Titan6
member
Titan6
I am having a recurring nightmare.
It takes place in a lecture hall at Anywhere State College during an intersting presentation on the history of structual engineering. The only alert person in the class, a straight-A student majoring in engineering, my son, suddenly notices a familiar male entering the room.
He is wearing a hooded sweat shirt because it is cold outside and the wind is blowing, but it makes him look like a convenience store crook. He is also carrying a backpack and begins to reach into it. My son knows him because he is been acting more than a little strange. A week ago he began posting distrubing fatalistic poetry on his web site. My son talked to the school guidance counselor who told him nothing was wrong and to stop prying into his personal life. He has been failing out of school this semster and the pressure put on him by his parents has put him on anti-depressants. He looks like he is now off his meds.
I know, because I am an observer in the nightmare, that the stranger is going for his 12 Guage Remington Pump shotgun that he bought at Walmart yesterday for $350, with two boxes of 1 ounce slugs.
My son, whom everyone knows by the nickname "Guns," is sure that the doorway figure fits the profile of a campus killer and isn't about to sit there and be murdered without a fight. Guns instantly reaches and covers him with his legal .40 Glock. But the shotgun comes out anyway.
The gunfire arouses the instincts of others in the class, and they, similarly, draw their permit-allowed weapons ranging from various sized open and concealed carry handguns. One student throws a flash/stun grenade.
There is chaos as the lecture hall turns into a battleground of crossfire, smoke and explosions, and when the battle stops, the only one dead is the troubled student with the strange poetry.
I fell into the nightmare after reading that many states do not allow people with concealed-weapons permits to carry handguns on the campuses of public universities. The revelation came after the deadly shooting at Northern Illinois University. The prospect has stirred online support and maybe sanity will prevail.
I was so terrified at the notion of keeping guns from responsible young men who are old enough to fight and die in our nation's wars, I had another nightmare.
This time I am taking my grandson to his kindergarten class at the behest of his mother, who has a doctor's appointment. As I am watching him run off happily into the play yard on School Street, I notice that another little boy has dropped his Roy Rogers lunch box.
It is red and yellow and has a picture of Rogers on the front mounted on Trigger, who is rearing. Rogers is waving his cowboy hat in the air the way he used to in all of those exciting 1950s westerns. I am intrigued by the lunch box because most kids today don't even know who Roy Rogers is, or was, much less Trigger, who is stuffed and mounted in a museum in Branson, Mo.
Then something equally significant catches my eye. In addition to the apple, carrot sticks and tofu sandwich that fall from the boy's lunch box, there is a snub-nosed .38-caliber revolver of the type I once carried as a backup weapon.
"What in the World?" I shout, surprised that a child in kindergarden who does not even have the prehensile strength to to pull the trigger of a short barrel revolver, has one. I take it away from the kid before he harms himself or other, and ask where he'd gotten it. His grandfather, who he says, is admantly against guns had it hidden under his bed and had never told anybody it was there. He was playing under the bed and assumed it was a toy and taken it to school. Then the boy's mommy comes by from parking her car and hustles him into the play yard, admonishing him for talking to a stranger -- bad boy.
The gun in the lunch box? That doesn't surprise me because it is within the as it is typical anti-behavior that holds that guns are evil things fit only for them.
Well, sure, even in the nightmare I am a little nervous that children would not grow up knowing more about Smith & Wesson than Abraham Lincoln, but at least they get training in firearms safety and sharp-shooting, learning how to pick off the dangerous classmates without hurting others. I guess John Wilkes Booth had that kind of training too.
But then I begin worrying that the anti-gun grandpa who furnished the snub-nose might come up with an antiquated .30-caliber air-cooled, belt-fed machine gun to mount in the kindergarten yard for all the kids to share. How could they possibly rely on the lethal efficiency of a weapon that was more than a half-century old?
I awoke from the nightmare both pondering the possibilities and comforted of the very notion of kids with guns. But then I finally calmed down, disturbed by the fact that it was only a bad dream and not a reality.
At least not yet.
I am having a recurring nightmare.
It takes place in a lecture hall at Anywhere State College during an intersting presentation on the history of structual engineering. The only alert person in the class, a straight-A student majoring in engineering, my son, suddenly notices a familiar male entering the room.
He is wearing a hooded sweat shirt because it is cold outside and the wind is blowing, but it makes him look like a convenience store crook. He is also carrying a backpack and begins to reach into it. My son knows him because he is been acting more than a little strange. A week ago he began posting distrubing fatalistic poetry on his web site. My son talked to the school guidance counselor who told him nothing was wrong and to stop prying into his personal life. He has been failing out of school this semster and the pressure put on him by his parents has put him on anti-depressants. He looks like he is now off his meds.
I know, because I am an observer in the nightmare, that the stranger is going for his 12 Guage Remington Pump shotgun that he bought at Walmart yesterday for $350, with two boxes of 1 ounce slugs.
My son, whom everyone knows by the nickname "Guns," is sure that the doorway figure fits the profile of a campus killer and isn't about to sit there and be murdered without a fight. Guns instantly reaches and covers him with his legal .40 Glock. But the shotgun comes out anyway.
The gunfire arouses the instincts of others in the class, and they, similarly, draw their permit-allowed weapons ranging from various sized open and concealed carry handguns. One student throws a flash/stun grenade.
There is chaos as the lecture hall turns into a battleground of crossfire, smoke and explosions, and when the battle stops, the only one dead is the troubled student with the strange poetry.
I fell into the nightmare after reading that many states do not allow people with concealed-weapons permits to carry handguns on the campuses of public universities. The revelation came after the deadly shooting at Northern Illinois University. The prospect has stirred online support and maybe sanity will prevail.
I was so terrified at the notion of keeping guns from responsible young men who are old enough to fight and die in our nation's wars, I had another nightmare.
This time I am taking my grandson to his kindergarten class at the behest of his mother, who has a doctor's appointment. As I am watching him run off happily into the play yard on School Street, I notice that another little boy has dropped his Roy Rogers lunch box.
It is red and yellow and has a picture of Rogers on the front mounted on Trigger, who is rearing. Rogers is waving his cowboy hat in the air the way he used to in all of those exciting 1950s westerns. I am intrigued by the lunch box because most kids today don't even know who Roy Rogers is, or was, much less Trigger, who is stuffed and mounted in a museum in Branson, Mo.
Then something equally significant catches my eye. In addition to the apple, carrot sticks and tofu sandwich that fall from the boy's lunch box, there is a snub-nosed .38-caliber revolver of the type I once carried as a backup weapon.
"What in the World?" I shout, surprised that a child in kindergarden who does not even have the prehensile strength to to pull the trigger of a short barrel revolver, has one. I take it away from the kid before he harms himself or other, and ask where he'd gotten it. His grandfather, who he says, is admantly against guns had it hidden under his bed and had never told anybody it was there. He was playing under the bed and assumed it was a toy and taken it to school. Then the boy's mommy comes by from parking her car and hustles him into the play yard, admonishing him for talking to a stranger -- bad boy.
The gun in the lunch box? That doesn't surprise me because it is within the as it is typical anti-behavior that holds that guns are evil things fit only for them.
Well, sure, even in the nightmare I am a little nervous that children would not grow up knowing more about Smith & Wesson than Abraham Lincoln, but at least they get training in firearms safety and sharp-shooting, learning how to pick off the dangerous classmates without hurting others. I guess John Wilkes Booth had that kind of training too.
But then I begin worrying that the anti-gun grandpa who furnished the snub-nose might come up with an antiquated .30-caliber air-cooled, belt-fed machine gun to mount in the kindergarten yard for all the kids to share. How could they possibly rely on the lethal efficiency of a weapon that was more than a half-century old?
I awoke from the nightmare both pondering the possibilities and comforted of the very notion of kids with guns. But then I finally calmed down, disturbed by the fact that it was only a bad dream and not a reality.
At least not yet.
