Posted on 10/02/2014 3:44:46 AM PDT by markomalley
Guns and rumors of guns aren’t the only things that will cause schools to go into lockdown mode.
Costumes – complete with plastic sword – apparently will do it, too.
Four schools in Onslow County, North Carolina were sent into police lockdown when a cafeteria worker panicked when the employee saw someone dressed like a pirate.
It was “International Talk Like A Pirate Day” and one school employee apparently decided to take it one step further.
A staff member reported seeing a “suspicious person” – the “pirate” – approaching the school and called police.
“The Onslow County Sheriff’s Office said that ‘suspicious person’ turned out to be a Richlands Elementary staff member dressed as a pirate,” ABC 12 reports.
The school was locked down for about three hours and no “suspicious person” was to be found – likely because he or she was in a classroom.
According to The Daily News, “Onslow County Schools sent out a news release the day after the incident indicating the it was a case of mistaken identity and there was no malicious intent.”
WITN reports the panic started when “the worker mistook a plastic sword for a gun.”
“It was terrifying,” says Bailey Padgett, a student at Trexler Middle tells the news station.
“I didn’t know what was going on … we were all huddled up in a corner.”
Police were also searching for a “white man” wearing “cammo pants and a drab olive shirt” but ultimately found nothing.
According to WITN, “… A man approached a teacher at Richlands Elementary this morning. The teacher noticed the man had a gun on his hip; it’s against the law to have a gun on school property. The teacher reported the man to officials, but he hasn’t been seen since.”
That likely led to the cafeteria employee mistaking the plastic sword for a gun.
Richlands Primary, Richlands High School and Trexler Middle School, in addition to Richlands Elementary, were given the all clear and the pirate festivities resumed.
My how we’ve fallen. I had a history professor back in college who dressed up in full period civil war Union and Confederat uniforms for his lectures about the civil war. Complete with a fully functional musket and bayonet. No one went screaming about nor was the school locked down. My home is in the country and no one thinks twice when someone is packing or walking through the store with a rifle.
Yargh ! Avast there , ye land lubber ! Keelhauling the idiot that caused this snafu would be well within reason.
My boys were In one of the schools affected by this lockdown. Two of the schools are basically on the same campus, and the other two are right next to each other, but a couple blocks away from the first two schools. The original story was that a gunman dressed in camo pants was running around the campus. That caused the lockdown. To this day I don’t know if that part of the story was ever true and many variations of that story came out within the hours after the lockdown.
I wasn’t worried about it at the time and figured there was a misunderstanding, but a lot of parents were freaking out. First and foremost, this is a military town. The town those schools are in have a huge hunting crowd. You are bound to see camo on someone. Half the kids in the high school wearing hunting camo as their regular daily clothes.
I still don’t know the whole story, but I do know some idiot staff member had a knee jerk reaction and caused a lot of panic. Stupid.
Ok! Here’s the sixty four dollar question.......Did the teacher get expelled? They would do that in a heart beat if it had been a kid, why not the teacher?
Hoplophobes on parade, terrorizing our children.
The cafeteria employee was certainly a Wookie apparatchik
Maybe someone thought a Islamic was going to behead some people.
there are no words.....
America has become a nation of p*ssies.
End of story.
Probably some anti-gun nutjob.
Purposely calling false alarms to provoke terror in parents and students.
How do they know it wasn’t a real pirate? Arrh...there be pieces of eight in those schools!!!! Arrrggggggg!!
“That likely led to the cafeteria employee mistaking the plastic sword for a gun.”
Because a sword and a gun look so similar.
About a thousand years ago, when I was in high school, I was on the rifle team. Dozens of boys and girls regularly walked the halls of my high school with .22 cal. rifles in gun cases. No one ever got hurt and no one ever panicked. This is not better today.
Correction:
The teacher noticed the man had a quad .50 cal anti-aircraft mounting on his hip and was driving a high capacity, automatic 155 mm howitzer; it’s against the law to have a gun on school property.
Wonder what these people will do when ISIS comes walking down the street? Probably will be an Iraqi Army look-alike situation.
YARRRR!
I worked at a rural district up north. Before all the school shootings started students brought guns to school all the time. We stripped and refinished stocks, Re-blued barrels, made new firing pins, etc...
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