ALL ROYALITIES FROM THE SALE OF THIS STORY WILL BE DONATED TO GUN CONTROL AND SAFETY ORGANIZATIONS! Thank you readers - keep it going!
"Since 1970, there have been 1,924 incidents involving the discharge of a firearm on school property and 637 people have died." source: Campus Safety Magazine.
I'm writing this immediately following the Uvalde school shooting.
I had left the University of Texas campus to go home for lunch just before Charles Whitman began his rampage from the UT Tower in 1966. Twelve students were murdered that day, and the slaughter goes on unabated. Politicians huff and puff about 2nd Amendment Rights and pledge to do something "reasonable" about it, but nothing is done, or if it is, it's temporary—witness the Assault Weapons Ban under Clinton that only lasted 10 years.
This short story is my humble attempt to give the victims of these shootings a voice. It is completely fictional with imagined characters—except for the shooter. I will immediately donate any royalties I make from the sale of this story to organizations such as The Brady Campaign, Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence or similar organizations.
Enough is enough.
Bill Schweitzer, June 2022
“People think - wrongly - that speculative fiction is about predicting the future, but it isn't; or if it is, it tends to do a rotten job of it. Futures are huge things that come with many elements and a billion variables, and the human race has a habit ... What speculative fiction is good at is not the future but the present - taking an aspect of it that troubles or is dangerous and extrapolating that aspect into something that allows the people of that time to see what they are doing from a different angle and from a different place. It's cautionary." - Introduction to Fahrenheit 451, Neil Gaiman.
Given the events of January 6, 2021, I was not that wide of the mark — and that Third Term is still a possibility.