Give a Boy a Gun tells the story of a Columbine-like school shooting. Gary and Brendan had suffered through years of bullying and abuse from classmates, were ignored by teachers and school staff, and considered themselves outcasts. They lash out during a school dance, locking the gym and taking everyone there as hostages. The book examines these events, as well as the years that led up to that night, by interviewing all the other characters about Gary and Brendan's childhoods and time in junior high and high school.

This was a tough read and I think it's an important one. Throughout the story, Strasser includes footnotes that list statistics about school violence, guns, and bullying. These are not obtrusive, and I thought they enhanced the story, further cementing it in reality. What I liked best about Give a Boy a Gun is that it presents multiple sides of most of the issues - no one group is clearly in the right. Not all of the football players are jerks and Brendan and Gary aren't glorified for their actions. Teachers that are seen by some as uncaring jerks get to express their own feelings and show their struggle with how to operate in the school. There are issues, though, where the author makes his opinion very clear (gun control, specifically). This book is an excellent way to start discussions on school violence, bullying, and guns. ( )

Reviewed by Me for TeensReadToo.com

Every person in the world should read this book. That being said, I'll admit right off that I hate guns. Absolutely abhor them. I'm the mother who refuses to let her children play with toy guns, even water pistols. Why? Why, indeed. Why let your children shoot things at each other--whether it be water, rubber darts, BBs, or paint balls--if you don't want them to shoot bullets at each other? After all, that's what guns are for. To shoot bullets. Bullets that are designed to do one thing, and one thing only--kill. Or, if you prefer, injure, maim, dismember, or wound.

So what is GIVE A BOY A GUN about? In a few words, human nature, the cruelty of children, and how those factors don't really mix well with guns. Oh sure, gun activists say that "guns don't kill people, people kill people." And, if you get technical about it, they're right. But when someone gives you a guitar, what's it for? It produces musical sounds. Yes, it needs an actual human to aide it along, but a guitar does what it's made to do--make music. Just like a gun, with the aide of a human, does what it's supposed to do--kill.

In Todd Strasser's GIVE A BOY A GUN, we learn about Brendan and Gary, two boys who live each day of school in their own personal hell. They're not athletic, so the jocks pick on them. They're not particularly brainy, so they don't fit in with the nerds. They don't come from extremelely wealthy families, so they're not immediately deemed popular. In fact, Brendan and Gary are like 95% of every teenager you meet--normal kids living normal lives, trying their best to just get through the day. I remember all too well the horror and terror of high-school; not physical, at least in my case, but the sheer emotional bullying that I received from kids who deemed me not up to par. And the teachers who turn a blind eye, either because the tormentors were too valuable to the school as athletes, or too much trouble to deal with.

But for Brendan and and Gary, enough turns out to be enough. Really, how much torment can one person take? When teachers and administration and counselors turn the other way, when budget restraints prevent teachers from the ability to really get to know their students, when athleticism takes precedent over brain power, when will school bullying come to an end? Why, really, should it shock us as a nation when things like Columbine happen? Has it really been so long ago that you were in school that you can't remember what it was like to be the object of someone's daily put-downs, or the sneers and snide comments from the "popular" kids?

Gary and Brendan, along with a few others like them, were "outcasts" in their school. When their fascination with revenge on those who've tormented them leads to guns, it really shouldn't surprise anyone. GIVE A BOY A GUN is interspersed with tragic facts--school shootings over the last several decades, quotes from newspaper articles, statistics from gun companies--that prove that teens and guns is a growing problem. But really, when you think about it, why should it shock us? We always see signs that proclaim a school a "drug-free zone", but when will we ever see one that proclaims it a "bully-free zone", or a "tolerance for everyone" zone?

Think about why kids are so cruel, why they can't get noticed by those who could possibly help them, and why they can so easily get a gun to make their problems go away.

Just as every person in the world (adult and teen) should watch the movie Requiem for a Dream, everyone in the world needs to read Todd Strasser's utterly though-provoking GIVE A BOY A GUN. And then we'll talk about how "guns don't kill people." ( )

I have read several novels about school shootings and this is by far the best and most thought-provoking. Written after the Columbine shootings, it is told mainly from the perspective of two boys who are constantly bullied and dream up a way to get their revenge. In footnote style, Strasser adds statistics and news reports relating to real-life episodes of school violence.

I read this book to a class of freshmen and they were spellbound. As we read, we were also able to have some profound discussions about the causes of this type of violence and how we are all responsible for making school a place where everyone feels safe. ( )

I'm not sure how I feel about the format of this novel. I opened it thinking it was a novel, but the author handled the documentary-style format well enough that I became convinced it was an account of a real shooting. And I was horrified -- not so much at the murderous boys, but at the teachers and administrators at their school. I've seen movies and stuff about high schools where football is valued more highly than education, but this seemed really extreme. I simply couldn't believe how callous some of the teachers were about the favoritism given to the athletes, and the abuse heaped on the rest of the students.

But then, about halfway through, enough improbabilities mounted up that I doublechecked the story and discovered it was fiction. So... now I'm not sure what to believe. I'm inclined to think the football stuff is really not representative of the real world. And a lot of stress is put on the idea that the boys were deliberately seeking out popular kids and hated teachers as targets... but if this is at all based on Columbine, my understanding is that's a misrepresentation. I've read elsewhere that there really was no rhyme or reason to the victims at Columbine -- the boys wanted everyone, not just athletes or popular kids or people who had harassed them.

So then it began to feel like the author was just making up facts to support her case. And to some degree, that's always the way in fiction, but I wonder if the rules change a bit when you are dealing with such an emotionally charged issue in such a pseudo-journalistic way. Then it starts to seem a little cheap -- because I know that she has a point she wants to make about gun control and bullying and whatnot. But she has built a book for the purpose of supporting her point. If she had wanted to, she could have created a story that put the blame for school violence on the lollypops the nurse was handing out -- there are no rules in fiction, after all. ( )

GIVE A BOY A GUN by Todd Strasser, Simon & Schuster BFYR, September 2000

I painfully recall those couple of years in my early adolescence when I really got pushed around a lot. For me it was junior high in the late 60's when I'd be constantly harassed by older or bigger kids. Walk down the hall or down the stairs and get tripped or shoved into a locker or have your books slammed out of your arms sending your papers flying everywhere. Sit on the school bus and be whacked with a book by a passerby or have your hat snatched. Occasionally I remember an even bigger kid coming along and asserting his dominance over the bully who was picking on me -- yep, that was me, the bottom of the food chain--but usually these incidents became solitary, painful memories of the time when I was a good, quiet student treading water in a sea of raging hormones.

I cannot recall ever having the urge to exact revenge (beyond a hand gesture). But, then again, it was a time that, in retrospect, seemed to pass soon enough as I came into my own in high school. But what would I have been like if I'd had to endure year after year of such torture through high school as well as junior high?

In GIVE A BOY A GUN by Todd Strasser, we meet two teenage boys who, after enduring years of torture by their school's most popular students, do take revenge. In a fictional account which recalls real-life school shootings in Littleton (CO), Jonesboro (AK), and Springfield (OR), the two teens take a group of students and teachers hostage at a dance in the high school gymnasium.

Strasser presents the story in the form of quotes by the teens (Brendan Lawlor and Gary Searle) as well as their friends, their tormentors and other schoolmates, current and former teachers, their parents and neighbors.

At the foot of many pages the author provides us with facts concerning gun availability, violence and manufacture as well as quotes relating to those tragic real episodes which have been occurring in schools across America. (Information Strasser has compiled includes the federal estimate that there are roughly 250 million people and 240 million firearms in America, that 12 percent of students say they know another student who has brought a gun to school, and that in 1996 there were more than 6,000 American students expelled for bringing a gun to school.)

In the story we learn how the physical and verbal abuse heaped daily upon the two teens by popular football players and the in-crowd is tolerated by the faculty. We meet teachers who, themselves, treat the unpopular kids as outcasts in the classroom. As Allison Findley (Gary's girlfriend) points out: "If Deirdre Bunsun is talking in world history, it's like 'Excuse me, Deirdre, now pay attention.' But if Allison Findley is talking, Ms. Arnold stops the class and stares at her. And then the rest of the kids stare at her. It's a light slap on the wrist for Dierdre, it's public humiliation for Allison."

We come to understand how Brendan, Gary, and their little circle of friends seek to escape from unremitting daily reinforcement of the message that they are worthless vermin. We hear from Gary's mom who was concerned about his spending the better part of Saturdays "cocooned within his quilt." We learn how Brendan grows up hating and reacting to injustices, is at one point compared to Rosa Parks by an old friend, and tries to take out his aggressions on video games. We see transcripts of their chatroom discussions. We hear how over a period of years the boys' desire to kill the kids who are torturing them evolves from the relatively innocent anger of youngsters to the determined and complicated planning that leads to the story's climactic evening in the gymnasium. Allison Findley wonders at one point about the darkness that she has seen developing in Brendan: "I don't know where it came from. Whether it had always been inside him, or whether it just started to grow because of the way people treated him in school."

Several of the story's most insightful quotes are from an overburdened school counselor, Beth Bender, who survives that night in the gym: "And that's when I had an epiphany. Can't you see why they were doing it? They had no protection. They couldn't get away from the bullies and tormentors. Not here, not in jail, not anywhere. So why not kill them? So why not kill themselves? What difference would it make either way? In another passage Beth refutes the assertion that this was an unpreventable act by crazies. "Every year you hear about kids walking into their school and shooting classmates and teachers. You don't hear about them walking into McDonald's and shooting people. They don't go to the town swimming pool or the movies and do it. Most of these kids live in neighborhoods with elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools. But they don't go to some other school. They always go to their own school. It's not random. It's a message, and the sooner we wake up and listen, the better.

A message I got from GIVE A BOY A GUN is that, in this situation, both sides were victims and both sides were perpetrators. A message that Beth wants us to hear is that parents, teachers, administrators, and thoughtful students with influence on their peers need to begin the process of instituting programs and procedures to teach conflict resolution, to teach respect for one another's differences, and to prohibit the teasing, the physical and the verbal abuse that we see Gary and Brendan having to endure from all the way back in grade school. There needs to be zero tolerance of name-calling and the other abuse these boys are subjected to. Of course, the book's other theme is the gun issue. It appears that the debate over guns in America will continue beyond my lifetime, but, clearly, the fact that temperamental, hormonal teenagers are so easily able to obtain guns is an issue that has got to be addressed sooner rather than later.

Todd Strasser surely has written one of the year's most thought-provoking books. Fail to read it at your own risk. Simon & Schuster is marketing the book for ages 12 and up. Parents and educators of younger children should read the book themselves and share the messages.

Richie Partington
Richie's Picks
BudNotBuddy@aol.com ( )