Posted on 10/09/2006 9:47:46 AM PDT by MeneMeneTekelUpharsin
JOPLIN, Mo. — A 13-year-old student fired an AK-47 inside his middle school this morning after confronting two others students and his principal, but no one was injured, authorities said. The student was wearing a mask and pointed the assault rifle at Principal Steve Gilbreth, Assistant Superintendent Steve Doerr and two students, saying, "not to make me do this," Superintendent Jim Simpson said. Simpson said the teen then fired a shot into the ceiling, breaking a water pipe, and said again, "Please don't make me do this."
"It was a very close call," Simpson said. Doerr and Gilbreth persuaded the student to leave the building, where he was confronted by two police officers with weapons drawn. The student dropped the rifle and was taken into custody, Simpson said. The student's identity was not released. Joplin police Officer Curt Farmer said officers found a note in the student's backpack indicating that he had placed an explosive in the school, which has about 700 students. Students in the school were moved to nearby Joplin Memorial Hall, and the school was closed while officers searched the building.
The student was wearing a mask and apparently had been planning an attack for a "long time," Simpson said. He didn't elaborate and said authorities did not know whether others were involved. Joplin, which has about 40,900 residents, is in southwest Missouri, on the Kansas border about 140 miles south of Kansas City. Schools across the country have been on alert after three deadly school shootings in three states in the span of a week, and several schools have been locked down or closed entirely during the past two weeks because of threats. In Pennsylvania Amish country this morning, church bells tolled across the region in remembrance of the five young girls who were shot to death at their one-room schoolhouse one week earlier.
Cheap Chinese crap or poorly maintained.
Beat me to it!!!
Just.....wow! I'll assume this is sarcasm.
Yeah.
In high school, I carried rifles and shotguns in the gun rack of my pickup truck all the time. It was very common, and totally ignored by the administration.
If any crackpot had tried to shoot up the school, he'd have had dozens of armed teenage boys shooting back at him within two minutes. And quite a few teachers too; my 5th-grade teacher always kept a riot shotgun locked in a rack in his Jeep, and I know half a dozen of my high school teachers were hunters.
-ccm
This might invalidate my prior conclusion that the boy was unwilling to die at the hands of the authorities.
It does highlight the nonsensical laws against so-called "Saturday Night Specials". Who in his right mind wants to limit the ability of a criminal to arm himself with an unreliable firearm?
I am the owner of a "cheap" semi-automatic copy of the AK-47. It's the second one I have owned, since the first one jammed on the second round I fired. Even the dealer was not able to get it unjammed. These arms cost so little to produce, that it was simply replaced.
Anti-gunners like to think that there is some difficulty to manufacturing such arms. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rifles and handguns are produced world-wide with some of the simplest of tools. The attractiveness of the AK-47 design is, in part, the ease of manufacture.
The one I own has the less expensive sheet-metal receiver, rather than the more dimensionally stable cast receiver.
Or, try an armed robbery in a gun shop. What are your chances? Slim. I know it has been tried, fatally.
Thanks for the ping! I have a friend who moved down there and teaches at that school - glad it ended the way it did.
We've had an ongoing problem with this at my high school...they recieved a threat last week and closed school for the day, made an arrest on Friday, and just this afternoon, they found a new one threatening to bring a AK-47 in to school tomorrow...decision about having school tomorrow is pending. We need some ideas- beyond arming the teachers, what can we do to stop this?
When only "professionals" are deemed to be the primary educators of kids, then whatever's goin' on in the current culture has an open invite into the classroom--including suicide, violence, etc. No educational environment is safe-proof and every one has pros & cons, but when parents delegate parenthood to daycare pros, you get what daycare offers--viruses, germs & all. And the same is true for any campus.
What I find hard to believe is that people snooze about the obvious that campuses, especially public-school campuses, have always been bully-rich environments. The only difference is that now the off-campus bullies are coming on-campus w/arms...and that the bullied kids on-campus are doing the same thing in too great of a degree.
This is getting OLD. I'm a Patriot and American. I believe that we have the Rights the Second Amendments give us. The problem is not the weapons its Mom and Dad, the kids that don't listen and are not being raised properly. I've owned weapons for many years and my children and my grand children aren't forced to be interested in weapons. They are made to understand what the weapons will do and what will happen to people if the weapons are used to harm people. None of mine have ever played with my weapons and I'm very proud of them. Yes they are children and they are watched. they do not ever try to go and play with them. They do shoot .22's, and they are supervised and expect to have discipline. They do. the public needs to learn that weapons aren't dangerous, it's the people that have them in their hands.
UPDATE: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1716475/posts
NOT AN AK-47!!!!
good post... thanks
I can't disagree with your analysis.
Do you agree that an armed principle or teacher, in a situation like those we've seen recently, could have prevented deaths by killing the 'bully'?
"detention for this kid"
I'm thinking more along the lines of jail time for parents who have no interest in controlling their kids.
Yeah, I believe you. If only a dozen teachers had been armed.
Not even a dozen. Two or three with a good plan,willpower, and actual firearm-competence.
At Columbine, the killers knew they would face at most one armed guard. That guard was assigned to Columbine because he was incompetent with a gun. If even a handful of anonymous responsible adults at the school had carried a concealed handgun, the killers would have hesitated to even enter the school. If they had gone ahead with their plans, the loss of life likely would have been much lower. In Mississippi and Pennsylvania, school shootings were stopped when armed adults intervened several minutes before police arrived
http://www.rmgo.org/alerts/2001-sb83.html
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