My Son William

by Bill J

My sixteen year old son William was shot and killed in 1997 at a fast food restaurant where he was working. He was on his second day at work, and he was where he was supposed to be. He had this brand new job and he was very excited about it. A man caught William as he was coming out the back door, and grabbed him from behind and put a semiautomatic handgun up to William's neck, and he told William to open the door.

William turned around and knocked on the door, the manager was still inside. She looked through the peephole and saw William standing there with somebody behind him with a gun up to his neck and she realized that this was really a very dangerous situation, and so she opened the door, did exactly everything we tell people to do when they have this kind of confrontation. And as soon as the door was unlocked and opened, for whatever reason, the man shot William through the neck and killed him.

The guy was caught five minutes later by the police and he's now serving a life sentence without parole in Virginia for the murder.

I grew up around rifles and shotguns -- my dad hunted with his brothers. My uncles and my cousins went out hunting, I didn't particularly want to learn how to shoot animals, but I clinked cans with a .22 and BB guns and learned how to shoot in Boy Scouts -- a pretty normal boyhood life out in the country. And one of the things that I started to realize as I was looking into the gun industry after my son was killed, was that this wasn't my father and grandfather's gun industry anymore. It had changed.

I had always sort of implicitly trusted firearms and the people that sold them, and then I began to realize that with this whole new subculture of violence that's been propagated throughout our culture and our society, that gun dealers don't care. They just don't care. The manufacturers don't care, the people that sell them don't care, and if I were to write a letter to the people that made the gun that killed my son, I'd get a letter back saying "Well we're really sorry about what happened, but it's legal for us to make these guns, it's legal for us to sell these guns, we're going to continue to do so, so leave us alone." That's their attitude.

I became very disillusioned and I realized that there are a lot of questions that I did not know existed about the gun industry. And as I got connected with other gun violence survivors, these questions start to arise, and you start finding out things. And so, our response to that is, "Oh my gosh, that's nuts," and we get involved with other victims, we get involved with victims' organizations.

And I'll guarantee you one thing, we do not go to the NRA for solace. We do not go to the gun manufacturers with out grief. We go to people who understand and to people who can help us move forward. And typically that takes a form of activism, where we begin writing letters to our legislators, we begin working on legislation, we begin testifying for good gun laws, we begin getting involved in organizations and donating to organizations like the Brady campaign.

But even then we are in a very difficult position because the gun industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. And that's just buying and selling new guns, that doesn't include the camouflage clothing, the accessories, the holsters, the hunting clothing and all of the magazines that are out there everyday spreading their propaganda about how wonderful it is to own a gun and how every man, woman, and child should have the right to do so. I used to read Field and Stream when I went to my grandfather's house and I sat there and read all the articles, you know it wasn't any of this propaganda garbage that you're seeing today.

One of the things that we are deeply distressed by now that my wife and I have become far more involved and more informed about the gun industry is that the gun industry really doesn't care about the people that buy their firearms. They don't care about the blood that's spilled; they don't care about what's going to happen to that firearm after it's purchased. They are in the business to make money.

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