Bullet found in school

At one school, someone broke a thermometer. Assuming that thermometers contain mercury, school was dismissed and the authorities spent tens of thousands of dollars decontaminating the lab and the surrounding area. Finally, the school superintendent admitted that the thermometer had contained alcohol, but came out with the usual BS about "the need to protect our children."

Jim

I read an account on a gun forum from a LEO that was sent on a call - a family had found an "explosive device" in their rented minivan. He arrived to find an entire family trembling in terror, and far away from the van. Upon inspection, he said he found a shotgun shell rolling around on the floor.

All this stupidity of a lock down when a bullet was found is going to do is produce more of them. Students will be pulling this crap ever week due to the stupidity of the school administration.

This is going to be a bit off topic but here locally a place that rented and pastured horses was digging in there pasture. The pasture was on Forest service land and a pestil was found. The idiots at the Forest Service wrote it up that a pistol was found and that triggered a law enforcement investigation of the site. Stupidity is rampant every where that has anything to do with the government.

Are the same folks, who have a triple-paranoia-zombie plan
vs. invasion in their own home, complaining about security in schools
being oversensitive?

Really?


While we all would prefer to live in a world, where school shootings are unheard of, and general society has more common sense in all areas, guns, belief, tolerance, solidarity .... (...)

But it aint like dat.

Better safe than sorry. And its good to practice it.

^^^ Pestil? As in Turkish fruit leather? Buried in a pasture?

Probably meant 'pestle'....

Did they find the 'mortar' to go with it?

.

Hindsight is 20-20.

It would be interesting to hear a lot of the poster's reactions if it came to light that a live round was discovered in a classroom earlier in the day before a massive school shooting ocurred, but no one did anything about it.

jerkface11 said:

They locked a school down here because a kid brought an empty clip to school.

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What kind of clip? There can't be that many non gun people that would know what a clip was if they found one. Heck, I bet there's a fair number of gun people that wouldn't know. Here's a couple pics of clips as examples.

What kind of clip? There can't be that many non gun people that would know what a clip was if they found one. Heck, I bet there's a fair number of gun people that wouldn't know. Here's a couple pics of clips as examples.

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All they said was empty clip. I vote for SKS.

My wife works as a para at the local high school. And I appreciate Huskerguy chiming in with some insight.

But I do take exception that "hundreds if not thousands of children are at risk." Not. Odds are somebody coming into a school with a plan to shoot the classmates who bullied them has a finite and limited number of targets. That they carry more than a magazine of ammo goes to a making a statement of empowerment. They have lots of ammo! In most cases they don't have the skills or mindset to use it all. They aren't there to do that - and if just one responding adult is getting close, they either quit or commit suicide.

"Hundreds or thousands of students" is exactly the overblown hysteria that surrounds the entire issue. That is rhetoric - making more of it than it is. Read the actual situations well documented and it's easily discerned how far a shooter will go.

The long term overreaction to anything firearms related in a school forcing a lockdown is going to eventually cause fatigue at the overreaction. Schools will even start compartmentalizing their facility - which means the automatic fire doors that all too often get blocked open will swing shut and lock, trapping a shooter into a much smaller area. Plus, the schools are already operating with a lockdown atmosphere. Many classroom doors are controlled ingress/egress to keep students from walking in or out as they please. It's a behavior issue with kids, primarily.

Goes to a more recent shooting where the perpetrator broke thru a window to get in.

Right now the pendulum has swung to one side in a reaction to prevent shootings in schools, and as they continue - and they will - the issues behind them and what to do will sort out. But, as I have pointed out, school shootings rank pretty low in the causes of death among children under 12. Mom's negligence does far more.

Be advised, while school shootings aren't confined to just public school, it does go to that. Building and housing our children in detention centers with concrete block walls, automatic security doors, and cops patrolling the halls isn't what we need. And a lot of us took steps to keep out of them by homeschooling or putting our children in private or religious schools. That is because the public schools were originally started to teach the children of the poor. They were never meant to be the only choice. Teachers unions pushed that agenda, and now, the unintended consequences of their actions and methods are coming to a head.

Tirod said:

My wife works as a para at the local high school. And I appreciate Huskerguy chiming in with some insight.

But I do take exception that "hundreds if not thousands of children are at risk." Not. Odds are somebody coming into a school with a plan to shoot the classmates who bullied them has a finite and limited number of targets.

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1. That is a load of baloney, plenty of school shooters and other mass shooters have gone in and just started shooting whoever they saw.

2. Even if they are targeting, you don't know which specific child/children are being targeted, thus they are ALL at risk, making the statement accurate.

LOL! I was briefly a teacher. If I would have found a bullet, I wouldn't have even given it a second thought. I'd either pocket it if it was in a caliber I owned, or throw it away. Strange happenings these days.

But why would they lock a school down over a small piece of lead with a copper jacket? I can only assume that they are talking about loaded ammo or a "live round."

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It matters not what it was. It could have been a firing pin. The whole purpose of exercises like this is to traumatize kids and ingrain a fear of firearms. Quite literally hopolophobia in this case; outright terror over a lump of metal. But the kids will remember that a "gun" made them cower beneath their desks for an hour in silence...

This is the kind of stuff ancient magicians, seers, and priests used to wrap their 'clients' around their fingers. I've noticed for a while now that there is a serious and disturbing anti-intellectual bent to a lot of American politics and culture (both sides), where both science and philosophy are shunned as exalted fields in favor of sports and artistry. The Aztecs had all sorts of sports and artistry, and also believed human sacrifices brought rain. Gonna go read Anthem and weep for mankind, now...

But I do take exception that "hundreds if not thousands of children are at risk."

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Oh, but they are at risk. Grave risk. Deadly risk. Catastrophic risk. ...and infinitesimal risk. I'd wager it's more likely a child meets an early demise choking on cafeteria food (somehow that doesn't figure in the Principal's "risk management" CYA ) or a caffeine-induced heart attack from school-supplied soda and obesity. It sounds crass or macabre, but the fact is that these events are so rare that they effectively don't happen on anything but an emotional perception level.

TCB

It makes sense on a larger scale really. A monetary scale that is. Sure it probably costs $10k+ in city resources to lockdown and deploy but look at it this way: $10k for a sense of security VS. multimillion dollar lawsuits against the city/ school district by deceased or injured faculty or students families.

Money and math.

No pockets they never did find the mortar but they sure pissed away a huge hunk of change digging up a pasture looking for not existant weapons or other evidence.

barnbwt said:

I'd wager it's more likely a child meets an early demise choking on cafeteria food (somehow that doesn't figure in the Principal's "risk management" CYA )

TCB

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Uh... You don't think school personnel train in CPR and emergency responses to choking? Because they do.

How about fire? Do you guys complain every time schools run a fire drill that they are "demonizing fire?"

Schools do a LOT of risk management. Active shooter is one of those risks, and a highly public one AND the one most likely to produce a lot of deaths if it does occur.

Stuff like this....

Quote: Originally Posted by Carl N. Brown :
Kingsport has had knife, hammer and baseball bat murders in recent years. I'll bet there are knives in the cafeteria, hammers in the shop classes and baseball bats in the athletic house. But I wonder if someone found one abandoned in a classroom, there would be an equal panic?


Please, cite the last mass hammering/batting/stabbing at a school in the US that resulted in 5 or more deaths.

Do I need to list the shootings, or can you figure those out on your own?

Guns do more damage/death more quickly with less expertise/ability than any other item available to civilians.

Guns are different, pretending like they are not simply denies reality.

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Sorry. During and after WWII my father's generation came to the city from the country. A lot of folks hunt and target shoot and have relatives in the country. The idea of freaking out over a dropped bullet as though it were a ticking nuclear bomb is kinda lame.

A bullet was found. Not a gun. Not a gunman. An object not capable of being used as a weapon by itself therefore not even a means of mayhem much less an actor on its own. A soft lockdown disrupting classes for 90 minutes, bringing in K9 search. Would it have occurred if a hammer, knife or bat had been found out of place in the school? BTW most actual mayhem at schools these days involves less than five victims--often by a bullying victim or victims striking back at a bully or by druggies attacking a "snitch". And I do believe that body count exceeds the mass school shooting body count. Doing something substantial about bullying or drugs in schools would save more lives than fostering moral panick over a bullet. FTM the highest body count mass murders in the US have been arson, not mass shootings. I don't know a gun that would do as much mayhem as that nut did at the Happyland nightclub with a jug of gas and a match. I worry about and guard against violent people in my life, not about things.

Other local reports of actual lockdowns with more cause (substantial or not):

http://www.timesnews.net/article/9044419/civil-war-re-enactor-causes-lockdown-at-schools
Civil war re-enactor reported as "man with a gun" (potential actor with means)

http://www.timesnews.net/article/9068210/gate-city-high-school-on-soft-lockdown-after-threats
Threat to shoot another student allegedly made by a boy and a girl caused a soft lockdown (potential actors with motive and opportunity to do threatened mayhem)

http://www.timesnews.net/article/90...t-prompted-science-hill-liberty-bell-lockdown
Police BOLO on burglary ring being actively pursued caused a lockdown of nearby school (could have prevented a standoff if the pursued burglars entered the school).

All these at least had an actor(s) with opportunity to be a potential threat, real or not. A lockdown over a means laying on a floor all by its lonesome seems a little over blown without a suspected actor.

The local story with local comments over the bullet lockdown (I have to view the comments with Google Chrome; Disqus does not work with my version of IE):
http://www.timesnews.net/article/9073709/dobyns-bennett-locked-down
Nick Shepherd, "Update: Dobyns-Bennett out of lockdown, single bullet found", Kingsport Times-News, 24 Feb 2014.

Carl N. Brown said:

The idea of freaking out over a dropped bullet as though it were a ticking nuclear bomb is kinda lame.

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I agree in this case, unless there was other evidence of danger the response was a bit overboard. But, in general, there is good cause for school administrators to be more concerned about a firearm in a school than a bat or knife.

ldlfh7 said:

With all of the school shootings these days, locking the school down over a bullet or cartridge is not all that surprising.

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You have fallen for the media hype.



Define 'these days'.

In 2013, ABC News reported that there had been 31 school shootings in the US since Columbine in 1999. I counted 32. That's about 2.2 per year.
No significant difference in the last 15 years. Maximum of four, minimum of zero.

FYI, there are roughly 105,000 public schools and universities in the US.

Define 'these days'.

In 2013, ABC News reported that there had been 31 school shootings in the US since Columbine in 1999. I counted 32. That's about 2.2 per year.
No significant difference in the last 15 years. Maximum of four, minimum of zero.

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Define school shooting, LOL. There have been 32 MASS shootings since Columbine, maybe, but there have been at LEAST 30 shootings at schools in 2014 alone and that is in just 2 months. Given holidays and weekends, that is a shooting about ever 1.3 school days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States

Double Naught Spy said:

Define school shooting, LOL. There have been 32 MASS shootings since Columbine, maybe, but there have been at LEAST 30 shootings at schools in 2014 alone and that is in just 2 months. Given holidays and weekends, that is a shooting about ever 1.3 school days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States

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Wikipedia?

If you actually go look at those, none of them, well maybe one of them is a 'school shooting'. The majority 'near a school', or gang initiation, or straight up murder of single person, etc.

I got a 2 for 1 deal from Northern Firearms on Gunbroker, a SiG-TACOPS 45 for a Octane 45 I was expecting my stamp for any time & a SiG 1911-22



As it turned out the guns and the stamp both came in the same week, but I had to wait 337 days for the stamp.



Strangely enough the 45 is US made and the 22 is German made, so I switched the stocks but I think I'll get some nicer ones for the 45.

Thanks, this is almost as newsworthy as seeing local FD rescue kitty from tree branch.

If you actually go look at those, none of them, well maybe one of them is a 'school shooting'. The majority 'near a school', or gang initiation, or straight up murder of single person, etc.

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Granted, some are "near a school" but as for being gang initiation (you have citations for this?) or murder does not change the fact that they were school shootings that occurred on school campuses. There are a helluva lot more school shootings than your claimed 2.2 per year average. That average would ONLY be for mass shootings. Mass shootings are but one type of school shooting, one involving 4 or more people being shot other than the perp(s) doing the shooting.

Regardless of motive, if it is a shooting on school property, it is a school shooting, plain and simple, like it or not.