Give a Boy a Gun by Todd Strasser Read Free Book Online

angry. I mean, I don’t know whether what Gary had came from Brendan, or whether Brendan just brought it out in Gary. I hate to say this, but maybe it would have come out in Gary even if Brendan hadn’t been there. But the two of them together . . . I don’t know, they just fed off each other.
    â€”Emily Kirsch
    Allison [Findley] worried me too. She came to school in dirty clothes, with dirty hair, andsometimes, to be blunt, she smelled. I was concerned for her, both because I wondered if there was something wrong at home, and because of the way the other girls treated her. She was a bit overweight, but also very well developed. You would hear things. I had no way of knowing if they were true. I hoped they weren’t.
    â€”Beth Bender

    â€œMitchell Johnson’s mother . . . said . . . that she taught her boy how to shoot a shotgun, and then he took a three-week course.”
    â€” New York Times , 6/14/98

    We hear all the time about the supposed deterioration of the behavior of young people over the past thirty years. Can we really put a value judgment on it? Maybe the behavior of teenagers has changed, but I’m not sure that implies deterioration. We read that with parents working so much and grandparents off in their retirement villages, there are far fewer adults around to influence youngsters. The articles do make one interesting point—that in the absence of real adult role models, violent television and video images have become the substitute role models. I think that’s probably true.
    â€” F. Douglas Ellin
    At the request of the police, Dick Flanagan and I went back and collected some of [Gary’s and Brendan’s] writings. We were both struck by how certain themes came out, not necessarily in any one piece of writing, but in the body of work as a whole. It was clear that Gary felt weak and defenseless. He wrote often about characters who were teased and picked on. The themes in Brendan’s writings were less clear but much more aggressive. More like you were in some extremely violent video game. The characters in his stories were always getting revenge, always on the attack with weapons capable of terrible destruction.
    â€”Allen Curry
    Brendan was seriously into [first-person shooter video games]. If you want to know the truth, so were a lot of other kids who didn’t do what he did. But one day Gary and I are in his room with him, just hacking around on the computer and listening to music, and Brendan’slike, “Point and click, point and click!” Like he’s just figured something out, you know? So he goes crawling into his closet and comes out with that crappy little gun, and he aims it at me. I guess he saw the look on my face, because he said, “Don’t worry, it’s not loaded.” Then he dry-fires the [gun] and it goes click , and he says, “See? Point and click! It’s the same thing!”
    â€”Ryan Clancy

    The average twelve-year-old has seen more than seven thousand murders on television.

    No one is naive enough to believe that violent movies or television or video games can actually make anyone commit a violent act. The real question is, If someone is inclined toward violence, do these forms of media help show him the way to do it?
    â€” F. Douglas Ellin
    Brendan got into this “point and click” thing for a while. At lunch he’d put his arm on the table and plant his chin behind it so it looked like he was peeking over a wall. Then he’d stick his thumb up and point his finger at the kids he hated. He’d go, “Point andclick, point and click. Die suckas.” Like he was picking them off one by one.
    â€”Allison Findley
    This one was after that school shooting in Idaho.
    â€”Ryan Clancy

    Several studies have shown that the appearance on television and in the movies of semiautomatic guns like the Bren 10 and TEC-9 boosted sales of those weapons. (Making a