Gun Crazy!

Hardly a week seems to go by without news of another multiple shooting in the US. Are these tragedies simply the work of crazed individuals who have spent years harbouring obscure grudges, their vengeful killing sprees enabled by the ready availability of firearms, or are they actually part of a sinister conspiracy? “Trust me, those rampages, they ain’t random,” declares fifty-eight year old Abe Zinkler, a former law enforcement officer from Tennessee. “They’re all carefully orchestrated – the shooters, the victims, everything! Nothing’s left to chance!” Zinkler, speaking exclusively to The Sleaze, has revealed that such shootings are part of a top secret US government conspiracy. “It’s no accident that all the victims of these gun massacres are too infirm, too stupid or too unfit to simply run away and hide when they see a crazy man with a gun coming,” confides Zinkler, as he cleans his pump action shotgun in the front room of his Fuckle County house. “By allowing them to be killed, the government is ensuring that only its fittest citizens survive!” According to Zinkler successive US administrations have used these apparently random gun rampages as a form of culling, with the aim of improving the country’s gene-pool. He believes that it is particularly significant that many of these massacres occur in High Schools and colleges. “That way the unfit are removed from the gene pool before they have had a chance to procreate and cause further genetic pollution,” he confides. “Trust me, it’s always the gimpy kids with leg braces or in wheelchairs, who buy it. Them, or the fat ones.” Similarly, other popular venues for mass killings, malls and postal sorting offices, provide prime opportunities for removing undesirables from the gene pool. “Those postal workers are all work-shy deadbeats,” Zinkler declares. “As for the malls, they’re just chock full of mindless consumer drones, gorging themselves on junk food and buying imported crap. Is it any wonder the government wants them dead?” Sceptics claim to have identified a major flaw in Zinkler’s theory – namely that the person doing the culling is surely exactly the sort of person you’d want removed from the country’s genetic heritage, yet they survive. “Hah! That’s the genius of the system – in reality the shooters are either gunned down by the police, shoot themselves, or are captured and executed,” retorts Zinkler, spitting a wad of tobacco across his front room and into a brass spittoon. “If they’re lucky enough to commit their crimes in a state without the death penalty, they’ll find themselves banged up in a maximum security prison or secure mental institution for life. Either way, the chances of having sex anywhere other than up the kiester are minimal, and the last time I checked, you couldn’t reproduce through the back door. So, no replication of their defective genes.”

Zinkler claims he was first alerted to the conspiracy by an imprisoned gunman some twenty years ago. “He had a lucid episode when he stopped taking his medication, and blabbed the whole mess to me when I was escorting him between jails,” he says. “Of course, I thought he was just a whack job and paid no attention at the time.” The prisoner told him a wild tale of how he’d been recruited by the FBI after sending a crank letter to NASA warning of aliens sabotaging the space programme. “He reckoned they’d taken him to a secret camp in Montana, where he received weapons training and was brainwashed with a combination of drugs and hypnosis,” reveals Zinkler. “They stoked up his paranoia, making him believe that the world really was against him.” Returned to his local community with no conscious memory of the indoctrination, the prisoner claimed that the FBI had then manipulated his life, ensuring he missed out on job opportunities and had no success with women. “Eventually, several years later he finally went crazy and shot up an Eagle Scouts camp, killing five people,” recalls Zinkler. “He claimed that he’d been told to do it by a mysterious voice at the end of his phone – when we checked, the telephone company told us he’d been cut off months before for not paying his bills!” The former cop was only reminded of the conversation years later, when another gunman, who had been arrested before he could kill anyone, claimed to have a recording of one of the voices which had been controlling him. “I was just expecting to hear a tape of him talking to himself,” says Zinkler. “But when he played it I was shocked to recognise the voice of an FBI man I’d worked with a few years before!” Needless to say, the tape mysteriously vanished, and the would-be shooter was sent to a secure psychiatric facility. Nevertheless, his suspicions aroused, Zinkler embarked upon his own private investigation into the conspiracy, claiming to have uncovered a massive covert operation involving a number of Federal agencies, co-ordinated by the FBI. “The Feds even make sure these crazies have no problems buying their guns legally,” he opines. “Why else do you think the gun laws never get amended, no matter how many of these massacres there are? Hell, the National Rifle Association is secretly funded by the government, just to make sure there’s no chance of tougher firearms restrictions!”

Not surprisingly, Zinkler’s claims have been met with derision in many quarters, including the conspiracy community. “If the US government wanted to ‘improve the breed’, surely they’d be better off wiping out entire inner-city ghettoes,” muses Joseph Moppsoon, Senior Lecturer in Political Conspiracies at Deptford College of Technology. “The number of people killed in these random gun rampages are just too small to have any significant impact on the genetic make-up of an entire nation!” Zinkler believes the answer to this criticism is obvious. “Damn it all, they have to do it this way to avoid arousing suspicion!” he says, agitatedly pacing around the room, swigging from a bottle of bourbon. “It all looks as if it is the result of random acts of violence perpetrated by psychopaths – how can the government be held responsible for that? That’s the genius of it – eugenics without resorting to concentration camps like the Nazis had to! Heck, if only they’d thought of it they’d still be ruling half the world!” Moppsoon remains unconvinced. “Look, if this plan was really working, wouldn’t the US be leading the world in just about every field of endeavour?” he asks. “Wouldn’t their armed forces sweep all before them in war after war? The truth is that they’re on the brink of recession again and are getting their arses kicked in Iraq – just like they did in Vietnam!” Zinkler, who fears that his revelations could make him a target for allegedly crazed gunmen, claims that it is precisely because the culling isn’t working properly that he’s now exposing it. “They’re killing the wrong people,” he says, peering anxiously out of the window from between the slats of his Venetian blinds. “It’s all very well shooting geeks and fat bastards, but what they really need to do is kill more blacks, Jews, homos and commies. Trust me, that’s the kind of purging which will make America great again!”