Parkland, Fl • February 14, 2018

Jacob Renslinger speaks with a measure of resolve well beyond his years: “What people don’t get is: criminals don’t follow laws.” A sophomore at Parkland, Florida’s Stoneman Douglas High for another 30 minutes or so, Jacob’s reflecting on the inevitability of his circumstances.

“If you outlaw something, who’s the only one who gets to have it?” explains Renslinger, demonstrating the confidence his principal will describe as “precocious” when they retire the young J.V. quarterback’s jersey in memoriam some time next month. “It’s sure-as-shit not the law abiding citizens,” he concludes, using the expletive for only the 95th time in his brief life.

As Jacob continues, one of his classmates interjects. “There’s also this thing called the 2nd amendment,” proclaims Martin Pierce, a freshman in his 7th month of puberty. “We have rights… you can’t just take people’s guns because liberals don’t like them,” Pierce argues, his voice cracking in a way he’d hoped would clear-up before his first date in 2 weeks. “Our founding fathers knew that guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” he admonishes precisely 12 minutes before a .223 round leaves the 20" barrel of an AR-15 semi-automatic People, and around 12.0001 minutes before the AA-battery-sized bullet enters his person & kicks-off the triannual uptick in N.R.A. donations.

“Plus, freedom isn’t free. My brother’s in the Army in Afghanistan” offers another of Jacob’s classmates, Jeannette Librata, a freshman who’d grown 2 inches in height since her Bat Mitzvah the previous year. “He told me when his friends die fighting that it’s for a good cause, because they died to protect freedoms, and we should be proud” she shares. “So that’s cool, I guess, that I can make my big brother proud — and I didn’t even have to go to boot-camp!” she exclaims, her sentence punctuated from the hallway with the “klack-klack-klack” of a weapon the 13 year-old likely could’ve legally purchased with her Bat Mitzvah money.

“Exactly,” replies Jacob, who, since Heaven’s firewall blocks Twitter, will never get to enjoy the thoughts & prayers Congressional aides will tweet on their bosses’ behalf following the boy’s relegation to the past tense. “I think we, as a country, need to accept that some problems are too hard to solve,” adds Martin, who grew up a 160-minute drive from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

“If it wasn’t guns, it’d be knives” Jacob argues to everyone in the closet as the door to the classroom outside is kicked-in. “This shit happens,” he says, enjoying the 96th & final use of his favorite curse word, “here, Europe, everywhere,” he finishes, glancing sidelong towards the flag of the only developed country in the world where this shit happens.