By: Adam Cady, Staff Writer
Congratulations. Your outstanding product, the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, a tool designed exclusively for killing, proved its worth yet again by effortlessly slaughtering 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. As a proud American consumer, I appreciate the manufacturing of quality goods, and your fine weapon performed exactly as intended last week.
For whatever reason, the media and Parkland Police have yet to report your company’s reputable name, the name behind that young shooter’s legally purchased AR-15. So, let me be the first to commend you, the CEO, board of directors and other executives at that mysterious corporation, for your fine work. Despite your anonymity, you are undoubtedly proud.And you should be proud! The particular instrument of death which you and your competitors produce is as American as apple pie! Used previously in the Sandy Hook, Aurora, San Bernardino and Orlando shootings, AR-15-style rifles are truly the cornerstone of American life.
If history is any indication, you will be rewarded handsomely for your work. After most of the aforementioned demonstrations of your product’s efficacy, gun sales rose dramatically. I have no doubt the champagne flowed among you and your investors following the events of Parkland. I have no doubt you celebrated for days on end the deaths of those 17 people. Perhaps you are celebrating still. Believe me when I say, on behalf of all decent Americans, you deserve whatever’s coming to you.
And if naysayers like the shell-shocked students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School should come knocking at your door, pay them no mind. Surely, your friends at the National Rifle Association and in Congress will thank you for your service. Besides, those students are only jealous! They know better than anyone the immaculate construction of your product, which left their friends and teachers dead on the ground.
And if your sons or daughters should find themselves huddled in the corner of a classroom, collapsed in a puddle of their classmates’ blood, riddled with bullets fired by your magnificent product, then I sincerely hope that you will have the clarity of mind to cry, “Hooray! What a wonderful piece of machinery I’ve made.” If that day should ever come, I sincerely hope that all those millions of dollars you’ve made at the cost of other people’s children will be enough to fill that empty bed.
I hope that if, like so many parents across this country, you should find your family shattered through the barrel of an AR-15, you have the common decency to spit on your child’s miniature coffin, stand at their funeral and say, “Now is not the time for politics. Now is not the time for action. Now is the time to marvel at my product, this splendid tool for killing! So please, send us your thoughts and prayers. Not for the sake of our expendable child, but for the sake of our guns, for the AR-15 rifle. Send your thoughts and prayers for my bank account, may it never feel as empty and devastated as the halls of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.”