You know
Not to join or align with the media blood dancers, but if you have a kid who is known to be an occasional whackjob, why in hell do you let him have access to firearms? I don’t know what the exact details were, but I do keep hearing he was living in a house where firearms were laying around.
When I was a kid, you gun-proofed your kids, you didn’t kid proof your guns. If you had kids incapable of learning, you kept the guns elsewhere.
I always knew where dad’s guns were. He kept them in the closet behind his suits, in their cases. Had I ever taken one out for ay reason I might as well have shot myself with it, because that was gonna be preferable to what was gonna go on when he got home.
One night when the rents were out on the town, we had kids prank calling, and they graduated to knocking on the door and then throwing things at the windows, breaking one. I turned off the lights and grabbed dad’s 870, loaded the tube, and chambered a round.
I figured i was gonna get a beating when Dad got home, but i was scared. Plus my sister was in the other room sleeping. SO I sat in the living room in the dark while dirt clods and rocks pelted the house, shivering like a dog shitting razor blades. When Mom and Dad pulled in the driveway I was relieved, and only slightly dreaded the upcoming asswhipping. Dad took the shotgun from me and emptied it. He put the shells in his pocket, and put the gun back in it’s case, and we all went to bed. I figured the asswhipping had been put off till the next day, but it never came, he never said a word about it after that, ever.
That has flavored my attitudes about a lot of things since then. Eventually it dawned on me that he knew I knew where the guns were, and he trusted me to do the right thing at the right time. Had I not been trustworthy he would have kept me from having access.
Edited to add: Read Ed Herings most excellent dissertation on the subject.
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I always knew where dad’s guns were. He kept them in the closet behind his suits, in their cases. Had I ever taken one out for ay reason I might as well have shot myself with it, because that was gonna be preferable to what was gonna go on when he got home.
That was the order of the day here, too. I didn’t dare touch them without permission.
Eventually it dawned on me that he knew I knew where the guns were, and he trusted me to do the right thing at the right time.
I never thought of it that way. Dad knew that I knew where his guns were, and the ammunition, and though I was under strict orders not to touch them he didn’t make it impossible for me to get at them. Or my older brother, or my sisters, or-or-or.
Hmm.
I guess my ‘rents trusted me. But that wasn’t what we were told. It was part of the indoctrination that we WOULD defend ourselves, the house, and each other if it became necessary in their absence.
BUT that it was death otherwise to so much as STEP into their room (where the guns were kept.
And, of course, we (well, I) got Gibbs-slapped when I made a mistake in safe gun-handling. Looking back, I think I must have been a bit of a burden.
M
My dad kept his .22s in the back of his closet, in the same corner as the vacuum cleaner. (Shitbox trailers don’t have a lot of storage space.) I was in high school before I could open the closet and retrieve said vacuum without fearing some kind of wrathful retribution.
Of course, in my parents’ case (my mom’s, at the very least), us kids didn’t know where the guns were because we were trusted to do the right thing. We knew where the guns were so we knew where we should never ever ever under any circumstances go.
My mom is scared of a lot of things.
Sorry, but this “kid” was 20. Which means, since he turned 18, he could have bought his own damned Rifle and Shotgun.
Another thing that torques me: Since when in Hell does an 18/19/20 year old have to be considered as a “Child?”
I sure as hell wasn’t considered a “Kid” when I spent my Eighteenth Birthday in Boot Camp. And the Military Cemeteries around the World sure have a lot of “Kids” in them, but it was okay for them to die at Omaha, Tarawa, Khe Song and Fallujah.
If they’re old enough to do Combat, they’re old enough to face the Consequences of their Actions when they go off the Reservation.
Clearly. But not the point of the post. yeah, hell, when i was 15 I could go buy stuff because the local stores all knew me. My point was that this woman should have known better than to leave this crap where it could be accessed. Sipwad would still have put his hands on weapons, but she might still be alive, or at least her weapons not used.
The mom of the killer sounds like she was a real piece of work herself. She got a quarter mill of alimony a year (a woman doesn’t get that unless she was the initiator of the divorce and had her shark lawyer lined up for the kill before she even told her husband she filed), but had no money for her son’s mental care. And it sounds like the parents favored the older brother over him, and most likely picked on him as well.
And a prepper who’d secure her provisions but not her guns? Doesn’t sound right, unless she bragged to him how she was going to now have him put away in a crazy house, checkmate, game over on your life before you begin it, and leave them accessible hoping he’d take the hint and bite the bullet, since he probably never asserted himself before, and save her the trouble of going through the trouble of actual commitment. Sounds a lot like Mommie Dearest.
No one knows if he just up and shot her, or if they had a conversation beforehand where he let her know he was set on destroying what she loved once he killed her. And so a bunch of children who weren’t even born when he was bullied in his 3rd grade class or whatever got to be unfortunate stand-ins for his vengeance.
Put an animal in an unnatural environment, like a killer whale in a tank, or an elephant in the hot sun all day giving kiddie rides for the circus, and express marvel when it flips out and kills a trainer or rampages down the street. Put a 20 year old man in an unnatural environment where he probably had zero say in his past, and his present, sees everyone around him building their lives, and tell him you’re castrating his future with a mental ward, and marvel when he flips out and brings the whole house down. Sounds like she thought she could throw more s*** at him that he could finally handle. I might be using more putty than wood to build this boat right now, but I’ll wait to see if my guesses pan out.
Explaining does not equal justifying or sympathizing; the situation reminds me of one my father used to comment upon. Some guy many years ago walked into the bank that had his mortgage, dragged the loan manager out by a rope around his neck and a shotgun under his (the perp’s) arm to ward off anyone out to save the guy, then put him to sleep past where anyone else would be either injured or have to witness the event. He then turned himself in and explained he wanted no one but the man who ruined his life to be endangered. that since he lost his house after he lost his job and the wife took away the kids, all he had left was to settle scores with the guy who could’ve saved him one last scrap of hope.
Kill a guy emotionally and leave him physically standing? Just, damn. If you hate your son so much, put some arsenic in his oatmeal, pay off whomever you need to avoid an autopsy, and a school of children at least don’t have to suffer.
When I was a kid, you gun-proofed your kids, you didn’t kid proof your guns. If you had kids incapable of learning, you kept the guns elsewhere.
This. Like you, I always knew where Dad’s guns were. And I left them the hell alone unless we were going out to shoot.
Les;
When I started my firearms training, anyone of any age could buy any firearm or ammunition. Of course, if I’d gone to Pioneer Guns and tried to buy a pistol, I would have been told, “Come back with your old man,” but it was a matter of custom and practice, not the law.
And — get this: these things just didn’t happen. The clock tower shooting was a national shock because it was unique, not because it was one more in a wave of such things.
M
Without looking, which came first? The Texas Tower shooter, or that freeway killer in that Boris Karloff movie (maybe a little later in his career than The Monster Mash).
I really enjoyed your analysis MTS. Were there anything working the way it should, you’d be given a chance to broadcast it on one of the radio jock shows and it would spark honest discussions. Which means your chances — well — see the opening phrase of this sentence. To paraphrase Groucho: Get your say and win 40 bucks.
Pascal, I climb upon the shoulders of giants before I collect a paragraph. I gleaned a lot from related posts and comments at the Captain Capitalism and Vox Popoli blogs before I came here, thought of some old news stories of where both animals and people, when put into unnatural and hopeless positions, acted in reaction to that, then people scoffed as if they acted out of the clear blue. I remembered people who got ripped in child custody and divorce settlements and wondered how and why they didn’t make their exes “disappear.” Remembered my father’s admonition to never corner a tame or wild animal, and never leave a man without an out. Then I thought of a short story called “The Life of the Malarchys” I read in a zine and wondered if this was the shooter’s home life, too
http://www.innerswine.com/archives/TIS171-2.pdf
http://www.innerswine.com/archives/TIS173-4.pdf
I am but a repeating tower; but thanks for the props.