them neatly next to the gun.

He turned to the man next to him, a business-type in a three-piece suit who was staring at him silently. The look on Mr. Three-Piece’s face was the kind of reaction saved for people who suddenly sprouted horns. Or, say, suddenly took out a gun on an airplane.

“Relax,” Ecklund said. “I’m an air marshal.” Then he picked up the gun, which he had loaded in a filthy bathroom at LAX, and shot Mr. Three-Piece once in the ear. Blood, bone, and brains splattered all over both Ecklund and the pretty young thing sitting across the aisle. She began to scream, but not for long, because Ecklund shot her next.

He got up, stepped neatly over the dead businessman, and entered the aisle. The sheep were craning their necks around the backs of the seats to get a better look. Ecklund, who frankly didn’t know shit from Shinola as far as sheep behavior was concerned, wondered if they just sat there while a wolf ate one of their own, or if they went crazy and bolted for the hills.

In this case, in his case, it was fifty-fifty. He killed another seven people in the next six seconds, simply aiming and firing, until the gun jammed and someone punched him in the face, hard enough to send splinters of his nose into his brain. The gun fell from his nerveless fingers and he collapsed onto the cheap carpeting of the plane’s center aisle.

The person who had hit him, Stuart LeCroix from Brookline, had just finished his vacation in Los Angeles and enjoyed it just fine. He looked down at the lethal handgun. He had not been thinking thoughts of murder and guns all day, had been thinking about getting back to work at the insurance company and whether or not the blonde from the hotel bar had given him her real phone number. Nevertheless, he reached down, feeling perfectly right with the world, picked up the gun, and continued the slaughter. It was fast, it was unexpected, and when it was over, LeCroix – slathered from forehead to sneakers in other people’s gore – blew out the lock on the door between him and the cockpit. The lock should’ve held, but hey, coulda woulda shoulda. LeCroix could kill the pilots; would he? Should he?

The plane crashed into a mountain in Colorado. A lot of planes crashed on September 19.

Tommy Huntington used to be a very successful entertainment lawyer, until 9/11. The events of that day, and the wars to follow, convinced him the world was no longer a safe place. Every safe place had to have rules, and during the W administration all rules had been thrown out the window. The longer things went on and the crazier shit got, the more convinced Tommy became that the only rule that counted was “he who has the high ground rules.”

To that end, he quit his job at the firm of Parkman & Parkman, much to the protest of both Parkmans (wizened and miserly Jews, the two of them), liquidated his holdings, and bought a cabin deep in the woods of central Maine. He assumed no one could touch him there. They could blow off all the nukes in the world; nobody was going to waste an expensive warhead on the forest wasteland of central Maine. His money bought him a very nice, large, isolated cabin, and some nice, large, highly illegal weapons. Just in case.

On September 19, Tommy was filled with regret. It wasn’t exactly buyer’s remorse over the cabin; he felt quite confident about that decision. It was just that something felt… missing.

Tommy had no family to speak of, really. He had a brother somewhere. He had never married, never spawned another Huntington even accidentally. The solitude of living alone in the cabin was not a problem for him. In fact, on most days it exhilarated him. He could do whatever he wanted, had no one to answer to, and no one to witness it.

So he wandered about his cabin, making himself a sandwich and then throwing it away, watching television (“the lie detector test says you are the father!”), wondering what was missing. Twice he found himself in the basement, staring at his arsenal of firepower, no idea how he got there.

The second time he left the basement, he brought his favorite firearm, an enormous Kalashnikov Series AK-47, up with him. He did not recall loading it. He put it down in the living room, next to the recliner, and continued watching television. Something was missing, and he probed his mind for it like a tongue feeling out a socket where a tooth had recently been.

Around five o’clock, as the setting sun was glowing in the trees of the forest that surround Chez Huntington, he realized what was missing: other people. He had no one to kill. And he wanted to kill. The need was very bad. He had quit smoking cigarettes four years ago, and he had thought the need for a smoke would drive him crazy for the first two weeks, but gradually, he had gotten used to it. This need was sharper than that, a thousand times sharper. His need could cut atoms.

But there was no one else around, and Bangor was so far away. So he shot himself instead.

Charlie Hetfield, star of such films as Guns of New Mexico and The Last Stand of Hood Creek and two-term president of the National Rifle Association, also had a fortress, only his was located on Rodeo Drive in the sunny city of Los Angeles. The walls around his estate were over ten feet tall and three feet thick. The craftsmen who had forged the front gate, the only means of entrance to Charlie’s home, had assured its buyer that it could withstand the impact of a tractor trailer going upwards of forty miles per hour. Three to six guards roamed the property with pit bulls and taser guns at any one time. The house within was wired with the finest state-of-the-art security systems, and one of the bedrooms on the second floor had been modified to accommodate several monitors, which were wired to the hundreds of cameras scattered throughout the estate; this gave Charlie a look at his domain at any time, from almost any angle.

                In addition to his wealth, his stature in the Hollywood community, and his enormous ego, Charlie Hetfield also had the distinction of being one of the few individuals on September 19 who didn’t feel a compelling need to commit homicide with a firearm. Even without this compulsion, Charlie knew some serious shit was going down. CNN showed image after image of rioting and mass destruction before going off the air altogether; the last thing Charlie saw on that channel was Anderson Cooper aiming a prissy little pistol at Erin Burnett.

                Shortly after he turned off the enormous curved flat-screen television in his palatial living room, he radioed security to find out what was going on. Nobody responded. Rather than go outside to investigate personally, he went to the monitor room and began playing with the computer that controlled the cameras.

                First he scanned the grounds of his estate, which were mostly empty. The only exception was the southeast corner, where Charlie found both of the on-duty security guards. One of them was dead, sprawled against the inside surface of the perimeter wall. There was a lot of blood behind his slumped head, splashed across the wall like a Pollack painting. The other guard was crawling around on his belly. There was a growing red stain on his back, and a small, cratered entry hole near the base of his spine. (Charlie, a gun aficionado if ever there was one, knew the exit wound has probably disemboweled the man, and he was somewhat surprised the guard was still alive.) One of the estate’s pit bulls was gnawing on the dead man’s ankle and occasionally eyeing the crippled security guard. He did not do so surreptitiously; he was merely sizing up dessert.

                He switched the view to the gate that faced Rodeo Drive. It was chaos outside. What seemed like thousands of people, all of them bearing some kind of firearm, were swarming like angry bees on the street in front of the gate. At first, it looked like they were planning some sort of massive siege on Charlie’s home, but he looked closer and got the reality of it: These people were simply shooting each other. Those with dexterity, luck, and a lot of ammunition seemed to be winning the fight, but locked into this murder-dance, it was clearly going to be a game of Last Man Standing. As he watched, someone managed to scale the perimeter wall and, precariously balanced on the top, opened fire on the crowd below. He was riddled with bullets within seconds, and plunged into the grass near the dead security guard. Charlie switched back to the camera in the southeast corner. The crippled security guard was now dead. The gunman who had climbed the wall was also dead. The pit bull was smiling, insomuch as a dog can smile, his chops dripping with viscera.

                That was it. Charlie had seen enough. He went into the basement and locked himself in his bomb shelter cum panic room, determined to remain there until the world regained its sanity. Like his estate, the panic room was state-of-the-art, with a landline phone, Internet-ready computer, and large supplies of non-perishable food. Unlike his estate, a lot of corners were cut when it was built, and the new conditions outside had made matters worse. The food was nearly inedible, having gone over a long time ago. The sink in the corner failed to produce water within forty-eight hours. The phone was useless. And on the fifth day, when he had mustered up enough courage to leave his sanctuary, he discovered that the lock had gotten damaged upon his entry, and he was sealed up in his panic room better than a pharaoh in his sarcophagi.

                This proved too much for Charlie. The panic room had a small weapons locker with a variety of pistols and rifles. Charlie chose a semiautomatic handgun and blew his brains out. At absolutely no point during this process – from Anderson Cooper going mental to his interment in the bomb shelter – did he consider his part in the situation, as an NRA president, as a 2^nd Amendment cheerleader, as a passionate lover of long-range weapons and things that go boom. Rigor mortis set in a few hours after his suicide, and the hand which still held the gun tightened. If you wanted to disarm Charlie, you’d have to pry the weapon from his cold, dead hand.

                Night fell. Mankind’s hold on earthly dominance was slipping in a tidal wave of insanity, and it remained to be seen who would be left to pick up the pieces. If the survivors had access to all the information they needed, they might have been shocked to hear that there were 718 school shootings on the day of September 19. The majority occurred toward the end of the day, when most of the students had gone home and the only ones left were practicing some kind of extramural sport or activity. Consequently, most of the victims in these shootings were custodians and teachers. As for the shooters, most of them were either custodians or teachers.

It was the guns. As September 19 became September 20, every firearm in the world had somehow gone from a passive device of destruction to an active weapon demanding prolonged use. It happened everywhere. America. Britain. Russia. In Mexico, the cartels ripped each other to pieces. Israel forgot all about the Holocaust that had been visited on their people decades earlier, and enacted one of their own, mowing down Palestinians and bringing a violent end to the “Middle Eastern crisis” overnight. Across the globe, old scores were settled, gunshots deafened the populace, and madness rooted itself firmly in the minds of approximately seven billion people. Social services shut down. The hospitals were as dangerous as the streets. The moon that rose over the East Coast, several hours after the party had started, was full and red and it gazed down balefully at the global massacre that was playing itself out, one bullet at a time.

Smith & Wesson. Glock. Kalashnikov. Uzi. ArmaLite. Thompson. Beretta. Browning. Bushmaster. Remington. Pistols. Revolvers. Rifles. Shotguns. Submachine guns. You can kill anyone with anything, but as midnight drew near, it was the guns that sang the loudest song.

Sunrise, September 20.

The little boy had been hiding behind the sofa all night, trembling, occasionally crying. Although he was potty-trained, he soiled himself twice. He was in a trauma of confusion and psychic pain. His father had shot his mother, and then something had happened to his father: He had put a hand on his chest and simply fell to the ground, which meant nothing to the boy, but was sign language for a heart attack to anyone else.

All night, the sounds. He could hear people running in the street, and the pop! pop! of gunfire. At one point, the house had shuddered as a car plowed into one of its corners, and the boy had screamed until his head felt fit to pop. Mommy had told him there were no monsters in the dark, but she had been wrong, hadn’t she?

He cried himself tearless around five in the morning. As the sun began to rise over a world that looked significantly different than it had twenty four hours ago, he began to peek out from behind the sofa at his father’s corpse. He did not recognize the gun as a Smith & Wesson Model 27, but he knew what it was nevertheless.

By noon, he knew what he had to do. Smith & Wesson in hand, Stefan Hackett, barely out of diapers, opened the front door of the house and walked out into the street, weapon raised, to greet this terrible new world.