My jaw dropped when I first read the news headline, “9-Year-Old Manassas Boy Arrested, Charged With Taking Gun to School.” My thoughts flashed to some of the violent attacks at schools in the past few years. Fortunately, this story read differently than I expected.
A fourth grader at an elementary school in Manassas, Virginia did indeed bring a handgun to school. According to the report, the boy’s grandmother explained that her fourth grade grandson acted out of fear. The child was being bullied and beat at school, to the point of death threats. So, he brought a cased and partly disassembled handgun to school with him.
Allegedly, the boy shared the information of what he had with him with a few other students, showing the gun to a few of them. Before long, word caught the ear of one of the teachers. The school administration was contacted, the gun confiscated, and the police called. The child was arrested for possessing a firearm on school grounds. The report stated that one of the boy’s relatives has been charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor for their part in providing the fourth grader access to the firearm in the first place.
According to the report, the child shared with the police that he brought the firearm to school to feel safer about the bully who had threatened him. The grandmother’s statement also supports that the boy had been the victim of bullying at school. If it had been your child bringing a gun to school, how would you handle it?
Featured image courtesy of contributor tillsonburg via istockphoto.com
First I would have beat his ass with a belt ….then I would have gone into why he thought that he needed it and it this case he was being bullied so I would go after the school administration for NOT doing their job.
My nephew was being bullied and as were his friends by some football player he used a roll of coins in his hand and gave the bully student perminant eye socket damage. The school administration had been looking the other way because the student doing the bullying was one of their star players. My nephew ended his playing career.
While it’s easy to blame the kid, the gun, or the kids parents or guardians, my question is what is going on at that school that kids are living in that much fear and what is the school doing to stop such activity. Saying that the arrest or suspension of the kid is the end of the story is not quite right; perhaps the school should be putting more monitors out and seeking to curb the other behaviors that are terrifying other kids.
Id take the gun away from my child and make them take a day off school so I could talk to him or her about whats going on at school to make them think they would need it. Then Id teach them how to use their hands to settle a dispute. Honestly, the bullies cannot be stopped. Administration and teachers dont really care . They just buy their way toward guaranteed retirement. They discourage self defense and I think the best way, from personal experience, is to put the bully in the hospital from a bad beating. It needs to be stressed that they dont understand how powerful guns are and that they will suffer for life if they use it in the wrong way.
I’d teach him that if he wants to bring a gun to a fight, he has to reassemble it BEFORE entering the fight! I’d also teach him that a length of 1 inch pipe is usually better and more politically correct than a gun or a knife.
There is a problem with bullies, they are not treated as they deserve. Kids are punished like adults for playing with toy guns, and bullies that are in some case really dangerous are treated like rascal kids. A schoolchild has not so many option against them. If he reports the abuses, usually nothing of effective is done against the bullies, and they may become even more aggressive. The other two options are submitting or gaining respect with violence.
For the gun, ere is valid what we were saying in the other discussion in the article about kids and shooting. If they are taught to deal with guns in the correct way, event like this would never occur.
I work for the local school district, and my fellow employees could not be more clueless. The administration is even more frightened of the parents than the students are of bullies. None of the adults wants to tangle with these over grown high school kids, and the policy totally favors the students. We have been lucky so far, but we are totally unprepared to deal with an active shooter scenario.
Mad_Dawg I remember when I was a kid, my parents told me if I was getting bullied to put up a fight. I’ve never been a troublemaker, so my eyes were wide as saucers hearing that not only would they not be mad at me, but they would even defend my actions (in that kind of scenario) to the principal.
TerrilSmoothboreHebert I agree that it’s crucial to teach anyone–children and adults–to respect the potential for harm that all firearms have.
AlessioBaldi Lol… I’m grateful for the kid that no one was harmed with his disassembled pistol. I can’t imagine being his parent and hearing about the incident. Had I been his mother, that child and I would be having quite a long talk after that…
dogboy545 I’m glad that, at least, in this situation, no one was harmed.