No one wants to see another school shooting, except maybe the anti-gunners who like to use the bodies of dead kids as soapboxes to take away our rights. 

No one sane wants to see another school shooting.

But we have a problem. On Wednesday, I wrote about a Phoenix, Arizona high school’s reaction to reports of someone having a gun at homecoming. The short version? It did not go well at all.

Today, we have something a little simpler. A kid brought a BB gun to an elementary school.

A student at Ethel Kight Elementary School faces disciplinary action after allegedly having a weapon on campus.

The Troup County School System stated that there was no threat to students or staff during this incident.

According to school officials, the school’s administration received a report on Oct. 23 that a student had an object inappropriate for school.

LaGrange, GA police determined it was an all-plastic BB gun, and while it wasn’t a firearm, it did qualify as a weapon under Georgia law and the student was charged with carrying a weapon in a school safety zone.

Now, I’m fine with punishing students who break the law and I’m fine with not allowing weapons in school. That’s really neither here nor there.

What bothers me is that this is news at all.

This is one of those things that has happened for years, but our hypervigilance regarding school shootings has made any report of a weapon something the entire community needs to know about. However, all it really does is make the anxiety even worse, because this was a kid with a weapon at an elementary school.

The thing is, there’s no evidence anyone’s life was in danger. BB guns can kill, sure, but that’s rare and we don’t even know if the kid intended to do anything but show it off. That’s what usually happened back in the day, after all, and yeah, they got punished for it and only the kids in the school knew about it until they told their parents, which was usually the end of it.

What’s the answer?

I honestly don’t know. 

I don’t blame administrators worried about not taking a threat seriously and ending up with a situation like Parkland or even something a smidge more pedestrian like the teacher in Virginia was who shot by a student because pretty much every other adult screwed the pooch.

On the other hand, must every reaction be tailored to increase people’s anxiety about sending their kids to school? Don’t get me wrong, if more parents embraced homeschooling, I’d be down with that as a homeschool parent myself, but I’m not cool with that decision being based on fear of something that’s not as significant of a threat as many want to believe.

People are terrified of guns, which isn’t always a bad thing, but this anxiety-driving effort seems like the kind of thing that can only be a threat to our right to keep and bear arms. People who are anxious and scared are irrational. They’ll support things they might not otherwise support, such as curtailing constitutionally protected rights.

Which probably answers the question of why this gets reported this way, doesn’t it?