It was just after 8 a.m. this past Wednesday, when an 18-year-old tried to walk into Northeast High School in Philadelphia with a loaded 9mm ghost gun in his backpack. Not just loaded, but chambered too. One round ready to go, six more in the magazine. He was armed and ready to shoot.

This wasn’t some hypothetical. This wasn’t ‘just a kid making a mistake.’ This was a loaded weapon with a bullet in the chamber inside a school full of students.

And we’re all supposed to feel grateful because a metal detector caught it. Let’s be real. Relying on a metal detector is a crap shoot at best. It worked this time. Maybe. Barely. What happens the next time? Or the time after that?

Again, metal detectors at schools are largely security theater. For metal detectors to truly be effective, each student needs to be screened one at a time, just like the airport. For a school that has just over 3,300 students, that’s just not feasible.

Philadelphia is lucky this didn’t end in gunfire. Those kids are lucky they were only locked down for an hour instead of running for their lives. And all of us are damn lucky we’re not reading about another row of faces on a memorial wall.

But you know what’s not luck? The part where this keeps happening. The part where another ghost gun shows up at a school. No serial number. No background check. No paper trail. Just a homemade weapon that exists because some ‘responsible gun owners™‘ decided the Second Amendment should apply to kits bought online and built in a basement.

How many times do we have to say this? Ghost guns are real guns. They kill real people. And they keep showing up where children are supposed to be learning.

There is no ‘both sides’ to this. Either you want to stop kids from being shot at school, or you’re cool with rolling the dice every single morning. If you’re in the second group, don’t pretend to care when the next headline hits.

A shooting was barely stopped, but nothing was solved. Not even close.

(Source)

Police ID student accused of bringing gun to Philadelphia high school