MyFoxPhilly.com is reporting that Plymouth Township police have taken into custody a home-schooler who was allegedly planning a Columbine-style attack on Plymouth-Whitemarsh High School. Details are here, more to come by the noon news broadcasts, to be sure.
Police searched his house and found a 9 millimeter assault rifle, four hand grenades, and black powder, among other weapons and books detailing how to make bombs.
They also found videos of the Columbine shooting and notebooks that detailed possible violent acts. [MyFoxPhilly.com]
3:30 p.m.: Just spoke to the PW parent again, she tells me the would-be attacker lives on Church Road, and the whole neighborhood is swarming with media. Philly.com says the kid didn't have ammo for the gun, which belonged to his mother, so an attack probably wasn't imminent.
Better safe than sorry, I say.
***
I just spoke to a parent of a P-W student, I told her about the threat at 9 a.m. (hat tip, Good Day) and she got a robo-call from the district around 9:45. Her daughter is still in class and to our knowledge, also unaware.
The school district posted an alert on its website, here, saying a current student reported the threat to police. This, combined with all the interviews I keep seeing from students in that Cleveland high school about how they had told school officials the shooter there was troubled, pretty much flies in the face of the interview in heavy rotation on CNN with Northwestern University Prof. Jack Levin. He prattles on about some supposed "culture of silence" inside schools -- sounds good as a soundbite, but it's just not true. Kids today are more than ready to "rat" on kids they perceive as threatening, and the threatening kids themselves usually try to get their message out somewhere (via blog, MySpace, etc.). It's getting "the system" to do anything that's the trouble.
What planet is this professor from? He's on again now, essentially blaming the victims, still talking about the "culture of silence" and urging more anti-bullying programs. This kid in Cleveland, from what I understand, was an overweight white Goth kid in an almost all-black high school, an outcast in any number of ways. What wasn't obvious about his being troubled? What was so difficult to find, for adults who aren't just willing to look but to act?
If Fox's detail -- that the would-be shooter had attended P-W but left because he had been picked on -- is true, his identity will probably become public soon enough. It also bears noting that behind the high school is the grade 4-5 school, which shares the parking lot with P-W.
