>It used to be that if you were an American teenager in a rural area, you could even drive to school with your hunting rifle still in your pickup and nobody would care.
my mom (born 1961) described her high school parking lot as exactly this. she described it as sort of a "clique"/social strata thing, like, guys I associate with wearing heavy Carhartt work coats to school every day and jeans with a clear indentation of a chew can (despite being under 18), would've been the kinds of guys who would proudly leave their sometimes multiple hunting firearms in gun racks in their pickup trucks in the high school parking lot, which nobody had any issue with at all.
1991, the year I was born, someone held up a class at the same high school with a sawed-off shotgun. nobody was hurt but he discharged a few shells into a wall. last I checked you could still see how rough the buckshot-riddled concrete wall still is, despite having been painted over. (interestingly, this story never made national news...)
I went on to attend the same high school and sometime around 2008 we had a complete school lockdown one Monday because a kid had left a paintball gun in his car from over the weekend... in the parking lot of the other high school across town. pretty sure he was tried for a felony.
>I went on to attend the same high school and sometime around 2008 we had a complete school lockdown one Monday because a kid had left a paintball gun in his car from over the weekend... in the parking lot of the other high school across town. pretty sure he was tried for a felony.
This is what you get when everyone at every level feels compelled to "do something".
I went to school in the 90s and two kids shot up their high school. They murdered 12 students and one teacher. It was called the "Columbine massacre" after the name of the school, Columbine high school in Colorado.
sometime in 7th grade, in the 03-04 school year, our student counselor came into our class one day and gave a presentation about something along the lines of identifying signs of school shooter-types in your fellow classmates, or something. she said "I know you're going to say 'awesome,' but the Columbine shooters had made a level of their school in a video game, and they used it to practice their shooting before they did it." (everyone predictably whispered "dude, awesome.") despite being ostensibly too young, I was a huge DOOM fan at the time, and I was quite knowledgeable about the Columbine incident because it fascinated me. so I raised my hand and told the student counselor that this was false and merely an urban myth—one could go online and find "the Harris WADs" quite easily, and it was pretty well-known among anyone who had a passing interest in the WAD scene that none of these maps, in fact, resembled a school, much less that particular high school, in any way. she made me sit in the hall.
my mom (born 1961) described her high school parking lot as exactly this. she described it as sort of a "clique"/social strata thing, like, guys I associate with wearing heavy Carhartt work coats to school every day and jeans with a clear indentation of a chew can (despite being under 18), would've been the kinds of guys who would proudly leave their sometimes multiple hunting firearms in gun racks in their pickup trucks in the high school parking lot, which nobody had any issue with at all.
1991, the year I was born, someone held up a class at the same high school with a sawed-off shotgun. nobody was hurt but he discharged a few shells into a wall. last I checked you could still see how rough the buckshot-riddled concrete wall still is, despite having been painted over. (interestingly, this story never made national news...)
I went on to attend the same high school and sometime around 2008 we had a complete school lockdown one Monday because a kid had left a paintball gun in his car from over the weekend... in the parking lot of the other high school across town. pretty sure he was tried for a felony.