13-Year-Old Found With Guns, Knives Despite Laws :: 02/12/2020

Most people agree that we’d rather kids not wander around with firearms unsupervised. While some of us know our children and know they could handle the responsibility just fine, we all know kids that we don’t feel comfortable doing any such thing. Most of us know some adults we feel that way about, too.

To that end, we have a lot of laws about how kids can’t buy guns.

It didn’t stop one Florida kid from getting his hands on them, though.

A 13-year-old boy is under arrest after two guns and four knives were found Tuesday morning in his possession at Palatka’s Jenkins Middle School, according to Putnam County school and Sheriff’s Office officials.

This is the second time this year that a Putnam County middle school student has been found with a weapon on campus after a Jan. 14 incident at C.H. Price Middle School in Interlachen, Sheriff Gator DeLoach said.

“That to me is alarming and we have to be proactive about protecting our students and school administrators and those who do their best to take care of our students,” the sheriff said. ”… Clearly to me if someone brings a firearm on a school campus, their intent is very clear to harm other students.”

Eh, not really. Sometimes it’s just to show off. They can flash a gun and scare off a bully. They can show their friends they have a gun and try to be cool. There is a number of possibilities that don’t include harming someone.

Yes, all of them are stupid, but these are 13-year-olds we’re talking about here. Honestly, how smart were you when you were 13? Maybe not dumb enough for this kind of stuff, but I bet you knew someone stupid enough to have done something like this. I sure as hell did.

Anyway, back to the story:

Deputies were called in about noon to Jenkins Middle on North 19th Street after the resource deputy and administrators got an anonymous tip, DeLoach said. The deputy and an administrator found the student in a few minutes with the guns hidden in his backpack.

“There were actually several knives, some of which were on his body and concealed in his pockets, and some in his backpack,” DeLoach said.

He said the student faces multiple felony charges of possession of a weapon on school grounds. He said he did not know yet why the teen brought the weapons to school. He was also unaware of any other issues with the student but said he and others he hangs around with have become “neighborhood nuisances.”

Regardless, there are no hard and fast answers on where the guns came from originally, but DeLoach has reason to suspect they were taken from the parent.

That’s theft.

Funny, though, because there are laws against that too.

Laws only go so far in preventing anything. What they do well is punish behavior after the fact. One hopes that the punishment is enough to deter some people from committing crimes, but for those who are going to commit them anyway, they do nothing. That includes penalties for having and using a firearm.

If a 13-year-old can get their hands on a couple of guns, what law is going to stop a criminal from doing the same?

Tom Knighton is a Navy veteran, a former newspaperman, a novelist, and a blogger and lifetime shooter. He lives with his family in Southwest Georgia. https://bearingarms.com/author/tomknighton/

https://bearingarms.com/tom-k/2020/02/12/13-year-old-found-with-guns-knives-despite-laws/