Armed Subject(s) ARREST – Even grocery store trips can be lethal on the wrong Tuesday in Eugene. There you are, mild-mannered citizen, SNAP card clutched in hand, when the yelling starts. “He’s gotta gun, he’s gotta gun!”
Your discombobulated brain spends vital seconds wondering Is it real? Was it live, or Memorex? Then your stomach drops to the floor, a half-second ahead of the rest of your body. It’s your turn, it’s finally happening. American mass shootings – our ghastly national pastime – has come to town and you’ve got a front-row seat.
Fire up your video with shaking fingers. Maybe you’ll record some vital footage, maybe you’ll record your good-byes. Who knows? You force yourself into the grocery shelves wondering: can a can of Campbell’s soup can be used as a ranged weapon? You didn’t know you’d be caught debating whether $4.99/pound is a good deal on beef. Too bad you aren’t in housewares – there’s cheap kitchen knives that might come in handy. Your bladder feels like emptying itself, but not right now, chum. We’re facing eternity with a dry pair of pants.
Here’s where the silly, lethally hilarious drama reaches its climax. There was no gun. Not a real one, anyway. One of our young, local free-range humans painted over the orange-tipped barrel of his favorite airsoft machine pistol to play Juvenile John Wick. From ten feet away, you wouldn’t know that it wasn’t a suppressed H&K MP5 with live ammo, but one of the baggers did. He knew the guy, stupid but relatively harmless. Cops arrived, AR-15s in hand, to hear the angriest bagboy in Oregon telling his neighbor he came ‘this close’ to getting shot. A brief search revealed that the gun was fake, but the folding knife in his pocket was real. Bye-bye, raw little Rambo. Hope the community service and probation were worth it.
This isn’t about politics. This is just about what it feels like to live with this every day.
Walk home from the grocery store instead of taking the bus. Five miles, kind of a hike, but so what? You’re in no condition to ride in a large public bus with a dozen hapless bodies. The angry hornets nest of panic, rage, and shame need time and space to calm themselves down. Nobody wants to meet a tear-stained, glaring man carrying four bags of groceries in hand. No one wants to hear him muttering ‘you weren’t ready. Next time. You need to be ready. Next time.’
Unless you’ve trained yourself to inhuman levels of hypervigilance, hours or days in simulated battle to mentally prepare yourself to charge into the fire, you aren’t going to react the way you want to. No Bruce Willis-style, everyman superhero stupidity. Harlan Ellison was right – Genuine, mindless violence is very important. There’s no knowing when or where it will strike. There is no escape.
