What's new
TerraForums Venus Flytrap, Nepenthes, Drosera and more talk

Register a free account today to become a member! Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!

Am I missing something?

Dear Parents/Guardian:

I am writing to inform you of an incident which took place today, Wednesday, March 19, at approximately 11:00 a.m. Two students informed a school counselor of a rumor that a student was planning to bring a gun to school. The administration, with the assistance of our School Resource Officer, the school security team, and the XXXXXXX Police Department, investigated the rumor immediately and determined that the student in question was not in school. The XXXXXXX Police were able to locate, apprehend and arrest the student without incident. During a search of the student’s home the police found an unloaded hand gun that belonged to the student’s older brother. There is no evidence that at anytime the student brought a gun into our building.

We encourage our students to use good judgment and bring matters like this to our attention. I appreciate and commend the students who came forward with the information that helped ensure the safety of all members of the XXXXXXX Community. I also commend the XXXXX Police Department for their quick response and the professional manner in which this incident was handled. If you have any questions regarding this incident, please don’t hesitate to call me.
 
So they searched his house on hear say and without a court order? Dang it is easy to get someone you don't like in trouble these days. I dunno who or what this guy has done to invoke this, but who knows.

What were you thinking Bruce?
 
yes, you are missing something..
you are missing the part of the story that explained WHY the student was arrested..
im very confidant there was a good reason...police dont go around arresting kids unless they have some good evidence...the school either doesnt know the reason, or they cant say for legal reasons..

either way..I say "good job" to the school and the police..
very well handled IMO..

you shouldnt assume the letter contains ALL there is to know, and the kid was arrested "for no good reason"..which is what many people are probably already assuming...the letter probably contains about 10% of everything there is to know about this case..

Scot
 
Judging by the nature of the letter this sounds like a high school letter (dear parents/guardian). Because of this the student is most likely underage and so as Scotty said they are probably omitting a lot of information about the nature of the arrest for the protection of the minor. If however there was nothing major omitted, then the police would not have had the right to invade the student's home and do a search based on hear-say. If this were the case I could do that to anybody I didn't like and say they were slanging guns out of their home. Generally, when two people are accusing one person of something, it carries more authenticity, however there still has to be some information missing from this letter or the police could not have violated the student's rights.

Daniel
 
Why state a gun was found at all if it was legally obtained, especially if not owned by the student ?

Maybe they can't say but so far I can see no evidence for this letter to be written and sent out at all. The student will now be “scarred for life” with the weapon incident thus alienating him more. So now we are creating what was feared with the rumor of two students ?

Let’s ban all handguns so the only people that have them will be the criminals, thereby making it easier to tell them apart from the ordinary citizens.

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

(Written by a German after WWII)

Maybe I'm off your point Bruce but it looks worse without some detail. A meeting would have been better than a note.
 
yah know i live in a rural area, guessing 80% of the households have firearms, i live in a high poverty area(actually though the wife, girls and i live pretty good i think we are technically below the poverty line), in an area with fairly high crime............in 20 some years i cant recall of a single instance where a student took a firearm to school intent on a malicious act......the occasional knife? sure. hell my buddies and i hauled our guns to school on a regular basis, though we made sure to park OFF school property(across the street) to cut down on time cause we would head out hunting as soon as the final bell rang..........all the teachers knew this, none flinched...........hell most of us carried pocket knives, even in the post-Columbine idiosity and most the teachers knew, didnt care and asked to borrow on occasion...............
 
I think you will have higher rate of crime if you ban handguns. Your not going to stop a criminal from having them. Black markets are every where. I dunno about this kid, but I swear parents are not doing a good job at raising these children now a days. Like rattler said he used to bring a gun to school to go hunting, but no one flinched because he was a good kid and was going hunting after class.

I dunno about this guy and what they found, but like drosera said. Why even say anything about the handgun found if it is legally obtained and not even the students in question. I didn't think about that.

Sometimes certain people generally do questionable things sometimes so I am not going to say a job well done ATM, but it is a catch 22. Had they not done something and something happened then it would have been asked why didn't they do something. Had they found nothing then they would have been asked why did they do something there was not enough info. So I think sometimes it is a no win situation. I think the same applies to the whole terrorist situations we find ourselves in.
 
Thanks for the replies; I agree with at least part of all of them. I was bothered because no crime was mentioned in the school's email to parents. The email wasn't sent in the heat of the moment; it was after 7 last night. Like many of you, I figured there must be more to the story, but felt the email either shouldn't have mentioned the arrest or should have indicated the charges. Otherwise it creates the impression, like one (or more?) you mentioned that an empty gun in the house is a criminal offense. Or that a couple of kids can make up a story and get someone who happens to have a gun arrested.

Today, our newspaper's website said the arrested person had threatened a student with a revolver last Friday and that school staff were worried he was going to the school yesterday with the gun. That certainly seems like enough to arrest him, especially because they discovered the (stolen) gun at his house. Interestingly, the article updated this afternoon said it was unknown whether he's a student, even though the school's email last night said he is. It shows how much confusion there can be even when bullets didn't fly.
 
  • #10
but if it belonged to the older brother is it stolen? my younger brother borrows my rifles all the time...........i mean it can belong to the older brother and he could have stolen it from him but the email does not say that(was this fact in the newspaper?). i live a half a block from an elementary school....next door to a day care and no one bats an eye when i haul guns in and out of the house on a regular basis.....i do love rural Montana.........
 
  • #12
Thanks for the update. To the schools credit, something is better than nothing with regards to a notification of some kind. A second note should be sent, or meeting, with the updated and corrected info as well. Glad a situation was abated. They must have had permission to enter the home as well I'm guessing.

On a similar note I just got a email of Dean Martin and John Wayne on horses talking about what Mr. Wayne wants for his new daughter when she grows up. Kind of touching. If he only knew.... the Duke would be kickin' tail all over the states and then some.
 
  • #13
Holy cr@p! That's some scary stuff!!

It's stuff like that that keeps me from the firing range anymore; it just ain't worth it, ya know? :(

chances are i know exactly the malfunction that caused it......sounds like a slam fire given the gun jammed up immediatly folowing the 2 round burst.......no way you should be able to call ita machine gun cause #1 itsa 100% accident caused a machine malfunctioning(a machine malfuctioning? that never happens........) #2 the only way to do it intentionally is to rig the gun so that when you pull the trigger the first time it just keeps firing until the magazine is empty or it jams reguardless as to weither your finger is on the trigger...the first round sets in motion a chain reaction that takes the trigger out of the equation after the first round.......

the guy said the guy who borrowed it ran 800 rounds through it a couple times.....guessing the gun was filthy as hell and a slam fire ofccured, nothing more, nothing less.............definatly not a machine gun
 
  • #14
That is a frightening story. It made my blood boil! I only own a .22 myself, but my friend owns several cabinets full of vintage WWII rifles from various countries. We regularly take these to the range and blow through tons of rounds, and occasionally there is a misfire. Who woulda guessed that could turn into a life changing event? I forwarded this story to him btw, thanks for posting it.
 
  • #15
misfire and slam fire are two different things.........misfires happen all the time with cheap or old ammo.....no real big deal if your paying attention and realize it happened......
 
  • #16
Getting back to my story for a moment, someone asked how the gun coulod be considered stolen if it belonged to the guy's older brother. Someone had reported the theft four years ago in a town about 20 miles from here, so big bro is now charged with possession of stolen property (I think).

Last year a high ranking police official in the neighboring city, which has an appallingly high murder rate, said the problem is that if someone bumps into someone else, the one who gets bumped pulls out a gun instead of settling it with fistfight like he remembers. A couple days later, the paper published a letter to the editor in which someone wrote that the proper response to one person bumping another isn't a fistfight, it's for one to say sorry and the other to say OK. But at least when hotheads limit themselves to fists instead of a gun, fewer of them die and none of the bystanders do.

As for Rattler's video, I didn't watch the whole thing but don't remember hearing anyone say the gun wasn't modified. It seems to me that there must be more to the story, since the guy apparently was convicted by a jury in Wisconsin, not Berkeley. Unless it was full of philosophy students from Madison, a central Wisconsin jury ought to include some people who know their way around guns. Unless the prosecutor excluded all potential jurors who did, a power I think the prosecution shouldn't have. On the other hand, maybe the jurors, unlike those in, say Berkeley, were inclined to accept whatever the prosecutor and police said in the trial. Maybe like my story, we peel back the layers to see what's underneath and find more layers.
 
  • #17
gotcha on the stolen part.....thanks for more facts.....couldnt make sence on where stolen got into the picture from what yah had posted..........

you could be right on the case i posted......really interested on how it will play out.........
 
  • #18
Here's today's update - big bro was also charged with risk of injury to a minor because the (unloaded) gun and ammunition were also accessible to a younger sister. A lot of us would have been arrested back in my gun-toting days, but now I think guns need to be more secure than that. Anyway, his idiot younger brother who did the actual threatening is a student at that school and had driven up next to another student in a store parking lot last week and pointed a gun at him. This week, some students at school overheard others talking about that and how the idiot was bringing the gun to school that day. They reported what they heard and the principal called in the student who had the gun pointed at him the previous week and, once he said what happened, the police got involved. It's fascinating how slowly the details trickle out.
 
Back
Top