Instead, the home viewers saw horror. A disgruntled ex-reporter shot Alison, Adam, and Vicki in cold blood. He was a lunatic, hired at the station in spite of what should have been abundant red flags, and fired only after showing so many signs of mounting mental instability that it was impossible to forge a pretext for keeping him on.
He had planned the shooting for months, claiming to be inspired by instructions from God Himself, or whatever voice sounded most like God’s within the howling storm of his diseased brain. He faxed a manifesto to ABC News on the morning of the murder, claiming inspiration from the Columbine shooters and the Virginia Tech gunman. He promised the Charleston church killer a “race war.” His outlook on the world had been molded by killers, and thanks to the countless news programs that probed for insight into the minds of these worthless individuals, there was no shortage of grist for the mill.
That morning, he drove to Bridgewater Plaza, strapped a GoPro camera to his head, and using a legally purchased handgun, shot three people, killing Alison and Adam. Then he strolled back to his car and uploaded the video to Facebook.
He uploaded my daughter’s murder to Facebook.
He then tweeted a link to the video to maximize his audience.
Nothing is ever lost on the internet, no matter how horrific or vicious. That video is still out there floating around, and it always will be. They may call it the Information Superhighway, but it runs above a toxic cesspool.
I haven’t seen that video, and I never will. I am grateful to whatever higher powers may or may not exist that I wasn’t watching WDBJ the morning of the murder.
Would you believe that people have tried to show me that video? It’s happened more than once. People have even tried to describe it to me. Many of them have meant well and have been surprised when I lashed out at them.
I know how the fucking thing ends. I don’t need to watch it to see how it happened.
Even though I have never seen it, it is hideous enough to know that it’s out there, floating in the digital ether, just a few clicks away for any sick son of a bitch who wants to see an innocent young woman gunned down in cold blood.
Anyone who chooses to watch that video will not merely see my daughter die. They will also see the moment I died. The person that I used to be is gone, obliterated like a sandcastle in a windstorm.
My heart stopped on August 26, 2015. I still think, speak, and eat on occasion, but I’m a different person now, a dead thing made animate through some cruel miracle. To paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, for the rest of my life, the shadow of the axe will hang over every joy.
Every day since August 26, 2015, is one day further from Alison, another mile marker on the path leading away from my life’s greatest treasure. One more day since the last time I saw her, since I heard her voice, since I told her how much I loved her, how much she meant to me. I would have taken her place without a moment’s hesitation. I would have died without regret to spare her an ounce of pain. If I had the power to turn back time, I would do just that.
Well-intentioned people tell me that each day is not one day further from Alison; it’s one day closer to “healing,” to “getting over it.” They offer their “thoughts and prayers.” Is there anything more worthless than thoughts and prayers? More than three years have passed, and while I am gradually learning to cope, there is no miraculous healing on the horizon, no divine intervention that will make me somehow accept what happened to my daughter.
So, what is there?
There is righteous fury. And there is a desire to spend the rest of my life doing whatever it takes to prevent this from ever happening to another family.
Let me be perfectly clear: this is not a book about reaching out to the other side, those people who feel that the occasional mass shooting is the price that must be paid to ensure that an amendment drafted in the age of muskets should also apply to a Bushmaster rifle capable of killing people just as fast as you can pull the trigger—faster if you buy a bump stock. I’ve talked to these people. I live in southwest Virginia; I’m surrounded by these people. The opposition is interested in what I have to say only to the extent that they can glean tidbits with which to assassinate my character (and rest assured, plenty will buy this book for that exact purpose).
I have said, in countless interviews, that I don’t want to take anyone’s guns away. All I want is meaningful commonsense firearm legislation that will keep guns out of the hands of maniacs. Yet when I make the mistake of reading the comments at the end of those interview articles or videos, what do the gun nuts have to say?
“Andy Parker wants to take everyone’s guns away.”
Someone ought to study the correlation between reading comprehension and gun ownership. Maybe I can find a way to get through to the folks who sit where that X crosses on the line graph.
But rest assured, my ire isn’t only reserved for the gun nuts. Since becoming a full-time activist, I’ve had plenty of experience with folks who, like me, want commonsense gun legislation. I was a spokesman for Everytown for Gun Safety, the biggest gun violence prevention nonprofit in America, until we parted ways. I felt too constrained by their timid message. And they thought I was a wild man.
The NRA and the politicians the NRA pays off paint organizations like Everytown and people who support them as rabid, gun-hating liberal lunatics. Perhaps in response to that, those who oppose gun violence have tried to scale back their message, to whisper rather than shout, to search for common ground in the middle of a raging battlefield.
This is the wrong approach.
This cause needs angry people. It needs people who have lost daughters and sons, wives and husbands, people who are not afraid to stand up and say, “I appreciate the fact that you want to buy ten guns per month and walk into McDonald’s with a SIG Sauer hanging off your hip, but I lost the goddamn light of my life, and maybe, just this once, you should listen to what I have to say.”
That, to a large extent, is what this book is all about. It’s not about holding hands around the campfire and singing “Kumbaya.” It’s not about reaching across aisles and finding common ground between people who want every man, woman, and child armed to the teeth and people who want to feel safe in a grocery store. It’s not about rattling off dry gun violence statistics to try and convince a militia member that they don’t really need another AR15.
This is a book about an ordinary man who lost his daughter to gun violence and is mad as hell about it. This is a book about showing people, in painful detail, what it’s like to receive the worst phone call of your life and feel your guts get ripped right out on the kitchen floor. This is a book about struggling to make something meaningful out of a meaningless death.
Along the way, some minds might be changed. That would be wonderful. But I’m not reaching out to the lunatic fringe with this book. This is a book for the average Joe, the massive majority of people in the middle who don’t have strong feelings one way or the other. This book is designed to interest them, hook them, and then grab them by the collar and shake them until they realize the full magnitude of what we’re dealing with in this country—until they realize that there’s a damn good chance this could happen to them, too.
You might wonder why I’m the person to write this book, and that’s a fair question. After all, there are other grieving parents out there, and their numbers increase by the day.
There are a few things that set me apart. The first is that the horrifically unique nature of my daughter’s murder was without precedent in our nation’s history, and if there is a just God, it will remain so.
The second is that, since Alison’s death, I have devoted every day of my life to spreading a message of gun violence prevention. My name and number are in a lot of important phones. I’ve written countless articles for Newsweek and the New York Daily News, for CNN.com and USA Today, for the Washington Post and the Huffington Post. I’ve been featured in People magazine and Cosmopolitan. I’ve