Tell me again how gun-free school zones protect our children

5 Hospitalized After 14-Year-Old Goes on Shooting Rampage at Cleveland High School

He was still suspended Wednesday, but somehow he made it into the SuccessTech Academy alternative school, armed with two revolvers. Police also found a duffel bag stocked with ammunition and three knives in a bathroom.

Coon, who students say also had threatened them last week, shot two teachers and two students before committing suicide, police said.

There were adequate warnings, but nobody believed in them.

... student, Doneisha LeVert, said she hid in a closet with two other students after she heard the alert over the loudspeaker. She said she heard about 10 shots.

Police released audio from three 911 calls — two from students who had fled the building after the first two shots and one from a distraught mother, calling on behalf of her son, who was huddled in the back of a fourth floor classroom.

"They just shot somebody in his room!" the crying mother told the dispatcher.

LeVert said Coon had made threats in front of students and teachers last week, but she believes no one took action.

"He's crazy. He threatened to blow up our school. He threatened to stab everybody," she said. "We didn't think nothing of it."

School Administrators were similarly clueless:

When Asa H. Coon got suspended for fighting on Monday, this was the 14-year-old's response to his schoolmates: "I got something for you all."
...

Coon had been suspended since Monday for fighting near the school that day, said Charles Blackwell, president of SuccessTech's student-parent organization. He did not know how Coon got into the building Wednesday.

Blackwell said that there was a security guard on the first floor, but that the position of another guard on the third floor had been eliminated.

Still, the School Administrators considered theirs to be a superior school:

SuccessTech Academy is an alternative high school in the public school district that stresses technology and entrepreneurship for about 240 students, most of them black, with a small number of white and Hispanic students. It opened five years ago and ranks in the middle of the state's ratings for student performance. Its graduation rate is 94 percent, well above the district's rate of 55 percent.

"It's a shining beacon for the Cleveland Metropolitan School system," said John Zitzner, founder and president of E City Cleveland, a nonprofit group aimed at teaching business skills to inner-city teens. "It's orderly, it's disciplined, it's calm, it's focused."

It's not as if the school could be considered 'vulnerable' to this sort of attack:

[one student's]mother, Lakisha Deberry, said she was upset that metal detectors at the school were not always in use.

"You never know what's going on in someone's mind," said Deberry, adding that she was required to go through a metal detector and present an identification card whenever she wanted to drop off something at school for her children.

The shooting occurred across the street from the FBI office in downtown Cleveland, and students were being sent to the FBI site.

The sad truth is, in an environment which prevents armed defense against armed aggressors, "procedures" provide no defense against a deranged attacker.

When school districts depend upon "Zero-Tolerance' measures to protect their students from armed, deranged mavericks, the administrators are rarely chosen to pay the price. Instead, it is the students whom they are sworn to protect who are killed and maimed.

The administration is allowed to defend their incompetence by citing their bureaucratic policies as if they were a real defense; as if a legitimate justification of their failures would be to say 'We told them they couldn't have not guns in this here school, it's not our fault if they broke the rules.'


School shooting will cease to be a recurring national tragedy when a national agenda is accepted to allow armed response to school shootings.

The shootings will continue until we not only accept the truth of this statement, but take active measures to ensure that our children are protected from the crazies.

The problem is not 'people with guns'. The problem is crazies with guns, and the total lack of timely intervention.

The day of political correctness is past. This is the day for pragmatism.

UPDATE: 12-OCT-2007
PENNSYLVANIA:

Police have taken into custody a 14-year-old boy who is suspected of planning a "Columbine" type event at a Pennsylvania high school, a police spokesman said.

Police in Plymouth Township near Philadelphia took the boy into custody after a search of his home turned up a number of weapons, including a 9 mm rifle with a laser scope and dozens of air guns, said Deputy Chief Joe Lawrence.

Police also found an operational hand grenade, three other hand grenades in the process of construction, bomb-making equipment, manuals and 30 powered weapons that fire BBs.

The boy's mother bought the rifle for him several weeks ago at a gun show, police said. No ammunition was found for the rifle.

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Student advocates Gun Rights, Gets Suspended
A Minnesota college ... "has suspended a student after he raised questions about the campus ban on concealed weapons, and is ordering him to have a mental health evaluation before he can resume his education."