“He wanted to defend himself and his friends, based on what he’s seen on the news.” – Granite School District spokesman Ben Horsley quoted in Utah sixth-grader brings gun to school, fearing another Newtown [via latimes.com]

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53 COMMENTS

    • I really hope they let him off easy. I know it was wrong for him to bring a gun to school, but think of the intent here. His caring for his fellow students is in the right place, he just jumped the gun as it were, no pun intended.

      • Utah schools are gun free zones if you don’t have a ccw. No open carry allowed. This assuming you are of age

        • OC is allowed, unless they just changed it. And it’s still allowed at universities as of this year. There were police and “officials” lying that it was not allowed, however.

  3. These parents need to be incarcerated. We tolerate way too many stupid and irresponsible people with firearms in the name of 2A. A 6th grader getting access to his parents gun? It already heaps tons of bad press we don’t need, on our faces.

    • At ten years old I owned a .22 rifle and I shot it regularly out in the woods, I was also driving a tractor five miles down the road hauling bins of apples to the cider factory from my families orchards.

      I had adult responsibilities and I treated them as such; one of the many problems in this culture is the forced extended child hood of our children and the lack of guidance of what being a mature responsible adult looks like.

      • +1

        I agree when I was younger I was expected to feed the chickens(which I did), bring in firewood, take care of Grandma, clean the dishes, etc. And to buy something I had to earn money working at school( thats how I bought videogames and an airgun for practice). today people expect that if you are under 25 that you are a retard, which has always pissed off.

        FYI: I am 15 at the moment.

        • At sixteen I’d reached my full size, 6’1″, 200 lbs and I was shaving; in the old days I would gotten married, start raising a family; go off to war; I would have been expecting myself and supported by the culture around me to lay down childish things and continue being the adult I had been learning all along how to be.

          I think part of the teenage “angst” is caused by the enforced childhood that the young people know instinctively is a violation of thier very spirit and desire for freedom.

      • This. People keep wanting to increase the age at which people are “adults” or “responsible”. They forget that for most of human history you were an adult around 13 years old and had adult responsibilities.

        • The average life span for most of human history was about 30 years. My mortgage is a longer term commitment than a life sentence used to be.

  4. “The student was arrested on suspicion of possession of a deadly weapon on school property and aggravated assault.”

    Aggravated assault? Clearly his intent was not to hurt anyone and the gun was unloaded.

    If we’re going to do away with GF zones, let’s do the same with idiotic zero tolerance policies.

    • What was his intent? I suspect he was brandishing in an attempt to look tough. In most states, brandishing is charged as assault.

      Clearly, he was not responding to a deadly threat. (…and was unprepared to do so.)

  5. Actually, according to the other kids, he pulled out a gun and held it to a little girl’s head. When she said she would tell the teacher, the kid said that if she told, he would kill her.

    It was only afterwards that he came up with the story that he just wanted to defend himself. It may be true, but it could also be a complete lie.

  8. The children are teaching us. They know that the solution to bad guys with guns is good guys with guns.

    Their fear is for themselves, and this little guy was not willing to let his safety be dictated to him by the people who failed to protect the children in Connecticut.

    Am I saying kids should bring guns to school? No, of course not.

    I’m saying we need to start taking school security seriously and stop wasting time with this AWB nonsense.

  9. According to the Fox News Story that Drudge linked to last night, the boy pulled it out of his backpack and aimed at another little girl’s head. While it was unloaded, let’s not go championing this dumb little shit as “teaching them right when they’re young.” He also said his parents told him to bring it to school, which I don’t believe for a second. This is a stupid kid, who did a stupid thing. Does he deserve an ag assault charge at 12? Probably not. Should he be taken out behind the woodshed for a lesson? Damn skippy.

    • Who the hell threatens to kill someone else with a real gun? This is the kind of little bastard that needs to be locked up in juvi until he’s 18.

      If he’s telling the truth his parents need to see charges too.

      We can’t play around with this ****. Normal people don’t threaten innocents with guns at any age.

    • I thought kids with guns at school was the wet dream around here? After all it’s only because schools are gun free zones that this massacre happened.

    • I have to agree with this. Any parent who lets their kid leave the house with a gun is a bad gun-owner, and most likely a bad parent.

    • I don’t know if the parents even knew…
      Like the Connecticut shooting I think the facts need to get sorted first…
      I agree, the parents are nuts if they DID know….

  11. Whoop his ass in the woodshed till he can’t walk or sit down for a week!
    After that explain to him about firearms, and then teach him about them.
    If he acts stupid about it whoop his ass again!!
    My cousin and i(42 days apart in age) had Red Rider BB guns when we were 8 yrs old. We had already been taught firearms safety and had already been taught to shoot and hunt rabbits and squirrels at 5 yrs old.
    He decided one day to put a paper target on the side of a block well house. Needless to say the BB came back and hit him and stuck in his forehead. He still has a scar between hi eyebrows.
    We both got our asses whooped that day. Him for pulling a dumbass stunt like that and me for laughing my ass off at him instead of getting my mom, who was an RN to look at it and make sure he was ok.
    I still, at 50, tease him about it and we both have a good laugh. When he turned 40 the rest of us cousins(9 of us) got him a new Red Rider with a cork in the end of it!!
    He still has it!! We still laugh about it!!

    • Seems like you are really enjoying yourself with the spilled blood of children and teachers that might have been prevented or at least reduced if school personal were armed and not in a ‘gun-free-zone’. Your type is as socially guilty, for last week’s mass murder, as those at the other extreme who believe that ‘anyone’ should be allowed to walk into a store and buy any gun.

      • Aharon: In all fairness, I think Mike was talking about the Utah story, not the Sandy Hook story.

      • Well we have an idiot gun owner of the day section! Maybe this needs to be moved there?
        Honestly we here at TTAG are more than willing to point out stupidity. The thought of anything less, or thinking we want kids threatening other kids with guns is ludicrous. In fact I would venture to say that we want education to everyone, training courses, proper safety and use, to kids and adults. You can’t force people to do things, but you certainly can provide them the tools to be safe, and practiced gun owners.
        MikeB numbers and Mr. hhhh’s should know this by now.

      • I guess it’s fair enough that I accuse you and you accuse me. But what about this? Eliminating the gun free zone or even allowing the teachers to have guns would not be a certain solution. How many female 1st grade teachers in CT would even want to arm themselves if they could. And if they were there’s no guarantee that they would have been able to stop him. Look at the Loughner case and even the fabricated story of a concealed carry guy at Klackamas mall. The proven fact is even when there is someone there with a gun they usually can’t help.

        On the other hand, if young Adam had been prevented from getting his hands on guns, there would not have been the tragedy at all.

        You blame me for the gun free zone and the fact that the teachers weren’t armed, but that might or might not have helped.

        I blame you for the fact the nuts like Adam Lanza can so easily get guns, which is a definite factor in these incidents.

        I win the blame game.

        • Mike. If reports are true, he tried to get one through a store and wouldn’t to avoid a back ground check. In the end, he murdered a gun owner and took those guns. What less than total confiscation would have stopped this kid.

      • LOL well not by the filter anyways…
        I find it tragic that anyone thinks we support this kind of action. Even if the intent was not threatening another student, we still have laws. We need the whole story before jumping to conclusions.

    • $300 says this little tool gets an Asperger’s diagnosis, probably with coincident ADHD, some time within the next ten years.

      • I am hoping that it does not turn out to be autism-related. My son is autistic, and he gets discriminated against enough already. Generally speaking, kids with ASD are about 20 to 30 times more likely to be victims of violence than to be violent themselves.

        It is pretty common for autistic kids to have impulse control problems, but that means they might start humming during a movie, not shoot up the place.

        Autism is a developmental problem, as a general rule, and not a mental health issue. The kids who are violent typically don’t have the ability to plan an attack. When I heard that the kid trashed his own computer and killed his mom, it made me think this was not an ASD problem, since autistic kids rarely plan that far in advance.

        Aspergers is different from autism, but every autistic kid is different anyway. I have been around all sorts of autistic kids for many years, though, and have never seen one carry a gun.

        I have seen autistic kids get really mad at me (I am a photographer) I usually get bitten, not shot.

        • … but every autistic kid is different anyway.

          You know what they say, “When you’ve seen one kid with autism… you’ve seen one kid with autism.”

        • On this I do agree with you lbd.
          My best friends mom and dad were foster parents in the 70’s and early 80’s for abandoned autistic kids. Some of them were really heartbreaking.
          Although they can be a handful sometimes most were very loving and caring kids.
          A bit too adventurous sometimes but generally good kids. Most had various problems because the autism and other problems were caused by drug and alcohol addicted parents/mom’s.
          From what I have researched so far Aspergers causes some similar behavior to autism but has a lot more unique problems that vary from child to child.
          That being said one of the problems today is the meds used on these kids. It seems like 99% of the side effects and adverse reactions are worse than the disease or illness they are meant to cure.
          My niece has Downs Syndrome, a pretty severe case of it actually, and the meds sometimes seem to hurt her more than they help her. I hope you can find a way to help your child without a lot of meds. They worry me more than the disease itself.

        • The the cure for the disease kills the patient is that successful? It is an old saying but one that can be applied here. Lots of drugs have really bad reactions, and there needs to be more talk about how to deal with that. Besides just access to guns, I am talking about whether the drugs or dosage levels are worth it.

          • Might be a good analogy, I drafted a whole response talking about Risperdal, and comparing it to gun control, and then deleted it. That is a pretty deep subject for a comments section.

  14. This was wrong on so many accounts. The parents are responsible to secure their guns from situations like this one. It was because of unsecured guns that AL had access to that he was able to murder the children and teachers in CT.

    • The story from the LA Time says “The gun belonged to an extended family member that was temporarily staying at the boy’s home, Horsley said. He declined to elaborate.”. If you want to blame someone, I think it should be the gun owner. The parents should get after the owner for not securing the firearm though.

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