And Then I Pointed the Gun

Today, I’ll introduce a kind of heavy story. I read “そしてぼくは銃口を向けた”(And then I pointed the Gun). This book was written by Makiko Iizuka. She wrote about many gun shootings at high schools mainly in the 1990s. These are true stories that happened in America. She went to meet the criminals in prison to hear their stories.

Why did I choose this one? The reason is that I had an assignment to find a nonfiction story in another class, and I was interested in this book.

What do you think of gun shootings? I had thought the gun shooting criminal is just a dangerous person before I read this book. However, I found out that it was not necessarily so from the book. The criminal is also a child. They had many troubles in their school, such as bullying or backbiting from others. And then, they tried to tell others their pain and suffering with a gun. This is too sad, isn’t it? They were called strange people many times by others and they were aware of it. They suffered because they differed from other people.

Each person had reasons why it happened. For example, a student had lack of love from his family and another had a school response complaint and so on. But mostly they had evil in their heart. Then I head there is an unusual elementary school where a teacher teaches children how to change their minds. That’s called “Bully Proofing” and “HAHASO”. Even if you were bullied, you shouldn’t over react. If you do that, the bullies get more fun. “HAHASO” stands for help, assert yourself, humor, avoid, self talk, own it. According to this system, you should do “I need your help” “Stop doing that” “Dodge bully with humor” “Leave from the bullies” “You say I’m not bad to yourself” “Purposely agree”. Actually, the children understood well. The most important thing is to pay attention to everyone.

Students were indiscriminately killed by criminals written in this book. In another case, one criminal in Tennessee killed one person. It was trouble between two boys and a girl. The criminal was a student with excellent grades but he started dating a girl. Then he began to be weird because the girl met with another boy. Of course he did a terrible thing but I think she was also bad because she betrayed him many times. Before she met another boy, she promised him she would never betray. However, she betrayed and he changed. After this terrible thing, he said that people don’t want to know about gun shootings. Instead of that they say empoly security guards and school counselors or regulate guns. But he said it’s impossible because guns are already circulating, and he said people wasn’t change their minds if they want to die. He said the most important thing is waking up from evil or fantasy. Sadly I think it’s difficult too. It’s not easy to eliminate guns that are widely circulated in the world. Then what should we do? I think we should pay attention to everyone and try to understand each other.

Finally, when I finished reading this book, I felt the criminal is not only bad. I found out they were also suffering from bullying. By the way, I thought the writer is brave because she went to meet a few criminals in prison. Even though she was in a prison, it’s a little scary to talk with someone who killed people. Anyway, when an incident happened like these cases, people will acquire guns to protect themselves. Then I think the guns will continue to increase.