Weaponry enabled Fla. gunman to ambush FBI

Witnesses employ a simple, repetitive phrase to describe America’s most shocking killings. That is, if Americans can still be shocked by the carnage inflicted by yet another madman with a military-style assault weapon.

They retrieve words from childhood play. From cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers. Juxtaposing an incongruent innocence against the bloody horrors of rapidfire, high-velocity mass shootings.

The simplicity works. They say boom, boom, boom.

Julius McLymont said it Tuesday, describing the gunfire he had heard coming from his neighbor’s apartment. “Boom, boom, boom, boom,” McLymont said.

Add another 40 or so booms to approximate the soundscape of mayhem, as David Lee Huber, a suspected purveyor of child pornography, ambushed FBI agents outside his front door with a volley of semi-automatic gunfire. The barrage ripped through the closed front door of his Sunrise townhouse and killed two FBI agents, Daniel Alfin and Laura Schwartzenberger, just outside. Three other agents were wounded. (Huber died a short time later from a self-inflicted wound.)

Boom, boom, boom. We’ve fairly worn out the expression after so many assault weapon shootings. “It was like, boom, boom, boom, boom, 10 or 15 shots really fast,” Linda Lara told reporters after she eluded the killer during the 2019 El Paso massacre. More booms followed, as a single gunman with a knock-off AK-47 assault rifle killed 22 and injured 23 others.

Just 13 hours later in Dayton, Ohio, another gunman fired bursts from his AR-15 along a crowded entertainment district, killing nine people, wounding 27. “Just boomboom-boom-boom-boom-boom rapid,” survivor Anthony Reynolds said. “You could tell there’s a big gun. You’re not going to get those from no handgun. You’re not.”

Another big gun, another AR-15, enabled a social misfit to transform Feb. 14, 2018, into the darkest day in Broward County history. His murderous rampage through Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School — killing 17, wounding another 17 — took just six minutes. “We heard, ‘Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!’ right outside of the door,” social studies teacher Ivy Schamis told the Sun Sentinel.

A shooter required only five minutes inside Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 to slaughter 20 little kids and six adults with his AR-15 variant. The mother of a first grader who survived the horror told reporters that she had thought it might help her young son escape his recurring nightmares if he described what he heard that day as he hid from the gunman. “I wanted my son to get it out rather than keep it in. My son said, ‘I heard breaking glass and boom-boomboom-boom-boom-boom-boom . . . ‘ “

A woman badly wounded in the 2015 husband-and-wife attack on California’s San Bernardino County Health Department — 14 killed and 22 seriously injured — described how the shooters found her lying on the office floor. “That’s when one of them came by and kicked me in my right leg. Then I just hear ‘boom. Boom, boom, boom’,” she said. “And I just knew ‘I’m hit.’ “

Jennette McCoy recalled standing at the bar of the Pulse nightclub on Orlando on a June night in 2016. Then “boom, boom, boom.” Until a lone gunman with a Sig Sauer MCX assault rifle had killed 49 and wounded another 53.

At that point, the Orlando massacre was the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, a tenuous distinction in a nation that applies few controls on the purchase of assault rifles. Fifteen months later, a shooter with a virtual armory of AR-15s set another ignominious record, firing from a high-rise hotel room into spectators at an outdoor music festival. In ten minutes, the killer got off 1,058 rounds, killing 60, wounding 411. “Boom, boom, a guy goes down,” one of the performers said. “We turn around, boom, boom, another girl goes down.”

Same expression had been voiced by a survivor of the 2012, Aurora, Colorado, killing — 12 killed, 70 injured in seven minutes. “Every few seconds it was just: Boom, boom, boom,” she said. “He would reload and shoot and anyone who would try to leave would just get killed.”

The simple quote shows up in news accounts after dozens of other multiple killings committed with weaponry that most advanced nations bar from civilian ownership. That includes last month’s drive-by shooting in Miami’s Liberty City in which a six-year-old girl was deadly collateral damage. “I heard ‘boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.’ It was so fast,” a witness told Channel 7 News.

The phase has become American shorthand for the kind of rapid-fire firearm horror that killed two FBI agents in Sunrise Tuesday. Until boom, boom, boom signals the very death of common sense.

Fred Grimm, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976. Reach him by email at leogrimm@gmail.com or on Twitter: @ grimm_fred