An ordinary early September day at Apalachee High School was shattered by the sound of gunfire. It’s an occurrence that happens on an infrequent basis, but even once is once too often.
This is something everyone can more or less agree with. There’s no reason for something like this to happen. Unfortunately, it still happened.
Less than 24 hours after the shooting, the situation is still pretty fluid and anything we learn today may be different tomorrow, but here’s the latest as it currently stands.
A 14-year-old student opened fire at a Georgia high school and killed four people on Wednesday, authorities said, sending students scrambling for shelter in their classrooms — and eventually to the football stadium — as officers swarmed the campus and parents raced to find out if their children were safe.
The dead were identified as two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School in Winder, about an hour’s drive from Atlanta. Killed were two other 14-year-olds, Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo, and instructors Richard Aspinwall and Christina Irimie, Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said in a nighttime news conference.
At least nine other people — eight students and one teacher — were taken to hospitals with injuries. All were expected to survive, Barrow County Sheriff Jud Smith said.
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Two school resource officers encountered the shooter within minutes after a report of shots fired went out, Hosey said. The suspect, a student at the school, immediately surrendered and was taken into custody. He is being charged as an adult with murder. Authorities said the weapon was an assault-style rifle.
The teen had been interviewed after the FBI received anonymous tips in May 2023 about online threats to commit an unspecified school shooting, the agency said in a statement.
So once again, he was on the FBI’s radar and absolutely nothing happened.
This is such a common occurrence that one has to wonder if the FBI has ever managed to interview someone and somehow prevent a mass shooting, or do they just let them go and hope for the best? Then again, with what we’ve seen from the FBI of late, this might be their definition of “for the best” since it plays into anti-gun hands.
The killer apparently used an AR-style rifle of some description, most likely some variation of an AR-15 versus something chambered in another caliber. This is going to spur another round of calls for an assault weapon ban.
However, let’s look at something else here.
Yes, four people killed is four too many, but as soon as the killer met armed confrontation, he surrendered. The little coward wanted easy meat and when he found out there were people there who had the means to resist, he folded like a lawn chair.
There were calls for gun control before any facts were known about this incident. There always are and always will be, all despite the fact that a 14-year-old kid can’t lawfully buy a firearm in the first place.
But few of those calls will acknowledge that the guns in the schools that they so vehemently oppose prevent this from becoming Uvalde or Parkland. Good guys with guns stopped this attack. Had there been more guns in the hands of other good guys, it might not have even gotten this far.
