The full, accidental text, reading "gunman be at west hall today," was reported to police around 11 30 a.m.
The final straw that drives her to undertake what evolves into a full-scale peace movement is an I.R.A. gunman's accidental shooting of an innocent neighbor who is caught in crossfire.
The N.R.A.'s cherished Wild West, good-guy-gunman scenario discounts all the other, more plausible possibilities: of accidental firings, suicides, gun thefts and other lethal mayhem that regularly occurs when guns and people mix.
The brilliantly contrived plot is in the manner of classical farce but it leads to mayhem on a massive scale that escalates from a broken nose to an accidental killing, butchery by axe, and execution by CIA gunmen.
The accidental heroine * Patricia Maisch has been hailed as an unlikely hero after helping to stop the killing spree of the alleged Tucson gunman, Jared Lee Loughner, and almost certainly preventing him from killing more than the six people who died.
