The Next Mass School Shooting: A Scenario Inspired by Ben Carson.
Gunman enters community college classroom, armed with AR-15, AK-47, two Glock G40s and an assortment of antique Winchesters in pre-teen daughter’s pink backpack.
The Winchesters, well, he’d been hoping to unload them on eBay to buy a gift for his estranged wife. But then the divorce became final and she left with their kids, her kid from a previous marriage and his from same. He kept pickup truck, sit-down lawnmower and two dogs until truck was repossessed, lawn mowing business went south and he had to let one dog go and kill the other.
The remaining weapons are locked, loaded and ready for bear.
Gunman is dressed in black parachute pants, black Gold’s gym t-shirt and red hat because he couldn’t find his black one on the spur-of-the moment. Suffering from the effects of the quart of vodka and the twenty-seven Oxycodones he stole from ex-wife’s purse as she was moving out, gunman stumbles. Despite this, gunman heroically (his perception) squeezes off a few rounds, three pockmarking the cinder block wall, one exploding the instructor’s knee.
It should be mentioned here that this is an adult education gardening class and the gunman is solely there to kill his instructor, who had spent most of the previous session talking smack about the “morality” of keeping a lawn in the midst of a drought without regard to how no lawns might affect the ability of a fellow citizen to earn a living.
Instructor, who owns a concealed weapons permit, removes snub-nose .38 from belly pack, fires twice. One shot mortally wounds gunman, the other pierces the aorta of a 79-year-old student and grandmother of six. Her emphysema-wracked husband, who had accompanied wife to school to insure her safety, rises, moves forward with the aid of walker and finishes the instructor off with a single shot from his 1955 Smith & Wesson snub-nosed Chief’s Special.
A passing nursing major, startled by the report, peeks through the open door, sees the elderly man hovering over the instructor’s corpse and withdraws a pearl-handled .22 target pistol from her purse. Screaming—because this is the first time she’s fired at anything but black silhouettes—she empties the gun. Three slugs enter the old man. One penetrates his oxygen tank, causing it to explode. The deafening blast disorients all inside the tiny room. Flying shrapnel maims three.
Chaos reigns in the hallway. One student conceals himself behind a locker door and begins recording the scene blindly. Others, too terrified to think straight, begin texting their friends, loved ones and the media. “Rick,” star of the school’s highly-regarded intramural Extreme Frisbee team, expresses fear that another suicide bomber may still lurk inside, preparing to pull the cord on yet another bomb. He enlists several teammates to raid the room. They neutralize all remaining members of the adult education gardening class with an assortment of legally concealed firearms and a steel chair. Grim high-fives ensue.
There’s a five-minute lull. Then, alerted by school officials and social media, a SWAT team and seven members of a survivalist militia arrive. Unfortunately, the militia members, who have been preparing for such an emergency since before most of the SWAT members were born, appear first. With shotguns, deer rifles and a single scythe, they make short work of the still-celebrating Extreme Frisbee volunteers.
Moments later, the SWAT team makes short work of the survivalists. The classroom, though stacked with bodies like cord wood, is declared cleared.
Relative silence ensues. Local media arrive. A business student buys two cases of off-the-shelf Mylar balloons, emblazoned Get Well and Feel Better Soon. Sets up shop on the main road leading to campus. Grieving coeds text orders to florists. Word spreads that Anderson Cooper himself is rushing to the scene; confirmation the body count is, indeed, newsworthy.
An understandably rattled city councilman exclaims, “This is going to put our little town on the map.” He’s repeatedly slapped. Later, he will survive a recall bid, resign from his seat and accept the paid position of county tourism chief.
Meanwhile, the sole surviving member of the survivalist group, who’d been completing the restoration of his Vietnam-era M48 Patton at the time of his compatriots’ ill-fated raid, fires up the tank. He clanks towards campus, laying down suppressing fire with his .50 caliber turret gun. Overwhelmed by the task of steering and shooting at the same time, he makes a wrong turn in the direction of the town’s only high school.
Panic grips the winding two-lane road. Word quickly passes from neighbor to neighbor to the police chief to the county sheriff to the governor’s mansion: a coordinated sneak attack on the nation’s heartland has been launched by Al Qaeda, ISIS and the Democratic wing of the federal government.
The governor, herself a Democrat but afraid to appear weak, makes the fateful decision to scramble National Guard jets. In a tribute to National Guard readiness, only eight minutes pass before four F-15 Eagle tactical fighters are streaking south at just-above tree level. A scant ten minutes later, the target is identified two hundred yards short of the high school and closing in fast. The M48 is instantly stopped in its tracks by 20 mm Gatling guns and 500-pound JDAM bombs, one of which accidentally tumbles into an idling school bus. Fortunately, school has yet to let out. The driver, incinerated beyond recognition, is instantly termed a hero. His pre-incinerated face soon appears on t-shirts, buttons and Mylar balloons.
Fresh rumors blossom. One in particular takes root in the rustic imagination: The federal government—again the Democratic wing—under the guise of “saving water,” has banned all green lawns. Because of this, thousands of lawn-mowing entrepreneurs will lose their jobs.
The furious sound of small arms fire intensifies and spreads from one anonymous small town to another. Rural America is speaking in the only language the big shots understand!
Dawn arrives. A cautiously optimistic all-clear is sounded. For as far as the eye can see, which isn’t far because the horizon is smoky, not a single federal unit stains the land. No National Guard. No Marines. No Army. No IRS. Can victory be declared?
Level heads say no: More and heavier weaponry will be required for the inevitable counter-attack. Not to mention food. Communications gear. And water trucks to re-hydrate critically-injured brown lawns.
A consortium of state militias, ranchers, snowbirds and bike gangs tries and fails to obtain billionaire backing. Despair follows. Then, in one of those miracles that could only happen here and not over there, a freckle-faced five-year-old Nebraska boy sets up a GoFundMe account in support of the cause. Millions pour in.
It is now clear: This will be the first revolution in history financed entirely through a web site.
Scant hours later, copy-cat big city “special interest groups” (yeah, the usual suspects), fearful of the spreading prairie fire, launch their own GoFundMe accounts, raising funds, purchasing arms—for defensive purposes only, of course.
Alas, their efforts only give the contagion critical mass. Weapons manufacturers hire extra help as orders pour in. Factories operate 24/7, churning out every weapon worthy of the name.
Week-after-week, suburb-after-suburb, metropolis-after-metropolis succumb to the chatter of small arms fire, the whoosh of RPGs, the distant thump or too-close thunderous crack of IEDs.
That is, until the revolution, now waged on uncountable fronts for manifold reasons, reaches the quiet seaside town of Baltimore…
…Where presidential candidate Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon with the low-key bedside manner of a morphine drip, is once again in line at a Popeye’s, hoping that potential voters will see him in the act of being a regular guy. He’s accosted by a masked gunman.
The gunman, a heavily-armed landscaper, is there to confront the manager about why he replaced a 2-foot-square patch of decorative fescue with artificial turf. And because Ben Carson is the only one around wearing a suit, he must be the manager.
As every future 3rd grader will know, in the same way they’ll know what Lincoln said at Gettysburg or the words Washington uttered after chopping down the cherry tree, Ben Carson tells him, “I believe you want the guy behind the counter.”
What happened next in that Popeye’s will be the subject of debate as long as the Union holds.
This, of course, we do know: The contagion, the fever, call it what you will, broke at that point, just as spontaneously as it had begun. That’s right. Every single m.f. small town, big city, race-creed-color m.f. laid down his/her m.f. arms.
So does Ben Carson become president? Hell, ask any future 3rd grader!
END
By:
Peter Fenton
special to My Urban Fantasy
