Blanche Ely High School in Pompano Beach, Florida is on lockdown today after police were called about an individual on campus believed to be in possession of a firearm.
CBS-12’s Mike Magnoli has been live-tweeting the incident as it has unfolded:
BREAKING NEWS: bso has reports of armed intruder at a high school im on scene
— Mike Magnoli (@MikeMagsCBS12) May 24, 2018
Magnoli confirmed that the Broward County Sheriff’s Office (BSO) sent their SWAT team after a teacher allegedly saw a “suspicious person” on campus. Parents were also on scene, nervously watching from outside.
Initial reports indicated the aforementioned “suspicious person” was brandishing a gun or similar weapon, so the BSO stopped to assure them there were no shots fired and their team was on the scene:
BSO deputies w group of mothers at a laundry-mat a block away, “there is no reason to cry, no shots, our guys are in there, they’ll check everything”
— Mike Magnoli (@MikeMagsCBS12) May 24, 2018
Eventually, BSO informed Magnoli that a weapon was never called in, the presence of the “suspicious person” prompted the call to police:
UPDATE FROM BSO: never a weapon. A suspicious person entered a class, never a weapon. BSO searching for said person
— Mike Magnoli (@MikeMagsCBS12) May 24, 2018
Thankfully, Blanche Ely High school is not another school shooting on a long list of American high school shootings, not that it would change the NRA’s attitude if it had.
Still, the fact that a 911 call from a high school now elicits a SWAT response is unsettling. It now makes more sense to deploy a county’s militarized police unit to respond to a building full of children and teenagers just in case.
Now those children will go home and lie awake at night as they are once again forced to face the possibility that it very well could have been someone with a killing machine walking in to commit an atrocity.
This is the world the NRA wants – as long as they still turn a profit.
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