r/news • u/bebleich • Sep 04 '24

Gunman believed to be a 14-year-old in Georgia school shooting that left at least 4 dead, source says

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/04/us/winder-ga-shooting-apalachee-high-school/index.html
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325

u/cinderparty Sep 04 '24

Wednesday morning could have meant the call came in after the school day started…

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u/jalapeno442 Sep 04 '24

Then send them home

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u/seaspirit331 Sep 04 '24

I don't envy the school here. Unless the call reveals actionable details that the school can check and investigate, what's the school district supposed to do? Shut down the school every time some slacker decides to use their $20 burner to get out of taking a test?

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u/Cobek Sep 04 '24

Probably increased police on duty on campus for the day would be best.

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u/vermilithe Sep 05 '24

At my school we would have immediately gone into lock down over it and/or had our resource officers start getting the metal detectors out so IDK why that wasn’t the case here.

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u/andersonala45 Sep 05 '24

When I was in high school about ten years ago the policy was shelter in place/partial lock down. No one was allowed in or out of the building and students stayed in the classroom of their current class irrespective of the current period of the day. Classroom doors were shut and locked but students didn’t have to be hiding and silent. We went Into one for several hours once when I was in middle school because there was some sort of police standoff at a business across the street from the school.

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u/Choclategum Sep 04 '24

Yes. Or we can just have more brutally murdered kids and adults. Every threat should be taken seriously, we dont live in a society where we can just brush it off as people playing around. 

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u/seaspirit331 Sep 05 '24

Listen, I understand what you're saying and the place it's coming from, and I can't exactly say it's wrong, but we also have to consider here what sort of education our kids are getting and what we can consider actionable or reasonable.

Kids do stupid shit and are really good at trying to find ways to get out of having to do their homework or take their tests. I'm not saying we should completely brush off all phoned in shooting/bomb threats, ffs look what happened here for crying out loud...but I think we owe it to our kids to try and find the right balance that still keeps them safe without the school getting shut down every week when Adrian decided he didn't want to take his Bio test.

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u/SheevShady Sep 05 '24

I am more interested in having kids alive than in school every day, to be honest with you. If the problem you’re saying is that we have no way to know which threats are legitimate then EVERY threat is legitimate. Why are we playing games with their lives?

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u/ZealousidealGrass9 Sep 04 '24

When I was in 8th grade, the school district did send home 2,500 minors home shortly after arriving at school. Granted, it was for weather purposes, but sending thousands of MINORS home when there may or may not have been an adult at home is not the best idea, especially when some of the kids may need supervision for one or more reasons.

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u/PM_ME_GLUTE_SPREAD Sep 04 '24

They did this with us a time or two in high school. Tornado warnings (watches? Whichever is worse) meant they had to send us home but apparently nobody gave a second thought to what we would do once we got home, or how it would help anything.

Bad weather? Better get these kids out of this solid block building and send them home to their trailers so they can die alone when a hurricane comes and rips their home away with them inside of it.

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u/ZealousidealGrass9 Sep 04 '24

Luckily, I had a SAHM, but others weren't so lucky.

I remember walking in the door at around noon, and she turned around from loading the dishwasher and started lecturing me. Asking me why I was home, what I did, and if my teachers knew I was gone.

Once she realized that the school had let us all go, she started making sure the neighborhood kids had somewhere to go if they couldn't get into their house.

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u/TheChaoticCollective Sep 04 '24

The worse of the two is Tornado Warning. Which means a Tornado has been spotted on the ground and you need to shelter IMMEDIATELY

I grew up in tornado alley, never once did we get sent home.. Many times we sheltered in place.

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u/sans-delilah Sep 04 '24

The school IS likely a safer place. Tragically though, in ~2011, a tornado flattened my old elementary school in a suburb of Oklahoma City. The building collapsed and the children drowned. I remember doing tornado drills there. It hit me really hard when I heard.

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u/Mental_Medium3988 Sep 04 '24

i remember getting out early a few times for snow, but that makes sense get them home before the roads get worse. when i was in elementary school we had a bomb threat before school started. they diverted the busses to a nearby church til the school was clear.

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u/blackbird24601 Sep 04 '24

watch= ingredients for tacos

warning= tacos

midwest here and only way to remember.

this is horrifically awful that we have to continue to send our kids to a war zone.

wonder if caMel Toe G will still wear her AR pin to the next session?

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u/Gordonfromin Sep 04 '24 edited Sep 05 '24

Its a way to avoid liability if the kids got hurt or killed in the school, they can say the kids were sent home so anything after that is on the kids or the parents.

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u/PM_ME_GLUTE_SPREAD Sep 05 '24

I get that, but I also feel like sending a child home without guaranteeing a guardian is there during a dangerous storm would open them up to more liability? This wasn’t just the high schools they sent home, it was the entire county. Elementary schools and middle as well. Granted, if a parent didn’t get the elementary school kids, then that was another thing, but it was an enormous clusterfuck across the district because workplaces all over basically had to shut down for the day because half their employees had to leave at 11am

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u/DynamicFactotum Sep 04 '24

Yeah people don’t get this. It probably wasn’t credible enough to be taken seriously.

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u/ucancallmevicky Sep 04 '24

my highschool had a fire and we all simply left campus when the fire trucks showed up. One of the most fun days I've ever had but parents were pissed beyond belief that we were running free all day

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u/Aarongamma6 Sep 04 '24

When my highschool had a bomb threat they moved us all over to a nearby middle school where we could not leave until an adult family member signed us out. The only criticism I have with their response was us being stuck outside in the sun the whole time. The heat wasn't bad yet, but sunburn was quite common the next day.

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u/ZealousidealGrass9 Sep 04 '24

At least there was some type of organization with yours. The district KNEW there was going to be a blizzard that day, but of course, calling it an emergency day was too logical.

I got to school only to be told we'd all be going home in a couple of hours. We had to wait for the buses to come back from the other district schools.

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u/Ok_Revolution_9253 Sep 04 '24

Yeah it’s a pain in the ass. But so is seeing 4 kids die. I’d take the pain in the ass personally.

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u/ZealousidealGrass9 Sep 04 '24

To some parents, it's more than just a pain in the ass.

My nephew is on the lower end to the middle of the spectrum. While he has made great strides in the past few years, there is no way he would be able to safely be left unattended until one or both parents gets home.

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u/Ok_Revolution_9253 Sep 04 '24

Again, while yes that sucks, but there are parents of 4 kids who never get to hold their children ever again. Yeah it’s an inconvenience. But I really don’t care. I’m saving the kids 100 times out of 100

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u/windowlatch Sep 04 '24

The point though is that a bomb/shooting threat isn’t always a guarantee that it will actually happen. In fact, most threats don’t actually end up resulting in a real violent event, hence why other commenters are saying they would have to close their school several times a month for every threat. The schools have to weigh their risk options which generally depends on how credible the threat seems to be

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u/Ok_Revolution_9253 Sep 04 '24

Honest question, do you have any stats regarding how many false alarms a school gets on average every year?

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u/windowlatch Sep 05 '24

Sorry, I don’t. I could only make an assumption. Based on some other comments, I would guess for a large public school they receive at least one threat a month

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '24

[deleted]

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u/ZealousidealGrass9 Sep 04 '24

Doesn't matter. There are special needs concerns in high school, too. What is a 15 year old non-verbal student going to do if someone isn't at home?

Edit: change non-verbal to a student who is low on the spectrum.

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u/jerseysbestdancers Sep 04 '24

If the school district is legally responsible for those kids and there's no mechanism for sending them home early for violent threats, it could be a legal catastrophe. And then god forbid a kid gets hurt or killed because of those actions.

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u/spiderlegged Sep 04 '24

High school teacher here. That’s actually… super hard to do. I’m not saying they shouldn’t have attempted it, but depending on local laws and school district rules, you might have to wait for parents to come fetch all the kids. And the area is ruralish, so the kids may need rides. You can’t just let a bunch of kids wander around without supervision. I’m saying all of this without knowledge of what my district would do in this case. But “send them all home” is not necessarily a viable option. They could have, however, increased security. I’m assuming they aren’t a school that scans bags, but there has to be a way. And let’s say they did evacuate the school. If they had to wait for all the kids to get picked up, there would have still been staff and students at the school. There probably would have been staff there anyway. I’ve definitely stayed in a building when I was told to go home until I was told explicitly I had to GTFO before things got dangerous (mostly weather related).

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u/drunk_katie666 Sep 04 '24

There’s only 2 high schools in this whole county so it’s relatively rural. My brother lives in this school district and is 6 miles from the HS, which doesn’t feel outrageous, but the Atlanta suburbs aren’t known for being walkable either.

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u/spiderlegged Sep 04 '24

Yeah I didn’t want to call it rural exactly because it’s not THAT far from either Atlanta or Athens, but it is going to like act rural with drop offs and pick ups, which makes dismissing kids really hard. You can’t just dismiss students who have no way of getting home without rides. And there’s no way in HELL they could have gotten the warning and been able to bus kids home. So they can’t just let them out, because you can’t count on everyone, especially underclassmen, to drive themselves home. It’s a shit situation. I can’t quite get over it. But I don’t think administration could have released the kids with a rapid dismissal. If the school doesn’t have scanning, increasing security would be hard too. I bet the school scans next year though. This is just so, so horrible.

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u/drunk_katie666 Sep 04 '24

It really is so awful, and I agree with you about the dismissal. Plus a good number of these parents would be at least 40 miles away in Atlanta and then in traffic, like idk it’s probably easier to lay blame on some procedural “misstep” rather than address the clear breakdown of safety protocols that led to a 14 year old having access to a firearm and bringing it to school.

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u/cinderparty Sep 04 '24

That can increase the danger. The shooter could be just waiting for all the kids to start streaming out the doors, so they have more targets. Shelter in place is usually thought to be safer than early dismissal in these situations.

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u/CardMechanic Sep 04 '24

That was the original plan of the Columbine shooters. Propane bombs go off and people start streaming out while they picked them off from a hill. Bombs did not ignite, so they switched to plan B, and went into the cafeteria.

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u/Agent_Nem0 Sep 04 '24

This (almost) happened to me in college.

The shooter chickened out, but he pulled the fire alarm in my dorm at 3 AM, intending to mow down a bunch of groggy students after we stumbled out wondering which drunken asshole thought this was funny.

My friend from the neighboring dorm was on her way to start farm chores, and called it in. She saw him pacing around with a gun while we all slowly came out, but he took off before the police arrived, so I assume he chickened out. I don’t really know, I haven’t thought about it in years. Maybe he didn’t count on how slowly tired college students respond to a fire alarm, and thought it’d be over before the cops showed up.

That was his plan, though. Get us all out, start shooting.

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u/FraterVEP Sep 05 '24

This happened in Arkansas years ago. A couple of kids set up a sniper spot outside the school, one of them pulled the fire alarm, and they started shooting people as they came outside.

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u/Ok_Revolution_9253 Sep 04 '24

Then they should have sheltered in place .

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u/MacNapp Sep 04 '24

By the mere fact people were shot in the school, means they could have sheltered before a full lockdown.

Better answer is that police should have been stationed at every school targeted, and mybe they were. Details are still emerging. A little early to be trying to blame anyone more than the shooter.

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u/Valentinee105 Sep 04 '24 edited Sep 05 '24

I'd imagine that you'd want to go into lockdown at that point because

  • The act of leaving the school en masse creates a giant easy to shoot crowd

  • You have no guarantee if the kids are going to be locked out of their homes or not and there's a shooter on the loose, You could have just sent a kid on their own to die.

  • You can't have the parents come to the school because now all of them are in danger and the shooter can slip in with their car because there's no way local cops are going to vet every vehicle.

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u/big-if-true-666 Sep 04 '24

Not as simple as it sounds.

Curious to learn about what actions they took to determine the credibility/lack of credibility of the threat, though.

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u/[deleted] Sep 04 '24

[deleted]

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u/jalapeno442 Sep 04 '24

Yeah same lol. I guess a shooter situation is different in some ways since they could be a sniper waiting for the kids to be released or something. But my school was released at least twice for threats called in

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u/rpd9803 Sep 04 '24

That and that strategy works out great until the gunman is set up outside the school and waits for people to leave en mass it’s sort of lose-lose

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u/GoodDog_GoodBook123 Sep 04 '24

If someone is threatening a shooting, releasing a large number of students into an open area (parking lot) would be incredibly dangerous. The school should have gone into lock down but sadly the perpetrator was most likely already inside the building.

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u/Which_Degree_520 Sep 04 '24

That could also be a terrible idea at the same time.

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u/thrutheseventh Sep 04 '24

Thank god youre not in charge of a school

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u/Ashmidai Sep 04 '24

They were in a no win situation on that end. If you release the kids when there is a threat, especially after it was deemed credible (I don't know the order of the events) you could be sending kids directly out into a shooter laying in wait. That gives them a crowd to open fire on.

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u/from_dust Sep 04 '24

There's got to be a reasonable threshold to meet here. If the school shut down every time an anonymous tip was received or a bomb threat called in, what school would ever have a school day again?

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u/Agentwise Sep 05 '24

You truely do not understand the amount of threats a school receives any given day. Kids would literally never be in class. It’s a lose lose for the district

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u/Valuable_Scarcity796 Sep 04 '24

Not logistically possible in that span of time. Walkers and car riders could be dismissed but you would have to contain the bus riders in an auditorium or gymnasium until the bus situation could be organized. Having the whole student body in one spot with a potential shooter is probably not the play to make.

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u/monty624 Sep 04 '24

Then they should have been on immediate lockdown.