A 6-year-old at JP Thomas Elementary School outside Columbia, South Carolina, brought a loaded AR pistol onto their school bus a couple of weeks back, because of course they did; it’s 2026, after all.
Another kid spotted it, thought it might be a BB gun, and told a staff member, who told the resource officer, who took the gun away without anybody getting hurt.
The child’s mother, Destar Hall, got called down to the school and was arrested and charged with unlawful conduct toward a child. She was granted a $25,000 bond the next day. Her husband, Tony Hall, told reporters the kids had found the gun out in the woods near their home, brought it back, and showed both parents.
Hall says he told his wife to get rid of it. He didn’t specify how, and apparently neither did she, because the gun somehow ended up in a first-grader’s backpack on the way to school instead of a police evidence locker.
I have to admit I’m torn on this one, which isn’t a place I usually find myself in when I’m writing about parents letting their kids have guns. Thankfully, nobody got shot. A sharp-eyed classmate did exactly what schools spend all year telling children to do, and the system, for once, worked the way it’s supposed to.
If your kid finds a stray gun in the woods, the obvious move is to call the police and let them deal with it. That’s the advice I’d give anybody, under normal circumstances. Except these aren’t normal circumstances. The Halls are a Black family in South Carolina, a state with a well-documented history of treating armed Black men (and sometimes just Black men in general) as an emergency requiring lethal force.
Calling 911 to report, “Hey, we found a loaded semi-automatic weapon” is a different calculation when you have to also worry that the responding officer decides your family is the threat rather than the people reporting one. I’m not saying that’s what would have happened here. I’m saying it’s not an insane thing to consider. It complicates the tidy “just call the cops” advice I’d otherwise be handing out.
What I’m really angry about is that a loaded weapon was just sitting out in some woods for a couple of children to stumble across in the first place. Kids find sticks and rocks and the occasional dead squirrel in the woods. They shouldn’t be finding firearms.
From what I can tell of this particular gun, it wasn’t anybody’s deer rifle that slipped off a truck bed. The thing looks cobbled together, with parts that don’t match and colors that don’t match, like somebody built it out of a spare-parts bin rather than bought it off a shelf as one complete unit.
I’m no gun nerd, so I genuinely can’t tell you whether what I’m looking at is metal, 3D-printed plastic, or some Frankenstein combination of both. But given how often I’ve written about the ghost-gun surge lately, my first instinct isn’t “hunting accident.”
My first instinct is that somebody built this thing specifically to be untraceable, used it or planned to use it for something, and then dumped it in the woods to get rid of the evidence. Then two kids happened to wander by before nature could finish the job.
Which brings us back to Tony Hall, who at least had the decency to own the mistake instead of trying to spin it. He said he thought he could “police it himself,” and I actually believe him. Even though that’s precisely the kind of thinking that lands a gun in a backpack on a school bus.
Normally this is the part of the post where I tell parents what they should actually do if their kid finds a gun lying around. Step one is always supposed to be “call the police, don’t touch it, wait.” But I can’t in good conscience hand out that advice as if it applies evenly to every family reading this, not when I know it carries real risk for some of them that it doesn’t carry for others.
So, instead, I’ll say I don’t have a clear answer here. If any of my readers who are people of color have their own answer, one that accounts for what “just call the police” actually costs you, please leave a comment.
(Sources)
Leave a Reply