The school mass shooting that didn’t happen

There were some tense moments at Bostrom High School in Phoenix, Arizona on Friday. A 15-year-old student brought an AR-15 and several boxes of ammunition into the school building. Normally, when we hear a story start like that, we brace ourselves for something simply awful to follow. But on Friday in Phoenix, the expected awful developments failed to unfold. The firearm was detected and reported.  Police took the boy into custody without incident and confiscated the firearm. There were no injuries. So while it’s important to learn as much as we can from mass shootings in the hope of preventing future incidents, we should also take some lessons away from a case where school administrators and law enforcement got it right. (NBC News)

Police arrested a student after he allegedly brought an AR-15 and ammunition to a Phoenix high school on Friday, authorities said.

The student is facing “serious felony charges” after allegedly bringing the semi-automatic rifle — the weapon behind a dozen of the 21 deadliest mass shootings in the U.S. since 2006 — to Bostrom High School, where he was arrested in the main office around 1 p.m. on Friday, according to a news release from the Phoenix Police Department.

Authorities also allegedly found more ammunition in the student’s backpack and lunch box, according to the police department.

We could spend all day discussing what could have gone wrong and how disastrous it would have been. But let’s instead look at what went right. First and most importantly, someone saw the firearm and they immediately said something. (Authorities haven’t revealed who initially reported it yet.) When training both students and staff, the message must be reinforced that a culture of “snitches get stitches” can’t be tolerated. They could pay for their silence with their own lives.

Next, the response by the school was nearly instantaneous and appropriate. They notified the police immediately and slammed the school into lockdown. Law enforcement arrive on the scene in minutes and secured the firearm and ammunition. They arrested the boy and removed him from the property.

Lockdown drills are an unfortunate necessity in the modern era, but they are critical. Securing doors and windows (or installing them if the school doesn’t have any) makes it harder for the potential shooter to reach their weapon or move about from area to area if they already have it.

One of the important pieces of information we still don’t have is how the boy got an AR-15 into the building in the first place. You could fit a reasonably sized handgun into a lunchbox or backpack without difficulty. But a rifle is another matter. It was roughly eighty degrees in Pheonix on Friday morning with no precipitation. It seems unlikely that many of the children would have been wearing heavy coats. If the boy used some sort of large package to smuggle it in, then that’s something monitors should be trained to watch out for.

Also, where did the boy get the rifle? He couldn’t legally purchase one at that age, so it was either stolen or it belonged to a parent or guardian. This should represent another opportunity to inform parents about safe firearm storage if there are children in the home. It’s once again possible that the boy’s parents could face charges if they stored such a weapon carelessly.

We don’t need to throw up our hands and declare there’s simply “nothing to be done” about school shootings. By trying to learn from the tactics employed by successful shooters and even those who fail, schools across the country can make it increasingly difficult for maniacs to pull off these sorts of attacks.