Shots Fired in Terminal 2

August 1, 2018
In January 2017, novelist Hazelgrove was returning with his family from a vacation trip. During a layover at the Fort Lauderdale airport, a gunman opened fire in one of the terminals, killing five people. Although Hazelgrove and his family were in a different terminal, he soon found himself caught up in the panic that follows any mass shooting. His book uses the Fort Lauderdale incident as a frame, but its real subject is mass shootings in the U.S. How does a weaponized human being come into being? What is the historical basis for the right to bear arms? To what degree should we hold gun manufacturers responsible? How can we make the places where large groups of people congregate safer? What can we learn from the spate of recent mass shootings, in Sandy Hook, at Stoneman Douglas High School, at Virginia Tech? Hazelgrove is a talented writer, and it is impossible to read this deeply personal, questioning, powerful book without feeling sadness both for the victims of mass shootings but also, perhaps counterintuitively, for the shooters themselves, who might have followed a different course if they had received help when they needed it.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)