Control by Glenn Beck Read Free Book Online Page A

Most people remember exactly where they were when it happened—it was a “JFK assassination” moment for a new generation.
    But I guarantee that almost no one remembers where they were nearly eighteen months earlier, on October 1, 1997.
    On that day a sixteen-year-old boy slit his mother’s throat, grabbed her rifle, put on a trench coat, and left for Pearl High School in Pearl, Mississippi. When he arrived he headed for the courtyard and began to fire,hitting nine of his fellow students and killing two.
    Police say that the killer’s plan was to leave the high school and drive to nearby Pearl Junior High School to start shooting again. But as the boy left the school and began to drive his car through the parking lot he was confronted by a Colt .45 pointed through the windshield. Stunned, the boy crashed his car. The man with the gun, Vice Principal Joel Myrick, held it to the boy’s head, point-blank. “Why are you shooting my kids?” he asked him.
    Myrick, who’d run to his truck to retrieve his gun as soon as he’d heard the shooting start, held the killer at gunpoint until police arrived. The boy was later found to havethirty-six rounds still in his pockets.
    No one knows how many lives were saved by preventing the boy from making it to the other school, and no one knows whether the two kids who were killed could’ve been saved had Myrick’s gun been closer. But we do know that this incident never reached “mass” status and therefore never captured the attention of the media, the public, Mother Jones, or Piers Morgan.
    Ten years later, on Sunday, December 9, 2007, a twenty-four-year-old man showed up at the Christian “Youth with a Mission” training center in the Denver suburbs and murdered two teenagers.He then drove south to Colorado Springs, site of the New Life megachurch. Like a movie theater, the church was densely packed with a huge crowd of people.
    In the parking lothe immediately opened fire, killing two teenage sisters. Then,armed with a rifle, two semi-automatic handguns, and a thousand rounds of ammunition, he entered the church. In a Web post found after the incident, the killer had written, “All I want to do iskill and injure as many of you [Christians] . . . as I can.”
    But that was not going to happen. Someone was ready for him.
    Jeanne Assam, a volunteer security guard for the church, was carrying a licensed handgun and quickly confronted the gunman. When he didn’t comply she shot him several times until he went down. He then shot himself in the head, putting an end to the attack. According to Pastor Brady Boyd, “she probably saved over 100 lives.”
    But the New Life Church and Pearl, Mississippi, mass-killings-that-weren’t are not the only ones ignored by people like Piers Morgan, who desperately want people to believe that guns have never stopped a would-be mass killer.
    In 1998, a fourteen-year-old boy took his father’s .25-caliber handgun and brought it to a Friday night junior high school dance at a local banquet hall in Edinboro, Pennsylvania. On the restaurant patio, he shot a science teacher in the head, killing him. Next, the killer went into the hall andfired several shots, wounding two students. The restaurant’s owner,James Strand, grabbed his shotgun, followed the boy out, and persuaded him to surrender. Strand held the boy for another ten minutes until the police arrived.
    In 1991, at a Shoney’s restaurant in Anniston, Alabama, two criminals using stolen handguns herded twenty customers andemployees into the walk-in refrigerator. Holding the manager at gunpoint, the two men began to rob the restaurant, but they failed to notice another customer, Thomas Glenn Terry, who was hiding under a table with the legal .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol he’d been carrying.
    It wasn’t long before one of the robbers saw Terry under the table. As the man pulled his gun out,Terry shot him five times in the chest, killing him. The other robber, who’d been busy