A Classic Three-Ingredient Side Dish

In the multicultural melting pot that is America, we seize upon the best of the world’s cuisine and make it our own. We process out the fiber and process in the fat, sodium, and sugar. We see your provolone, Parmesan, and Swiss and raise you a plastic-wrapped slice of American, which looks as plastic as its wrapping. Throw that cheese and some bacon on a burger patty formed from half a pound of ground beef, put it on a bun, add a pile of fries, and you have a meal fit for the average American third grader. We do things big here, and then we sometimes even name those things “Big”—Mac, Gulp, Blood Clot, whatever. But there’s one side dish we Americans do bigger and better than anyone, and it goes with every occasion or non-occasion and every time of day or year, and it is not imported or adapted from another culture. It is uniquely our own, the quintessential American side dish: the shooting.

The recipe for a classic American shooting requires only three ingredients, sometimes referred to as the three G’s of a basic bullet attack: a Guy, a Gun, and a Grievance. My wife has suggested that a target is also required, but that’s like saying that a chocolate chip cookie cannot exist without the person who may eat it. Besides, the target is always a person or persons who are basic representations of the grievance. If Sal the Incel’s grievance is his self-professed inability to get laid in spite of his undoubtedly superior intellect and online gaming skills, then he will probably target the ignorant/evil women who have doomed him to a life of celibacy and the vain, vapid “Chads” whom those silly/wicked women throw themselves on in bars, in bedrooms, and in the dark corners of Sal’s imagination.

There are a variety of guys you can bake into a shooting, but the most common ones are socially awkward yet highly self-important young men who have failed to live up to their grandiose self images. Twenty-four-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald is a good example at the upper age limit of this group. You can go older, as was quite famously done once with a sixty-four-year-old guy in Las Vegas, but the odds of success are much greater with a guy who hasn’t ripened for anywhere near that long.

It is almost never as big a hit, but you can substitute a gal for the guy ingredient in this recipe, as was done just yesterday in Wisconsin. This is so rare that it immediately causes speculation among armchair chefs on social media that the gal in the recipe was transgender. The Daily Wire made just such a claim this morning, but you must take that with a grain of salt because those Daily Wire folks are very finicky. They suspect that trans, gay, or immigrant ingredients have been hidden in every dish like onions in their mother’s meatloaf. Do not worry, none of those variations have any impact on the final product.

If you really must substitute a gal for your guy ingredient, be prepared for a lot more prep time. From what I understand, a gal substituted into this recipe will most often need to be thoroughly beaten and battered like a chicken-fried steak, or the whole thing will fall apart. Also, this substitution renders a product usually served in small batches at home. This being a guide for beginners, we will stick to the classic guy ingredient.

The gun, of course, is both essential and widely available, but you can’t use ammo-free. Other than that, there are numerous options, and they can be used in combination as required. If your guy is a John Wick fan, your best choice is probably a semi-automatic pistol. Pistol purists will tell you that a revolver adds more kick to the recipe, and that’s true. However, a guy with Adam Lanza arms will likely fire one shot from a .44 magnum revolver, get pistol-punched between the eyes, and fall to the ground unconscious. Stick with the semi-auto and the highest-capacity magazine you can find. These are also widely available.

A high-capacity magazine is the secret sauce of most successful American shootings. It allows your young guy to be almost completely unskilled and still achieve an amazing end result. If the grievance paired with your young guy suggests a high body count, the high-capacity magazine is absolutely required. Without it, crucial time will be wasted changing magazines while students or movie-goers or Walmart shoppers scatter. The mark of a true amateur is adding a bump stock to the mix without a high-capacity magazine. You might as well be adding fuses without dynamite.

Now, your John Wick guy can also be paired with an AR-15 variant. (The high-capacity magazine remains crucial.) When I went to Iraq in 2003, my assigned weapon was a Beretta 9mm semi-automatic pistol, but I opted for the M-16. Even in close spaces, the semi-automatic rifle is a superior gun ingredient.

If your guy sees himself less as John Wick and more as Frank Castle from The Punisher, then you might want to throw in a scope for distance accuracy and a bipod for stability. You could even go with a bolt-action rifle if the grievance ingredient is focused on only one or two people, but this is rarely the case, and most guy ingredients pair better with maximum collateral damage. Also, if you go with the scope, bipod, and bolt-action rifle, and your shooting is off the mark, others are bound to doubt your kitchen skills and criticize your use of frivolous extras.

The grievance is by far the least tangible ingredient. The good news here is that you can throw in almost anything, and none of it has to make a bit of sense. You’ll find that many race-based grievances come with a manifesto, which increases the chances of achieving social media fame. You might think that grammatical errors and misspellings in the manifesto will ruin your shooting, but exactly the opposite is true. Grievances against women are also quite common, and you may even find a guy for your shooting who has beaten and battered a gal in his life to the point where she is almost ready to be substituted for the guy ingredient in a shooting served at home. If that is the case, your guy may be nearing his expiration date, and you will need to throw your shooting together quickly or find another guy with a grievance. Don’t worry, though. Guys and grievances are also widely available.

Finally, don’t put too much pressure on yourself. Shootings are served up regularly across the country. Some even substitute a toddler or a first grader for the guy, and the recipe kills! Master the basics and then challenge yourself a little. Every day, the news reports some new innovation you can try in this crazy culinary school. Who knows what tomorrow may bring? Bon appetit!

Note: some ingredients not widely available outside the United States.