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photographs, and signs saying WE WILL NEVER FORGET YOU. The best part of
Number Sixteen is that the cable networks are now free to resume commercial
messages. As a result, you can go directly from a funeral to info about adult
diapers, or products to stiffen your penis, or how if you follow a certain
green line across your kitchen floor, you’ll be able to spend your retirement
living in Fat City.
    Seventeenth, the NRA announces they will have no comment
until the details become clear. Also out of sympathy for the victims. Pro-gun
legislators neglect to return calls from news organizations.
    Eighteenth, politicians decree a national dialogue about gun
control. This dialogue centers on automatic and semiautomatic weapons, plus
high-capacity clips and magazines for same. (The gun Adam Lanza used at Sandy
Hook to murder almost two dozen little kids was a Bushmaster AR-15. He also
carried a Glock .10, a pistol so big it’s issued to rangers in Greenland,
should they encounter polar bears.)
    Nineteenth, the NRA drops the other shoe (only it’s more
like a combat boot), proclaiming itself dead-set against any changes in
existing gun laws. In their official statement, they blame the shooters and
America’s culture of violence. They also single out the failure of mental
health professionals to ID potentially dangerous persons, even though most US
senators and representatives with A ratings from the NRA don’t want to see a
single dime of federal aid spent on beefing up such services. (Gosh, they’ve
got that pesky deficit to think about.) The NRA doesn’t come right out and say
the victims are also to blame for thinking they could live in America without a
gun on their person or in their purse, but the implication is hard to miss.
    Twentieth, there’s a killer tornado in Louisiana, or an
outbreak of hostilities in the Mideast, or a celebrity dead of a drug overdose.
Out comes the dramatic music and the BREAKING NEWS chyrons. The shooting is
relegated to second place. Pretty soon it’s in third place. Then it’s a squib
behind that day’s funny YouTube video.
    Twenty-first, any bills to change existing gun laws,
including those that make it possible for almost anyone in America to purchase
a high-capacity assault weapon, quietly disappear into the legislative swamp.
    Twenty-second, it happens again and the whole thing starts
over.
    That’s how it shakes out.

II. Rage
    During my junior and senior years in high school, I wrote my
first novel, then titled Getting It On . I suppose if it had been written
today, and some high school English teacher had seen it, he would have rushed
the manuscript to the guidance counselor and I would have found myself in
therapy posthaste. But 1965 was a different world, one where you didn’t have to
take off your shoes before boarding a plane and there were no metal detectors
at the entrances to high schools. Also a world where America hadn’t been
constantly at war for a dozen years.
    Getting It On concerned a troubled boy named Charlie
Decker with a domineering father, a load of adolescent angst, and a fixation on
Ted Jones, the school’s most popular boy. Charlie takes a gun to school, kills
his algebra teacher, and holds his class hostage. During the siege that
follows, a kind of psychological inversion takes hold, and gradually the class
begins to see Ted rather than Charlie as the villain. When Ted tries to escape,
his supposedly well-adjusted classmates beat the shit out of him. Charlie caps
his final day of public education by trying to commit what is sometimes called
“blue suicide.”
    Ten years later, after the first half-dozen of my books had
become bestsellers, I revisited Getting It On , rewrote it, and submitted
it to my paperback publisher under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman. It was
published as Rage , sold a few thousand copies, and disappeared from
view. Or so I thought.
    Then, in April of 1988, a San Gabriel, California, high
school student named Jeff Cox walked into