Shooter Two

Today, another school shooting

imagine yesterday, the nineteen

children were being themselves

ready for school, and this close

to the end of the school year.

Imagine their plans for the new

free time. Imagine this morning

as they got ready for the school

day, their last school day. Now

imagine the young man who was

planning to do what he did and

having some goal in mind. What

was it – to kill a group of children,

or to shock us once more, or was

it some sense that there was fame

to be had in a mass shooting, or

was it an elaborate suicide, a very

public suicide, instead of just going

off alone to shoot himself. It isn’t

hard to imagine the aftermath for

this school shooting. We’ve become

used to it all, the news coverage and

all the politics of them – it’s election

time and this plays well in certain

parts of the country. We’re just getting

ready for the next one.

 

               Shooter Three

At first his plan was to “kill everyone”

but that changed as he planned –

“everyone” would take too long and

take too many bullets, so his plan

came down to killing fewer people

but also killing a moment and a mood.

So there he was disguised and well

armed, well-aimed up on that roof

overlooking their parade, a sniper

like the military snipers he had seen

in movies, a sniper with his private 

mission. After seventy shots wildly

shot from his perch, after seven were

fatally shot and thirty others shot, he

in disguise blended in with the fleeing

crowds, as if he were one of them. But

it didn’t take them long, first his picture

and then the scene, the picture of him

being arrested, driving the car they knew

he would be in. Now he joins the ranks

of recent shooters – Buffalo, Uvalde Texas

etc., a growing list of people and places. And

maybe they will kill us all, the “everyone”

he was/they were originally after.