Simon

“Dwayne's bad chemicals made him take a loaded thirty-eight caliber revolver from
under his pillow and stick it in his mouth. This was a tool whose only purpose was to
make holes in human beings. It looked like this:
In Dwayne's part of the planet, anybody who wanted one could get one down at his
local hardware store. Policemen all had them. So did the criminals. So did the people
caught in between.
Criminals would point guns at people and say, "Give me all your money," and the
people usually would. And policemen would point their guns at criminals and say, "Stop"
or whatever the situation called for, and the criminals usually would. Sometimes they
wouldn't. Sometimes a wife would get so mad at her husband that she would put a hole
in him with a gun. Sometimes a husband would get so mad at his wife that he would put
a hole in her. And so on.
In the same week Dwayne Hoover ran amok, a fourteen-year-old Midland City boy
put holes in his mother and father because he didn't want to show them the bad report
card he had brought home. His lawyer planned to enter a plea of temporary insanity,
which meant that at the time of the shooting the boy was unable to distinguish the
difference between right and wrong.
· Sometimes people would put holes in famous people so they could be at least fairly
famous, too. Sometimes people would get on airplanes which were supposed to fly to
someplace, and they would offer to put holes in the pilot and co-pilot unless they flew
the airplane to someplace else.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions