Georgia School Shooting Started Over a Vape

Last Wednesday, two ninth graders got into an argument in a bathroom at Warner Robins High School in Warner Robins, Georgia. By 2:15 that argument had turned into a fistfight, and by the time it was over, one of them had pulled a gun and shot the other in the leg.

An entire high school got shut down for the better part of a week, all because two fourteen-year-olds couldn’t let a vape go. That’s it. That’s what this was about. Not a gang beef, not a long-simmering feud, not even a girl. A vape. I’ve written about a lot of school shootings on this blog, and in close to three decades, I don’t think I’ve ever had to type a sentence that stupid before, but here we are.

The shooter, 14-year-old Denzelle Willis Jr., fled the school on foot and was found about an hour later sitting on a playground slide in the neighborhood across the street from the school. He’s now facing five charges, including aggravated assault with a firearm, and that one charge alone was enough to bump the whole case into superior court, where the district attorney is trying him as an adult.

The judge wasn’t in a mood to discuss bond either, so he’s sitting in the Youth Detention Center while a grand jury waits until at least this coming Tuesday to hear the case.

The gun didn’t belong to Willis. Local police confirmed it was stolen and that Willis likely carried it into the school in his backpack, which means somewhere out there an adult owns a handgun that isn’t where it’s supposed to be, and nobody seems especially interested in that half of the story.

Georgia’s relationship with firearm ownership means a stolen gun in a teenager’s backpack barely rates a follow-up question, let alone an actual investigation into how a legally-owned weapon ended up walking itself into a high school bathroom. I’d bet real money, if I had any, that whoever owned that gun faces less legal scrutiny over how it went missing than the kid does for using it.

Warner Robins High School doesn’t have metal detectors, and the district said as much once people started asking, framing it as one of the “important questions” under review now that a student’s already been shot. Again, I don’t think metal detectors would have necessarily stopped this.

Unless you’re pat-searching every kid, every backpack, every single day at every entrance, a determined 14-year-old with a stolen gun is going to find a way in regardless. Detectors are security theater dressed up as prevention, the same as I’ve said about the AI gun-detection systems schools keep buying instead of addressing why there are so many guns to detect in the first place.

The actual problem isn’t the absence of a machine at the front door. It’s that a stolen handgun was accessible enough to end up in a ninth grader’s backpack at all, and that particular problem doesn’t have a metal-detector-shaped solution.

Naturally, nobody in power seems interested in that conversation. Gov. Brian Kemp put out his statement thanking the “men and women” who responded and said he was grateful they kept students safe, which is true and also says absolutely nothing.

Sen. Raphael Warnock offered his prayers for the injured student and his gratitude to law enforcement, which is also true and also says nothing.

But ‘thoughts and prayers’ plus a thank-you to first responders is what passes for leadership after a shooting in this state, every single time, regardless of how the gun got there or why.

Nobody asked the obvious question, which is how a stolen firearm keeps finding its way into the hands of children in a state that makes owning one about as difficult as buying a lottery ticket.

Students went back to class Monday with a few more officers in the hallway and some extra counselors on standby, which is a reasonable enough response to the trauma of the week. It just isn’t a response to the actual problem, which nobody in Georgia seems especially eager to name out loud.

(Sources)