Suzanna Hupp 1991 cafeteria shooting testimony
The closing line is the one that stays with you. Suzanna Hupp says she'd rather be sitting in a prison cell on a felony charge, with her parents still alive and able to meet their grandchildren. That's the cost she's putting on the table. Her argument for keeping the right to bear arms starts with a quote: "God created men, but Sam Colt made them equal." Then she walks through what happened. Lunch with her parents at a cafeteria a friend of theirs ran. They'd just finished eating when a pickup truck came through the window. Nobody in the room read it as anything but an accident at first. Then the gunfire started. She and her father hit the floor and hauled a table over themselves. Her mother was down behind it. Hupp was waiting for the usual demand, wallets on the table. It never came. The shooting just kept going. It took her about forty-five seconds to work out what she was actually looking at. He wasn't robbing the place. He was moving through the hall, dropping people one after another. Her purse had a pistol in it. Then she remembered the thing she calls the stupidest mistake of her life: a couple of months before, she'd taken the gun out and left it in the car. In Texas at the time, carrying a concealed weapon was against the law. Her father got up and said they had to do something, that the man was going to kill everyone there. He went at the shooter. The shooter turned and put a round in his chest, which nudged his direction a little. Someone broke a window. When the shooter's back was turned, Hupp jumped up, grabbed her mother by the collar, and yelled that they had to run. She says her legs grew wings and she went out through the window. Her mother didn't follow. What happened after that she got from police officers, some of them her own patients. They were in the next building over, at a conference in the hotel. And here's where the gun control logic eats itself: the hotel manager had told them to leave their weapons in their cars so other guests wouldn't be alarmed. Minutes were burned while they fetched the guns from the trunks and ran to the scene. They walked in on bodies and no clear idea who the shooter was. What told them was a woman kneeling in the aisle, holding a man who was dying. A man of about thirty came up to her, put a gun against her head. She looked at him, bowed her head, and he fired. That's how they knew. They fired into the ceiling, he ran into the toilet area, a few shots were exchanged, and he killed himself. Twenty-three people died that day. Hupp's parents were among them. The shooter doesn't get her anger. She calls him a madman, and says being angry at him is like being angry at a rabid animal. You don't scold a rabid animal. You put it down. The weapon doesn't get her anger either. It didn't walk into the cafeteria on its own. It didn't pull its own trigger. Her anger is aimed at the legislators. As she tells it, the law stripped her of the right to protect herself and her family. TikTok via
