The tick-tock of the clock was off rhythm. Every minutes, it called out a second. All characters stand frozen to their places. It was a brief moment of fear and panic that marked the very meaning of terrorism itself. Slowly the tick-tocks sped up, the scene began to unravel. The covered man's instrument of destruction came over his shoulder, and the barrel pointed to the ceiling. Now seconds came far too quickly, the characters now moving frantically to either escape or to take cover.
The room filled with sound as the weapon fired off shot after shot into the lifeless ceiling. What the man did not notice however, was that he was not the only man in the room with a weapon capable of taking lives. The unseen hero in the corner did neither ran nor hid, he simply drew his own weapon. Smaller it was, but it was enough to tranquilize the situation. The hostile intruder didn't even see the hero until it was too late. He fell before he took even a single life. The authorities arrived late, as expected, but weren't of any real use but clearing out the scene and congratulating the hero.
In another reality, the innocent people of this world are not to carry weapons of lethal ability. The tick-tock of the clock was off rhythm. Every minute, it called out a second. All characters stand frozen to their places. It was a brief moment of fear and panic that marked the very meaning of terrorism itself. Slowly the tick-tocks sped up, the scene began to unravel. The covered man's instrument of destruction came over his shoulder, and the barrel pointed to the ceiling. Now seconds came far too quickly, the characters now moving frantically to either escape or to take cover.
The room filled with sound as the weapon fired off shot after shot into the lifeless ceiling. The man needn't take caution, these people had no means of defense. A mother with a suckling baby ran, tears in her eyes, to the emergency exit on the other side of the building. Her life, along with her infant son's, was cut short by the armed man's bullet. A teenage couple attempted to hide under their table, but bullets penetrate wood. As men and women attempted to run from the man, they were simply mowed down by the power of the illegal weapon.
The authorities arrived early enough to get a good look of the scene; bodies strewn all across the room, blood coating the walls of the diner. The man had turned the weapon on himself as a means of escape, he understood that it would either be a bullet of his own or a policeman's. What is the difference between these two scenarios? The armed intruder, the one that was to break the law in the first place, simply broke the law that he wasn't to carry a weapon. The law-abiding citizen listened to the law, and carried on himself no weapon for defense of himself or others. What are laws like these if the people that they are meant to protect are only hurt by them?