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Doug and his friend Scott, 15, debated this problem for several days, turning the shotgun over and over in their hands, carefully inspecting and cleaning every part. They bought a box of shells from a friend and practiced loading and unloading the gun. Finally one Saturday, they drove out of town and headed for the countryside. "We didn't know quite what we were going to do until we found this tree near a cornfield that was split right down the middle into a V," says Doug. He loaded one shell and carefully worked the gun into the crotch of the tree until it fit tightly. Then, while both boys crouched behind the sides of the tree, Doug reached around to the gun, felt for the trigger, closed his eyes and squeezed. "I just love that sound," he says.
In four months, Doug figures, he's done nine drive-by shootings, aiming mostly at cars and houses. "It's basically revenge, that sort of thing," he says. Like when he shot five times at a truck that belonged to the boyfriend of a judge's daughter -- a roundabout response to the judge's conviction of several of his friends for various offenses. "I'm not actually aiming at anybody," he says. "But once my older brother missed a baby's head by a quarter of an inch. It was in all the news."
The roar of Doug's shotgun is the sound of a growing national tragedy. America's easy availability of guns and the restlessness of its youth have finally collided with horrific results. Gunshots now cause 1 of every 4 deaths among American teenagers, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Bullets killed nearly 4,200 teenagers in 1990, the most recent year for which figures are available, up from 2,500 in 1985. An estimated 100,000 students carry a gun to school, according to the National Education Association. In a survey released last week, pollster Louis Harris found alarming evidence of a gun culture among the 2,508 students he polled in 96 schools across the U.S. Fifteen percent of students in the sixth through 12th grades said they have carried a handgun in the past 30 days, 11% said they have been shot at, and 59% said they know where to get a gun if they need one.
But even the worst schools are safer than the streets, which is why summer is the deadliest season. For many teenagers, with their undeveloped sense of mortality and craving for thrills, gunplay has become a deadly sport. "You fire a gun and you can just hear the power," says Doug. "It's like yeah!"
Not long ago, many Americans dismissed the slaughter as an inner-city problem. But now the crackle of gunfire echoes from the poor, urban neighborhoods to the suburbs of the heartland. Omaha, with a population of 340,000, is just an average Midwestern city, which is why the story of its armed youth shows how treacherous the problem has become. The Omaha neighborhood of Benson, a tidy grid of suburban-style homes on the northwest side, has been taken by surprise. Three dozen shaken parents and troubled teenagers gathered on a rainy Tuesday night in May at the Benson Community Center, bracing for summer's onslaught and groping for solid ground in a world where cruising can include drive-by shootings and where a semiautomatic handgun can be the most exciting thing in a boy's life, the 1990s equivalent of a shiny new bicycle. "My son was shot last summer," announces Chris Messick, a mother of three. "They almost shot his head off."