That they never checked his backpack must weigh heavily on staff.
I know of an incident involving a first grader who brought steak knives to school and was discovered at recess digging in the dirt with the knives. Immediately shit hit the fan, and she faced expulsion. Was allowed to remain but was then banned from riding the bus, had to have a parent walk her into the school office where her backpack was checked then she was escorted by an aide to her classroom. This is in place for the rest of the school year.
It’s not “strategy” and I’m not defending the parents.
These days, it should require no more than common sense on the part of school officials to investigate volatile situations further and get those kids out of the school to avoid a violent incident.
In past episodes, classmates have mentioned how the “troubled teen” was talking about blowing people away, but gee, they didn’t think he was serious. Wonder if that’ll be the case here too.
Your post makes it appear you think the school is equally to blame. The “also” indicates a shared blame. What percentage of blame do think the school has vs. the parents?
Why are you so invested in defending the school people who dropped the ball here?
Is there some intense ideological battle going on behind the scenes in which people score points for laying blame entirely on the clueless and/or criminal parents?
Given the situation, it seems they would have asked the child to open his back pack. Or, picked it up and handed it to him. A two handed lift would give a good clue as to contents.
I prefer the military approach. At five one morning an AP threw open the barracks door and yelled: “open your lockers, fall out on the road and strip to your shorts - NOW”. Less subtle.
It comes in two models, including 10 and 15-round magazines, respectively.
It’s chambered in 9mm.
A 9mm cartridge, for argument’s sake, weighs about 0.423 ounces, so … add 4.23 or 6.34 ounces, so …
33 to 35 ounces, or … just over two pounds.
If a book bag actually had a few books in it … the two pound firearm stashed somewhere within might not be noticeable without actually examining the backpack’s contents directly.
The question is, is just a drawing, without any prior knowledge of the existence of the firearm itself, enough grounds for reasonable suspicion to search bag and/or school locker?
It’s ridiculous that people would blame this on the school when it was so clearly the fault of the parents, but I guess as gun owners they can do no wrong.
Yep. Plenty of cases out there that say that school officials have very wide-ranging abilities to search possessions of students in such instances. School lockers (such that still exist) have been held to be totally school property and that the students therefore have zero “expectation of privacy.” Backpacks are slightly different but not substantially. The only real privacy the kids have, legally, is against body searches conducted by Admin as opposed to by an SRO.
ETA: There is no freaking way you could tell a bag has a pistol in it by hefting it. No freaking way. A loaded school backpack can weigh 30 lbs., with all the books and crap the kids carry. A 2 lb. 9mm wouldn’t register at all.
“In its latest rating of the most durable school backpacks, Consumer Reports has conducted its own survey to determine how much weight kids are carrying as a result of overloaded packs. The researchers visited three New York City schools and weighed more than 50 children’s backpacks. They found that kids in the 2nd and 4th grades are carrying about 5 pounds worth of homework and books. But once kids reach the 6th grade, the homework load gets heavier. On average, 6th graders in the study were carrying backpacks weighting 18.4 pounds, although some backpacks weighed as much as 30 pounds.”
You are not going to be able to tell that 2 pounds of an average kid’s backpack is a gun, as opposed to textbooks, homework, lunch etc.
