To The Next Mass Shooter

          To The Next Mass Shooter

          A Modest Proposal

          Dear Sir:

          I get where you’re coming from. They don’t, but I do. Life sucks, doesn’t it? You’ve got no friends, and you get no respect. Girls won’t date you, the asshole boss pays an insultingly low slave-wage, so your revenge arsenal cost you all of your money. You’re trapped, you’re dying inside, you hate everything and everybody, especially yourself, so you want to go out with a bang. I get it.

          I write to offer a suggestion. You see, all of your predecessors did their massacres all wrong, and we’ve grown bored with them. We’re jaded. Somebody shoots up a movie theater? Ho-hum. A school? Yawn. A church? Whatever!  Then we do nothing, and a day later we forget all about it. So what’s the point? Nobody’s impressed anymore!

          The problem is the choice of target. Killing masses of unarmed civilians is for wusses. It’s unsporting; and what’s worse, it’s no fun. Sure, it’s practical to slaughter the defenseless, but what do you care about practicality? You’re mad as hell, and they’ll never take you alive! You want action, not survival; you want to prove something. So leave the women and children alone, and target heavily-armed men!

          Now, where can you find a big crowd of well-armed men? A crowd that you can walk right up to, while just as well-armed, and they’ll do nothing before you open fire? Not the police station, nor the Army barracks; those guys are paranoid about other guys carrying. Really the police and the armed forces are gun-control organizations. They’re all about control: of the guns, by the guns, and for the guns.

          If you want a rabble of well-armed posers mentally unprepared for battle, then the best target for you, Sir, is the gun show.

          Never mind the odds. If you kill two of them right away, then no matter what happens next, the score will be at least 2 to 1, so you win. And your spree might last longer than you’d expect. Plenty of your predecessors were never stopped by gun-carriers; sometimes because those carriers couldn’t make a safe shot, sometimes because they didn’t want to look like mass shooters themselves. Really it’s because they’re posers. They want to seem as dangerous as you really are.

If you don’t mind dying, then the gun show is a soft target. You’ll shoot down plenty of them before they shoot back, and then they might miss you and hit each other. You might even spark a random fire-fight! You wouldn’t survive it, but so what? Think of the headlines!

          You won’t see them, of course, but we will, and finally we will be shocked. Shocked, I tell you! Finally a convincing rampage! Shooters shooting shooters: proof of the practical necessity of well-regulating the militia! Proof that even posers will believe!

          We might even name the resulting law after you.

Think about it.

          Sir.