Great Mills High School (courtesy baltimoresun.com)

“Two students were critically injured and a gunman died in a shooting at Great Mills High School in Southern Maryland Tuesday morning as classes began,” washingtonpost.com reports.  “The shooter was a student at the school.” According to nydailynews.com, “A school resource officer took down the unidentified shooter after exchanging gunfire inside the school.” And here’s the surprising (or not) bit: the school had ample warning . . .

Parents at the school became worried after a Feb. 20 Snapchat post that warned students of a possible shooting.

In response to the threat, the principal — Jake Heibel — sent a message to parents and told of a report of a student in a hallway mentioning a shooting. He said it had been investigated and “the threat was not substantiated.”

The school held a public meeting earlier this month to discuss the threat, he said.

Here’s the letter Principal Heibel sent out prior to the meeting and subsequent shooting, as reported by thebaynet.com on February 21:

Good Morning Great Mills High School Parent/Guardian,

Yesterday we received a report that a student in the hallway during transitions overheard two students mention “shooting” and “school”.  We interviewed the student with our SRO, viewed video, interviewed other students, and contacted central office.  The threat was not substantiated.  Late last night, additional information was circulated quite extensively on social media about a potential threat at school today.

Law enforcement was contacted and an investigation was conducted, which included interviews with students and parents to determine the validity of the potential threat. The threat to Great Mills High School has not been validated at this time. However, we will have additional security today and we will continue to investigate the source of the postings.  Also, continue your vigilance and alert us to any information you may encounter. If you see something, say something.

Tomorrow, students will have the opportunity to discuss school safety during One Lunch. I am very proud of our students and appreciate their vigilance and willingness to notify adults if they see something that concerns them.

Thank you and please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

Sincerely,
Dr. Jake Heibel
Principal

I’m guessing the School Resource Officer was brought in after the threat. We shall see.

In any case, a good guy with a gun stopped a bad guy with a gun after good guys without guns failed to stop a previously identified bad guy initiating an armed attack. And yet the “we need gun control” outrage is already percolating in the mass media.

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39 COMMENTS

    • Except that the SRO did his job here. The only dead person is the attacker. Good for the SRO! He deserves respect and honor, just like the Florida SRO deserves shame and reproach.

      • I’m not complaining at all about the SRO being a badass like he should be. My comment was more in response to what the psychotic liberals are going to start crying about. Just sick of hearing about how bad guns are, how it’s all our fault, and we don’t care, yadda yadda yadda.

        • I’m of the opinion that nearly all school killers are copycats who worship their predecessors, the columbine killers in particular. These shootings seem to come in clusters, then it’s quiet for awhile. Though based on reports that the shooter fired at the SRO rather than eat his barrel, I wonder if this was a jilted ex-boyfriend who decided to get revenge.

        • @troutbum

          Only a couple injured, doesn’t sound like a lunatic stopped his meds, sounds like a jealous ex or a kid who got rejected too many times.

        • Our psychotic leftists are already playing down the SRO’s involvement saying that he was “only going up against a handgun”. Like to see one of them do that with a tank.

  2. A armed SRO stopped it, the 3rd person injured is the shooter that was put down by the SRO.

  5. So the guy that obviously had a gun on him, the SRO, wasn’t the first one shot by the bad guy? That’s not gonna fit the narrative…

  6. With only three injured they must have gotten the hugs to him pretty quickly.
    What’s that? It was a guy with a gun who stopped him?
    Nah, had to be the hugs. Guns just make things worse.

    • Guest……The SRO demonstrated that gun control works, STEADY AIM ! Should have happened in Florida.

  9. Doesn’t Maryland have an AWB in place, or some weird ban on everything but “heavy-barreled target-model” ARs?

    • Yes and no.

      All modern rifles, particularly post-1994 ones, are legal like SCAR’s, Tavor’s, Bren’s, FS2000’s, Vz-58’s, AR-10’s, Galil ACE’s, heck even non-7.62×39 AK’s (and as-imported sporters in 7.62×39) are legal like Connecticut used to be!!

      The Maryland “AW list” is a massive farce.

  10. As an SRO, I’m glad theirs gave this dude a dirt nap. The past month hasn’t exactly been the finest hour for SROs

    • Don’t ever say that. As bad as you think this person was, he/she was still a person. He/she was somebody’s kid.

      We should never celebrate the killing of another human, no matter how justified it is (or we think it is).

      I carry a firearm. I am willing and able to take a life, but I won’t be (and never have been) happy that I did.

      • That’s part of the problem. There are a great number of people in this world who need a great deal of killing. When they get said killing, that is a cause for celebration.

      • How about:

        “I am saddened that this individual made poor decisions that caused his life to be forfeit, but I am glad that, having made those decisions and initiated violence against others, he ded.”

      • FLAME DELETED

        He brought a firearm to a school and shot someone. There is no alternative explanation to what happened. I’m glad he’s dead and rotting in the ground.

        You may carry a firearm but I’ve used one, and felt no remorse for my actions because they were justified. I do not value this fools life. He forfeited any sympathy from me the second he tried to murder someone.

      • James Isaac and Tile Floor,

        I believe both of your sentiments are in order.

        Yes, the attacker was a human being — someone’s son, someone’s grandson, possibly someone’s sibling, and a child of God. All human life is sacred and on that level, we mourn the loss of a human life.

        At the same time, the attacker sought to seriously maim or murder other human beings, who are also someone’s children, grandchildren, possibly siblings, and children of God. All human life is sacred, including their’s. What the attacker did was reprehensible and we are happy that the attacker cannot ever maim or murder anyone else ever again.

        We can be both remorseful and relieved (happy so to speak) at the same time.

  11. Clearly we need more gun control in Maryland…wait, what ? We already have some of the most strict gun laws in the country ? That can’t be right. Must be the gun’s fault.

  12. Clearly this school resource officer wasn’t a coward. Clearly he could never have been hired for the same job in Broward County, Florida.

  13. If you have a kid in school and a problem develops that demands your attention, Do Not think that talking to the principal will take care of things. In the old days, principals were just below God in terms of taking care of school business. They had huge respect within the school district and larger community. Many principals had been at the same school for decades, often from the time when the school was built. Both the superintendent and school board generally deferred to their judgment on personnel and discipline issues happening at “their” school.

    Those kinds of principals are long gone. Thanks to progressive “outcomes” based education policies, the principal’s role, like that of classroom teachers, has been reduced to that of a mere technician who is charged with carrying out orders from above. In fact, the person sitting in the principal’s office of your kid’s school has one of the most insecure jobs in America and is, as a consequence, completely risk-averse and can be counted on to paper-over problems out of fear of being criticized.

    So what should you do if your kid has a problem with a school bully or if you know of some kid talking about shooting people? The only people in today’s public schools who can actually solve problems are the people who hold ultimate power. If a real problem develops talk one-on-one with your district’s school board members.

  14. 1 – This will be used as an example of why gun control works – Antis will say things like ‘how much worse would it have been if we didn’t have an AWB or magazine limits. There will always be a win to spin it
    2 – On a more positive note, at least as of right now, the perpetrator hasn’t been identified. Right answer! Stop giving these individuals fame and notoriety. I hope this was a conscious decision by LE, though I’m sure it won’t be long before some newshound ferrets it out.

  15. Shannon Watts is a multi millionaire PR expert, she will spin this beautifully for their side. If, as I am guessing, the shooter had a pistol, that will be “proof” that things would have been so much worse if he had an evil automatic assault rifle. The SRO taking the shooter out will be proof that only highly and regularly trained law-enforcement firearms experts should have guns, and “regular” civilians would have only made things much much worse by killing all the children in crossfire.

    • Shannon et al will ignore this one almost entirely, since the only fatality was the shooter, and because MD is one of the gun control utopian states.

  16. I don’t believe the government (teachers and police) wants to protect children. They only want our tax money. They won’t teacher gun civil rights to possible future gun owners. But they will teach “Heather has Two Mommy’s”.

    http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/education/bs-md-guns-in-schools-20180223-story.html

    “I don’t think the presence of more guns will make children feel safer in schools,” he said.

    “Most school districts in the Baltimore region already have armed police officers patrolling some campuses. Only Baltimore City and Carroll County have no armed officers in their public schools.”

    “In Baltimore City, the president of the school police union has been arguing for years that having armed officers would make a difference in an active-shooter situation. Baltimore is the only jurisdiction in the state with a sworn police force specifically for a school district, but state law does not allow for them to be armed while inside school buildings.”

    My daughter attended Baltimore area schools. But I’ve been educating her on her gun rights at home. Next month she will be shooting the family AR-15 for the first time.

  17. 81% of mass shooters signal intent to at least one person

    www2.ed.gov/admins/lead/safety/preventingattacksreport.pdf

  18. Happy they got the young bastard. My grandkids live in a northern suburb of Baltimore. Happy they’re home schooled but my ex-soldier son is a fudd. Oh well…good job SRO!!!

  19. If there were any semblance of a competent press, the gun control kids would be asked to react to the fact that an immediate armed response prevented a mass killing like at Parkland.

    If.

  21. This story should be non stop on the MSM news for at least a week about a school shooter shot dead in his tracks by armed RSO saving countless student and staff lives. That is the nightmare scenario for anyone contemplating shooting up a school – being shot dead and humiliated almost immediately AND and example of a solution other than hanging a “Gun Free Zone” on the school doors. But we all know that will never happen

  22. Why do we have mass shooters in schools? What is their motivation? These twisted little monsters want fame and glory. They want to show the world that they matter. The propaganda media and the professional blood dancers give them all that and more. Anti civil-rights bigots bear a great deal of responsibility for the rise of this phenomenon. They created “gun free zones” that are safe hunting grounds, they provide national name recognition for the killers and they endlessly promote policies that will continue the slaughter.

  23. Already off the home page of CNN – and an anti-Trump story is top headline. Must be gone because there wasn’t enough bloodshed to push their narrative.

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