About Accidental Firearm Discharge on Campus
After my best friend shot me in the head through two walls in our on-campus apartment by freak accident, every news outlet in the Twin Cities threw something together for quick clicks. Reading them felt dirty to me. Like a bad sex joke etched into the bathroom stall at a Cum N’ Go.
Most of the information was just plain wrong. Laughably withheld. Altogether false. Imagine watching a game of your favorite sports team. The next day you read a summary of what happened but there are all these wild inconsistencies. Stats are skewed. Plays invented. The other team won when actually yours did. That’s what it felt like. Guesses, approximations, thrown together and delivered with a staggering conviction of truth. As if two totally separate events existed in the same parcel of time and space.
Every article covered the basics. This University. That police department. Here were the times, roughly. The students are both male, 22 years old, one from this city, the other from that city. Some included my name. None included my best friend’s. The articles assured us that it was not an act of violence, which is debatable. They stressed it was an accident, he was just fooling around with a gun, then, oops, pulled the trigger, which doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t violent. It was a very violent accident. Those things are not mutually exclusive. We were assured the weapon, never weapons, no one knows about the plural weapons he hid away in the trunk of his car after he shot me, we were assured that the guilty weapon was taken into police custody and that there was no current threat beyond that.
We were assured that the 22-year-old suspect (news sources don’t typically name suspects before they are charged or arrested) was no longer on campus, which was untrue. We were told with confidence that no one was likely to bump into him by chance. Wrong again, my girlfriend did just days later, overwhelmed and appalled. The police confirmed that he had a valid permit to carry when his gun accidentally went off. Our concern is directed again and again to his permit to carry. This, for them, is the salient detail. As if it were to make the whole situation a little less horrific, and somewhat ok.
Some articles wanted us to know that the bullet was fired through a wall. Or possibly two walls, then into the common area. Some articles wanted us to know that the suspect at the time was not visible to the other student who was shot, that is, me. Most articles wanted us to know that the student, me again, was transported to the hospital. None of the articles devoted word count to the severity of the injury, the critical care and subsequent surgery, or, of course, the slurry of bizarre circumstances leading up to said emergency admittance. Namely my best friend’s refusal to get help for two nightmarish hours while he prioritized his own fate before mine. Faced with the fear of going to jail and scrubbing toilets for the rest of his life, he insisted we go to Home Depot for paint and quick-dry plaster to repair the bullet holes in the wall, less concerned with the one on my head. All while blood from a source eerily close to my brain soaked through the bottom of a pillow case. It wasn’t until my other roommate came home from volleyball practice that he was convinced, outnumbered, to call 911.
A gun went off, went through some walls, then made contact with another human. At the time, that’s really all that’s known for certain. What word would best fit that scenario? A student was hit? Struck? Injured? All serviceable, though “shot” is probably the safest bet. Those words were not used. Instead, the word “grazed” was deployed, almost ubiquitously, in every article. The meaning of grazed, according to whichever dictionary Google prioritizes, “to scrape the skin, or a part of the body, so as to break the surface but cause little or no bleeding.”
Ah, yes. Grazed. The bullet touched the gentleman’s head lightly in passing, shattering a portion of his skull bone before ricocheting off onto the carpet. Only a healthy trail of blood smatter, some alarming red handprints on the wall, were found leading to the bathroom mirror. The abrasion merely caused severe brain trauma, a scratch really, along with reconstructive neurosurgery that resulted in the addition of a few titanium plates and screws implanted in the head. Being a scuff, quite minor, the gentleman will struggle through a life of various physical and psychological residual symptoms, requiring numerous therapies, medications, specialty appointments, that is, complaints to be taken lightly given the stark horror of the insignificant nick.
Some articles mentioned that I’m an English major.