Shots Fired in Terminal 2

My family was in the shooting in Florida at the airport. I saw my twelve year old hiding under a plastic bin and my wife and kids flat on the sidewalk. I just finished a book on mass shootings in America, Shots Fired in Terminal 2. Here is the bad news. When you send your kids to school they are not safe. One in 300 is the statistic that each of us will be in a firearm related incident now. It gets worse. The front lines of this undeclared war on the American populace is the very place we send our children. The schools. This is the free fire zone of our times.

Being in a shooting is like being in a war. You do think you will die. Your heart does race. You breathe like you ran a marathon. And you cannot shake the feeling that something terrible will happen to you any second. And that feeling can come back any time. You may think it happens to other people it does not. The statistics are closing in on everyone. AR15s Assault Rifles make those statistics narrow because they kill with such efficiency and intensity. They are the Tommy Gun of our times which by the way the Thompson Machine Gun was called, The Annihilator by it's inventor.

This may sound grim. It is. It is a time bomb because every day more people buy assault weapons. Of the ten shootings I studied every one one of the shooters was considered mentally ill. So there you go. Here is the math. 350 million people. Even if 5 percent of the population is mentally ill that is 17 million people. There are 310 million guns. That one in 300 will soon be one in 200 then one in 100... then it will come into your life.

Channel 32

Shots Fired in Terminal 2

The Motivation of the Las Vegas Shooter

Unfortunately Stephen Paddock is not that different from other American shooters. I just finished a first draft of a book, Shots Fired in Terminal 2 about the Ft Lauderdale airport shooting that I had the bad luck to be in. I studied twenty mass shootings in America and I looked for common factors in the shooters. This is what I found. They were male. Ninety nine percent white. Young adult to middle age. Middle class. And they had access to high powered weapons. And they were all insane to some degree. And their stated reasons for murdering people was not really important.

It is the pissed off white male syndrome. That is what I called it though I never put it in the book. From Sandy Hook to Columbine the psychopath was there waiting. The paranoid schizophrenic, the PTSD vet hearing voices telling him to kill, the manic depressive, the truly insane killer of children and the killer of people watching movies all are cousins of the severely mentally ill. By the time I was finished I realized there were two things that could be done to limit these shootings. One was to get rid of access to semiautomatic weapons and the other is to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill.

If we did these two things and nothing else we would see a result. People who shoot people enmasse are insane. They just are. There is no rational. There is no motive. I saw it in every shooting that I studied. The men who committed these acts were simply nuts and it is not about the second amendment or handgun laws. What happens is the insane individual decides to kill people and they know that the best gun to do this is a semiautomatic. That is where it stops.

 Stephen Paddock just joined the white men's club of mass killers who have no motivation. Insane people don't need one.

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

How the People in the Baseball Shooting Feel Now

Your first thought is to stay alive. To run. This is incredible in itself. Middle class people are not used to running for their lives. Maybe the military, the soldier, the veteran, but now you are running from the bullets. It is the shots you hear. This is the sound that gets you running like you have never run before. And everyone else is running too. It is an avalanche or a tornado of humans doing what they are not used to and that is dealing with a fight of flight response that is overwhelming. Time slows down during this or ceases to exist. You are somewhere between moments that might be your last. 

And then you are trying to make yourself small. You will hide behind grass if you have too. Anything to stop those bullets that surely have your name. You just cant get away fast enough and everyone else is trying to do the same. You have no time to consider you are literally running for your life. That will come later when you go to bed and you hear the shots over and over. Right now you are in the land of hyper-awareness fueled by adrenal cells working overtime. You are a revved up machine that is bent on trying to get out of the trajectory of a piece of flying metal that might have your name on it. 

And then when the shooter is secure the situation is still active. This means no one knows if there are others. You cannot relax. You are still in danger. And the ambulances and police and Swat teams and media come in a flood. You talk like someone else and recant your experience. You marvel how calm you sound as you learn of those who were not so lucky. And once the wave passes and you finally get home you are different. You will never ever be the same. You will never view a public place the same way. You will never trust the world again. In the time it takes a bullet to go a mile you have been changed. You are now in a club no one wants to belong to, the victims of a mass shooting. 

*William Hazelgrove and his family were in the Ft Lauderdale Mass Shooting. He is writing a book The Shots In Terminal 2 

Forging A President