Read Online Give a Boy a Gun by Todd Strasser - Free Book Online

I’m over by the magazines, looking at all these stupid pictures of skinny, perfect girls with perfect hair and skin. It makes you wonder why all the rest of us don’t just crawl in some hole and do the world a favor and die. Anyway, Gary comes by with this big grin on his face, and I go, “What?”
    And he’s like, “Not here. Outside.”
    We get outside and he starts laughing, like, “You can’t believe this, Allison. I found everything I need to know.”
    â€œNeed to know about what?” I ask.
    And he goes, “About making a bomb. Right in the good old library.”
    I’m not sure which he thought was cooler:the fact that he found the information, or the fact that he found it in the library.
    â€”Allison Findley

    â€œIt is the wisdom and judgment of the [Connecticut State] General Assembly that the Sporter is an assault rifle—it’s just the AR-15 with a different name.”
    â€”Rep. Robert Godfrey

    Everyone’s painting this picture of Brendan being the leader and Gary following, but there’s another side to it. Especially where those pipe bombs are concerned. Brendan wasn’t mechanical. I mean, he just wasn’t interested in that kind of thing. But Gary loved building stuff. He really had a talent for it. I remember going to his house for a birthday party and seeing what he’d done with LEGOs. He’d made LEGO robots and programmed them with his computer, so if they walked into something, they could turn around and go in another direction. It was pretty awesome. You hear the police reports about how well constructed and intricate those pipe bombs were. I guarantee you, thatwas Gary’s work.
    â€”Ryan Clancy

    â€œWe say we want to regulate assault guns; then we go out and buy an assault gun factory. . . . The whole darn thing is so hypocritical it’s hard to imagine.”
    â€”Rep. David Oliver Thorp

    I had to take him to the hardware store and over the state line, where they sell fireworks. When we got to the [fireworks] stand, that was probably about the most excited I’d ever seen him. He wanted to know which ones had the most gunpowder. They told him, and those were the ones he bought.
    â€”Allison Findley
    Brendan and Gary had this big announcement they wanted to make. They were going to announce it on Saturday. So Allison drives up and Gary’s in the front seat and Brendan’s in the back, and we just take off. Listening to music, smoking, cruising. We probably drive for more than an hour and a half, until we’re way out in the middle of nowhere. Then we go down some dirt road, and we’re at this cabin. I thought Gary said it was his uncle’s, but anyway, no one’s around.
    So Gary opens the trunk and takes out this green duffel bag and all these big sheetsof colored paper, like the kind you do school projects on. And we all go tromping off into the woods. The thing is I have no idea what’s going on. I’m like, “So what are we doing today? An art project?” And they’re not telling me. It’s an announcement, you know? I’m supposed to wait.
    We get to some place that Gary likes, and he stops and says, “Okay, we’ll do it here.” Next thing I know, he’s taking pushpins out of the duffel bag, and we’re supposed to pin all these sheets of paper up to these trees. Like we’re making a multicolored room in the trees that’s all paper walls. This probably takes an hour itself. And then Gary has to very carefully number all the sheets and make notes in a notebook. I have no idea what this is about, but so what? It’s as good as doing anything else, I guess.
    Then Gary says we’re ready, and he goes back to the bag and he takes out this thing and sets it on the ground right in the middle of the paper room we’ve created. Then he tells us to get the hell out of there. I ask himhow far, and he says a hundred yards