Imagine a society where everyone had a gun. You have a gun, your parents have a gun, your neighbor has a gun, and even your grandmother carries a gun. The reason for this is simple; safety. This super-armed race is also super-safe because everyone knows that everyone else is armed. The second focus of my satire will be the hopeless and implausible programs enacted which try to stop such an event from happening.
My story opens with a typical school day in a typical suburban house in Typicalsville, America. A mother prepares breakfast for her young child before he catches the bus off to middle school. The mother gets the young boy ready and packed and they head out the door ready to get into the school bus. As the bus approaches the mother realizes the son has forgotten an important item for school. She runs back to the door and immerges again holding a small brown object; a pig-nosed revolver in a new leather holster. She hands the loaded gun to her middle school aged child who boards the bus. The bus driver smiles and remarks about forgetting their own pistol sometimes which the bus driver then holds up and shows the mother; a Colt-45. The child is driven away to school where he sits next to his friend (who like all the other children also has a gun). They reach school and walk into the building in which they pass through metal detectors. Naturally every child “beeps” as they walk through. However one other child they do not know walks through and does not set of the alarm. The guards escort him away asking him where his gun is and explaining the importance of gun safety and gun control. We overhear them discussing how if everyone has a gun everyone is safe because everyone has the power to end life thus no one will commit crime because they know it will end only one way. They also talk loudly about how gun control now requires all capable people to carry a gun by law.
The children move inside, taking of their jackets, nervously catching glances of and comparing others pistols. The make their way into the hall because today there is a government safety rally. A government official has come to talk to the children. He is dressed professionally. He gives a short speech describing how the laws require that when you enter this year of school you must begin carrying a gun if you can. He then goes on to discuss what to do in the unlikely event that there is a shooting in the school. He talks about the “Green Paper/Red Paper” rule and how if there is a shooting that the students should lock their door and slide a green piece of paper under it into the hall if everything in the room is alright and a red paper if they have problems. Some children shall raise their hands and ask questions. The main character shall raise his and ask the question “What happened before gun-control was enforced.” The man shall fall grim and say “Terrible things.”
The story continues on but culminates at a point where in a class a student shoots another. The exact details of how this will happen I have not set yet but this action causes a chain reaction in which every student in the room shoots another and the teacher until in the end only our little boy is left alive after shooting his friend to stay alive. The boy looks around the room full of bodies and blood splattered walls and slowly walks over to the door. As the alarm sounds other gunshots are heard down the hall. The reader will then be withdrawn from the room and shown the hallway of closed doors which slowly, one by one, all have red papers pushed under them out into the hall.
The satire of this piece is hopefully clear; gun enforcement, or rather the total opposite of what we view gun control today, would result in safely only until one event which would cause massive death. And also that a defense against such an event happening would be nonexistent. Much like the mindset during the cold war regarding nuclear weapons, a relative safety would be enforced rather than created and that safety would be poised constantly on the verge of insanity. The irony would be clear in that in the end the system put in place to protect would ultimately destroy everything. Working humor into the piece will be a little harder but with some thought is plausible.
