Gun!

If you live in my neighborhood and last night watched what passes for news locally, you were informed that one of our students brought a gun to school yesterday.  The story had the requisite outrage that parents weren't notified more quickly, this, in spite of the fact that the reporter had time to get to our campus and find people to interview IN BROAD DAYLIGHT.  There was the one funny part of the story: citizens stunned by the report, claiming "This can't happen in _______________!" which is ludicrously absurd whether it is spoken in Collierville, Germantown, Memphis proper, or our little suburb.  Kids find guns wherever there are kids who get angry or feel threatened, and guns. And, after all, that's the American Way. But I'm not here at the moment to tell you what I think of the money-grubbing, bullshit-spewing, death machine of a trade association called the National Rifle Association, which rules this country by fiat, leaving a mountain of corpses in its wake each year that the late Osama bin Laden could only dream of and admire.  And, parenthetically, can you imagine the right-wing nutjobs' utter moral outrage if Al Qaeda killed all the Americans annually that the NRA does?  Hey!  That's got to be the explanation! That damned Moslem terrorist Obama hasn't taken all the guns away, so that Americans will kill each other FOR the terrorists!  Yeah, that's the ticket!
Anyway, the point here is that our people handled it right.  I never even knew anything had happened yesterday until last night's news, and I was in the building where and when it happened. According to the dopes on channel 3, a student had the good sense to tell an adult that a classmate had the thing, the teacher told the principals, it was handled and no one was injured or endangered.  The police dealt with the student who brought it. End of story, no tragedy!  Sorry, local news!
I quickly came to the conclusion, after coming to work here almost a year ago, that this school and community are fortunate to have this principal, these assistant principals, and this faculty and staff teaching and caring for their children.
Yesterday just underlined that conviction, and put a few exclamation points at the end of the sentence!