Let's say your name is Joshua. You're eighteen years old, a quiet student who likes to draw and an otherwise normal person, but you're going out of your mind because your ex-girlfriend won't talk to you anymore and has been hooking up with another guy. You know her parents are out of town and you know she's with him in her living room right now, lying on the couch, shirt off, jeans unzipped, because that's exactly what you would have been doing with her on a Friday night a month or so before. You take your father's gun because you want her to know how painful it feels and how far you'd go to get her back. But when you're finally there, standing in the middle of the living room, nothing works out the way you'd planned. Not that you had any plans. The girlfriend, you realize, is no longer your girlfriend. She's screaming at you to get out, and there's a look in her eyes that doesn't fit with the way you feel. Meanwhile, her new boyfriend has decided to go all Rambo. It gets crazy. You're both fighting over the gun like it's a live snake, and it's pointing this way and that. You just want to get a firm hold on it, put it away, and go home. But Rambo won't let go. And then he does, and you're both out of breath, and all the emotions have drained away, and you just leave. You drive home, numb and shaky, praying no one calls the cops or your parents. You're terrified for a month and ashamed for about a year. You bounce back a little in your second year of college and switch majors, dropping pre-medicine to work on a degree in psychology with as many fine art classes as you can fit in. Once in a while you think about that Friday night. You even gain some perspective on it. In one of your classes, you read s0me statistics about violent crimes and young males. It's practically an epidemic, except no one acknowledges it. At seventeen to twenty, the human brain isn't developed enough to fully distinguish right from wrong, reality from fantasy, but the young male has all this emotion and power and little ability to express it except through physical violence or acts of self-destruction. That's how soldiers and suicide bombers get recruited. Sitting there in the library, drawing pictures of her along the margins of your notebook, you think about that gun and what it felt like holding it, and how it slipped around in your hands when you were fighting, and how goddamn scary those few seconds of uncertainty were. And you put down your pen, cover up the drawing, and thank God that nothing bad really happened.
Now, let's say the gun went off.
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