The rampage began just past noon on a Christmas Day. It was warmer than it should have been, so blame it on the weather.
One of the two shooters had been given a bb gun that morning. It was a pump instead of the Red Ryder cocking model his friend had.
Their first victim was a robin, age and gender unknown. It survived. The second was an 11-year-old kid riding a new Christmas bike — almost certainly a Huffy — the police report didn’t say.
They were imitating a scene where Davy Crockett targets a Cree through the sight of his flintlock. The boys were stunned that their bbs could travel across two lawns and actually hit the injun from Woodbine Avenue.
Nothing serious, a swollen eyelid, five minutes in the emergency room and out. The victim looked forward to playing with his assailants at school after the holidays. The boys had been lucky.
Police officers arrived just when their families were sitting down to Christmas dinners and collected the bb guns. There would be no charges — those were more forgiving times for children.
What the police and the parents didn’t know is that there had been a shooting a few weeks earlier. A new kid named Chucky ended up with a swollen lip. He was savvy enough not to tell that two boys had shot him — he needed to fit in.
Over the next summers one of the shooters would fire twenty-twos bolted to a booth at his father’s union picnics. Later he would train with an M1 on the firing ranges of Fort Knox He qualified as a marksman. They gave him a badge.
Later still the shooter spent years championing the Bill of Rights and could recite the Second Amendment word for word but he chose not to keep firearms. He figured he had had more than his share of luck.
