Horror of free access to firearms – West Virginia 14-year-old takes 27 classmates hostage at gunpoint

It was yet another instance of what can happen with the free availability of firearms in the United States. This time is was a 14-year-old boy of West Virginia who took 27 classmates and a teacher hostage at gunpoint. The boy has been arrested.
This has been reported in news.sky.com dated 26 August 2015.

The teenager had held the hostages in a second-floor classroom at Philip Barbour High School in the small city of Philippi, West Virginia. Fortunately, the negotiators succeeded in convincing the boy to set the teacher and his peers free, and later to drop the weapon and surrender.
Philippi, incidentally, is a small city of some 3,000 residents and located about 130 miles south of Pittsburgh. Fortunately, there was no mishap but, when one recalls the Sandy Hook mass murder in a school by a student, one realizes that there is a need to introduce some sort of check on who can own a firearm. It was the gruesome incident of December 2012 that should have rug warning bells. In that incident, the gunman walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and killed 20 children, six adults, and himself.
Since then, there have been at least 887 mass shootings, with shooters killing at least 1,148 people and wounding 3,184 more. Details here at this link.
(Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org)


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