NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana
It is the fateful afternoon of September 15, a Sunday. I am sitting in a hotel lobby in this storied city, where the Mississippi River flows gently into the Gulf of Mexico; the “Big Easy,” it’s called. I am enjoying a café au lait as I read an interesting article about a poet from Boston named Amy Silberman who died here back in 1994 when bullets rained down from the sky…
… until I am interrupted by an alarm on my smartphone telling me of semi-disturbing news:
FLASH! Armed with a Soviet-era SKS semiautomatic assault rifle, a lunatic from Hawaii has attempted to assassinate Donald Trump on a golf course near his Florida home at the Mar-a-Lago resort. It is the second such attempt in as many months to kill the former president, and the second claim in as many months in which he credits the intervention of God Almighty to insure his life for a return to the White House.
—Later herein about Mr. Trump’s near deaths and claims of holy help in staying alive. For now, consider the late Amy Silberman, whom God Almighty must have skipped over:
In the final year of her short life, Ms. Silberman, 31, had come to New Orleans as a tourist at the perilous time of New Year’s Eve—that being when exuberant gun owners express themselves at midnight, in which celebrants take a breather from boozing to toast the calendar’s turn by firing all manner of weaponry into the heavens.
What goes up must come down, including hot lead.
Thus did Ms. Silberman fall victim to gravitational law, evident that midnight of ‘94 in a lethal descent of spent ammo, courtesy of gun enthusiasts here, who, like millions of their countrymen worship the almighty god of guns.
(Generations of New Orleanians spared second stage gunshots have lived with constant discoveries of spent ammo in all the unsurprising places: roof line gutters, sidewalk cracks, tree trunks, porch steps et cetera. So as not to drop dead, police officers don bullet-proof helmets fifteen minutes before and fifteen minutes after midnight on New Year’s Eve.)
Had it been someone other than Amy Silberman struck dead that New Orleans midnight of ‘94, the visiting poet might have composed a dirge in honor of the deceased, titled something like “Strange Rain in the Big Easy.”
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana
It is the fateful afternoon of September 15, a Sunday. I am sitting in a hotel lobby in this storied city, where the Mississippi River flows gently into the Gulf of Mexico; the “Big Easy,” it’s called. I am enjoying a café au lait as I read an interesting article about a poet from Boston named Amy Silberman who died here back in 1994 when bullets rained down from the sky…
… until I am interrupted by an alarm on my smartphone telling me of semi-disturbing news:
FLASH! Armed with a Soviet-era SKS semiautomatic assault rifle, a lunatic from Hawaii has attempted to assassinate Donald Trump on a golf course near his Florida home at the Mar-a-Lago resort. It is the second such attempt in as many months to kill the former president, and the second claim in as many months in which he credits the intervention of God Almighty to insure his life for a return to the White House.
—Later herein about Mr. Trump’s near deaths and claims of holy help in staying alive. For now, consider the late Amy Silberman, whom God Almighty must have skipped over:
In the final year of her short life, Ms. Silberman, 31, had come to New Orleans as a tourist at the perilous time of New Year’s Eve—that being when exuberant gun owners express themselves at midnight, in which celebrants take a breather from boozing to toast the calendar’s turn by firing all manner of weaponry into the heavens.
What goes up must come down, including hot lead.
Thus did Ms. Silberman fall victim to gravitational law, evident that midnight of ‘94 in a lethal descent of spent ammo, courtesy of gun enthusiasts here, who, like millions of their countrymen worship the almighty god of guns.
(Generations of New Orleanians spared second stage gunshots have lived with constant discoveries of spent ammo in all the unsurprising places: roof line gutters, sidewalk cracks, tree trunks, porch steps et cetera. So as not to drop dead, police officers don bullet-proof helmets fifteen minutes before and fifteen minutes after midnight on New Year’s Eve.)
Had it been someone other than Amy Silberman struck dead that New Orleans midnight of ‘94, the visiting poet might have composed a dirge in honor of the deceased, titled something like “Strange Rain in the Big Easy.”
•
As I read of Ms. Silberman’s demise in Louisiana, the American gun lobby’s favorite son was the aforementioned target next door in Florida—a paunchy man septuagenarian in the crosshairs of a 3x32mm Gen III prism scope who had just stepped off the fifth hole green of a West Palm Beach golf course.
Lurking in a nearby ramble of bushes and low trees between fairway and highway was the aforementioned lunatic—58-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh, whose lengthy criminal record of a cool one hundred arrests includes a 2002 standoff with North Carolina police in which he holed up in a house to defend himself with his fully automatic machine gun.
Investigators said the wannabe assassin had hidden in the ramble for twelve hours, patiently waiting for his chance to earn an asterisk in the rap sheet of American violence.
Unhappily for Mr. Routh, intrepid agents of the U.S. Secret Service spotted the barrel and scope of his SKS protruding from the bushes and commenced blind fire with high-capacity Sig Sauer P-229 pistols. Spooked, albeit unhit, Mr. Routh ran off to the getaway Nissan SUV he’d parked at roadside.
Thanks to a passerby who used his trusty smart phone to photograph the fleeing Nissan, local police officers were quickly alerted to the license plate number and gave pursuit. In less than an hour, Mr. Routh was arrested, jailed, and charged with a number of serious crimes that will likely keep him out of circulation until his natural passing.
—NOTE: Soon after Mr. Routh’s capture in Florida, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation searched the Greensboro, North Carolina, apartment of his 35-year-old son, Oran. Rather than clues as to the motivations of Routh père, the feds discovered arrest-worthy material belonging to Routh fils—“hundreds” of photographs of nude children, some as young as six, posed in sexual activity.
As mentioned, the Florida episode was not the first try at whacking Donald Trump, prominent defender of so-called “gun rights.”
The initial Trump assassination attempt occurred in western Pennsylvania last July. A 20-year-old nursing home worker named Thomas Matthew Crooks escaped notice by local police and the Secret Service when he crawled atop an unguarded low-rise building offering a clear sight line to Mr. Trump as he spoke to an outdoor crowded of admirers.
Mr. Crooks used his father’s Christmas gift—the ubiquitous AR-15, modeled on M-16 military machine gun—to seriously wound two admirers, kill a third, and graze Mr. Trump’s right ear. He himself was shot dead by police.
In between thwarted assassination attempts, Mr. Trump made a star turn at an event staged by the National Rifle Association (NRA), the rightwing political institution that champions armaments for anyone and everyone, everywhere and anywhere. There, he gave a rousing address that excoriated modest proposals to address America’s mad obsession with guns.
Confident of victory in next month’s presidential election, Mr. Trump declared, “Every single attack on gun owners and manufacturers will be terminated on my very first week back in office, perhaps my first day!”
Included among those terminations, presumably, would be statutory “attacks” on lunatics with access to military-style assault rifles available at any one of the 78,000 licensed gun dealerships in the U.S.*
Like their comrades in arms, after all, lunatics are deeply in love with America’s best-selling weapon and the clear favorite instrument among mass murderers—the AR-15 semiautomatic assault rifle, a slightly modified machine gun capable of firing six hundred rounds of .223-caliber bullets per minute, melting human organs on impact.
*According to a count by Everytown for Gun Safety, the New York-based non-governmental organization, the number of American gun shops is twice that of post office branches and more than all McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway and Wendy’s locations—combined.
•
Again, it was a Christmas gift from Dad.
On September 4 in Winder, Georgia, two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School lost their lives in a barrage of fire from an AR-15 assault rifle wielded by a lost soul—14-year-old Colt Gray, a freshman at the school. Seven other students and faculty members were critically injured.
Classmates describe the boy as “pretty quiet.” Colt’s maternal grandfather, Charles Polhamus, described the boy’s homelife this way: “His dad beat up on him…I’m not talking about physical, but screaming and hollering, and he did the same thing to my daughter (Marcee Gray, née Polhamus).”
Relatives remembered the boy’s father calling him “sissy” and “bitch.” Mother Marcee had problems of her own—multiple arrests involving drugs, for one. The household rapidly blew apart when the Grays were evicted from their rented bungalow; when mother and dad went their separate ways, leaving the boy Colt in the care of his abusive father, Colin.
Colin Gray, 54, maintained a cache of hunting rifles in the house he shared with his son. He told police that Colt was permitted to handle the hunting gear, but that the AR-15 he gave his son last Christmas was off-limits—except when the two of them visited a local firing range.
Nevertheless, Colt Gray got his hands on the assault rifle, concealed it in a backpack, and headed off to school. Once there, he sent a text to his mother that read, “I’m sorry, Mom, I’m sorry.”
Shortly after that message, Marcee Gray telephoned Apalachee High School to say she had a “hunch” that Colt had reached a boiling point.
Then the boy walked out of a classroom, opened his hallway locker, returned to the classroom, and blasted away.
Authorities determined that blame for the Apalachee murders was a father and son matter:
• Colin Gray, because he gifted his troubled boy a weapon of war, was arrested and charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder, and eight counts of cruelty to a child. He faces as much as forty years in prison if convicted.
• The boy Colt Gray is charged with four counts of first-degree murder. He will be tried as an adult. If convicted, he faces a lifetime in prison.
The rate of American schoolhouse shootings is approximately three times per month, according to a survey by the CNN Television network. Thus far in 2024, the deadly incidents already total thirty-six—an entire year’s worth of carnage, suggesting many more incidents yet to occur. And what most news outlets ignore is a related and growing parallel to actual acts of terror: the dramatic increase in threats of schoolhouse slaughter.
According to the New York Times:
“In the three weeks since two teachers and two students were killed at Apalachee High School…more than seven hundred children and teenagers, including at least one fourth grader, have been arrested and accused of making violent threats against schools in at least forty-five states…
“[S]chools confront an onslaught of…gunfire and bombings. The reports have terrified students and their parents, caused attendance to plunge and forced the temporary closure of dozens of campuses…[S]ocial media posts leap across platforms, broadcasting images of guns, lists of schools and menacing warnings to stay home.”
•
Thirteen years ago in the parking lot of a supermarket, a popular politician known as Gabby by everyone in Arizona and Washington was shot through the head at point-blank range by a paranoid schizophrenic armed with a perfectly legal Glock semiautomatic pistol and four magazines, each one holding thirty-three 9-milleter bullets.
As Gabby dropped to the pavement that January morning, the 22-year-old shooter fired randomly into a small crowd of constituents gathered around Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords to express their views on government issues. Eighteen people were struck in the bloody melee and rushed to a hospital. Five of them died, including Arizona’s U.S. District Court Judge John M. Roll.
Within minutes of the short-lived rampage, the shooter was thrown to the ground by onlookers who restrained him until police hauled him off to jail. Ms. Giffords, then age 41, was diagnosed with aphasia, a brain disorder that affects the ability to communicate by language. Doctors give affected patients three to twelve years of survival time.
Ms. Giffords was determined to beat her death sentence, and she has. Today at age 54, she has cheated the doctors by a full year, thanks to assiduous therapy and stalwart support from her husband—the retired navy combat pilot and astronaut Mark Kelly, who assumed his wife’s place and positions in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The former congresswoman recently wrote of her ordeal, and her thoughts on America’s sick love affair with guns:
“You have a school shooting on a Wednesday and the country’s attention has moved on by Friday. You have a country where …kids do schoolwork at home because it’s not safe to go to school.
“Political rhetoric matters, but rhetoric wasn’t in the bushes around Mr. Trump’s golf course…A dangerous man with a gun was.
“It’s the guns. It’s always the guns.”
Gabby Giffords is one of America’s toughest ladies. Tough because she refuses to cede righteous anger to our national tendency to quickly consign godawful violence to memory’s dead letter office. Tough because by her post-assault years of speaking out against guns as best she’s able is the active opposite of the usual flaccid disregard for victims like her.
In this year’s very first schoolhouse slaughter, Donald Trump spoke for millions of his fellow weaklings in urging us to forget about 17-year-old Dylan Butler, who walked into an elementary school in Perry, Iowa, with a shotgun. He killed a sixth-grader, injured seven others, and ended his own life in suicide.
“We just have to move on,” said Mr. Trump.
Forget about Dylan Butler—and the note he left, indicating the explosive device he’d hidden in a hallway. The note read, “Now we wait.”
Fortunately for the students and teachers in Perry, Iowa, the explosive device was found and neutralized. But what of the rest of us?
Unfortunately, we wait for the next explosion and the next and the next and the next and the next…
•
In honor of Gabby Giffords’ bravery, I offer a modest proposal: Three things must be accomplished to dampen wicked violence in America, where guns outnumber our population of 333,300,000 people—
• Re-enact the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which President Joe Biden guided through Congress as a senator. The act, which expired in 2004 and was never revived due to NRA pressure, prohibited the “manufacture, transfer or possession of a semiautomatic assault weapon.”
• Repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act of 2005, granting the multi-billion-dollar U.S. munitions industry specific immunity from product liability law.
• Institute mandatory liability insurance for gun owners, the same as mandatory liability insurance for automobile owners.
Unless and until these measures are put in place, bullets will rain down from the sky, so to speak. And not just in the Big Easy.
Now we wait.
