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When he puilled the trigger, it was love.
This was inspired by a mall shooting that took place in New York. Guy walks into the mall with an AK-47 and opens fire. For all his shooting he only actually hits two people. This is a man who is not serious about killing.
It turns out that it’s not that unusual. In an excellent study entitled “On Killing” Lt. Col. Dave Grossman points out how difficult and unnatural it is to get a person to kill. Until the advent of modern military training, the kind of training seen in the film “Full Metal Jacket”, commanders could not count on the average soldier to shoot to kill. He supports this with numerous interviews with WWII and Vietnam vets and re-creations of civil war battles. He shows, in the case of the Civil War, that if everybody was really trying, the death tolls would have been dramatically higher.
Grossman also finds that the act of killing causes tremendous psychological damage. The United States removed 500,0000 soliders from active duty in World War II as psychatric casualties.
We seem to be, at least on some level, hardwired for the preservation of the species. This is very different message than we get from the media. I don’t think this is a conspiracy, I think it that the internal machinations of the soul just aren’t very dramatic. “People actually found to be good, deep down inside “film at a eleven.†Isn’t much of a grabber.
So I wanted to try and write a story to convey all of this “and use fiction to answer the question that all the news stories ask, but never seem to adequately answer” why did someone do this? Without demonizing or dehumanizing anyone. It’s a tall order.
I guess this is all a long way around to say that writing this story scared me. I’m not convinced I pulled it off. But the ball came over the plate and I put my best swing on it.
(CNN) A gunman was arrested Sunday after opening fire and wounding at least two people at Hudson Valley Mall in upstate New York, police said.The incident began shortly after 3 p.m., when a man from the nearby Saugerties area fired from “an assault-type rifle” as he entered a Best Buy store at Hudson Valley Mall, said Capt. Wayne Olson of the New York State Police.
The man then walked out of the store and into the mall’s main corridor, where he continued firing until he ran out of bullets, then put down his rifle and surrendered to a mall employee, Olson told reporters.
A 20-year-old National Guard recruiter was struck in the left knee and taken by helicopter to Albany Medical Center, Olson said.
“There’s a possibility he might lose the limb,” Olson said.
The second gunshot victim, a 56-year-old man from nearby Kingston, sufferedsuperficial wounds to his left arm, left thigh and left lower leg, possibly caused by a single “fragmented projectile,” Olson said.
Another person was injured not from a bullet but possibly from flying glass, he said.
Two other people had bullet holes in their clothing, but escaped injury, he said.
“We consider it fortunate that more people were not struck,” he said.
The man, who has not been identified publicly, is being charged with reckless endangerment in the first degree, assault in the first degree and assault in the second degree—all felonies under New York law.
“There will be a review to see if more severe charges are appropriate, for instance, the possibility of attempted murder,” Olson said.
The man was expected to be arraigned Sunday night or Monday morning at Town of Ulster court, Olson said. The man was to be held overnight in Ulster County Jail.
Police have yet to determine whether the weapon, which the man purchased, was legally possessed, Olson said.
The rifle is not an AK-47 “in the truest sense of the word, in that it is not foreign-made,” Olson said.
Store surveillance videotapes are under review, he added. Ulster police are leading the investigation, with assistance from Kingston police, the Ulster County Sheriff’s Department, New York State Police, the FBI and a host of other agencies.
The large suburban mall is one of the most popular shopping centers in the area and was crowded at the time of the shooting, said James Sottile, mayor of Kingston.
The mall was to re-open when police have finished work on the crime scene, Olson said, adding that that could be a lengthy process. “It may not be tomorrow.”
Jana Decker told CNN she was at the mall with her boyfriend when they heard the shots, which sounded like fireworks.
“A few minutes later, we seen a whole mob of people coming through the mall,” she said. “We turned around and ran with them.”
With the mall packed with shoppers on a Sunday afternoon, “people were just tripping over each other trying to get out,” she said.
Ulster is about 90 miles north of New York City, and the mall is in a rural area just south of the Catskill Mountains in Ulster County.