Monday, April 21, 2008

High School Bomber

Over this past weekend on Saturday, the parents of a senior of a South Carolina high school reported their son to the cops after discovering the materials necesary to create a bombs. He had not created it yet, but according to him it would only take him minutes to put it all together. I was just wondering how safe schools really are when kids are able to access these things very easily. I know we have secure the building drills every so often, but if someone had a bomb like this kid was going do, how would we fare. It seems very scary how anyone could get this items and that it could be used anywhere.http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/04/21/school.bomb.plot/index.html

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

that is pretty scary that someone could come so close to killing so many people. I guess its good that we're about to graduate high school. we can put those fears behind us. But seriously, it might be necessary to have bomb detecting dogs at school entrances along with metal detectors just to keep us safe. who knows what will happen in the future!

Keith Chin said...

Well, technically it seems possible for anyone to kill at least one person before anyone could do anything. All they would really need is a knife. A bomb would cause a lot more damage and potentially harm a lot of people, but I would assume that someone has to be fairly unstable for them to go that far. Looking at the article... while I don't completely doubt his determination to follow through with the act, the fact that he had no date and that everything he had done was planning and calculating, it seems like a really serious plan of action rather than an actual attempt at blowing up the school. Then again, he did buy the ammonium nitrate, so who knows.

Anonymous said...

Not to be a pessimist, but may I remind you all of Virgina Tech? Yeah, college, so it's scary in any case when you have an unstable individual involved. It's also pretty terrifying that he was able to purchase the ammonium nitrate off of ebay.

This just goes to show you how easy it is to harm others if the means are there. I think it's really up to the people around these unstable individuals to detect strange behavior and stop them because other than that prevention would be really expensive or impossible.

Anonymous said...

Unfortunatly there is no way for any school to be safe. We can have every drill and take every precaution possible but there is always a chance that someone decides to do something really stupid. As we seen from the past, it is really easy for kids to get their hands on guns and other weapons. I think parents have to take a bigger responsibility and make sure that their kid is making the right choices in life. Most school shootings are committed by isolated and depressed teens. I know this is asking a lot, but if parents make sure their kids are happy and are being active after school, I think a lot of these threats at school will end. Also, I want to know what kid knows how to make a bomb?

William Chen said...

To say the least, its very easy nowadays for anybody to find out how to make dangerous and destructive objects. The Internet has become so comprehensive that one can find almost anything on it. I just searched "how to make a bomb" on Google and basically found 4 sites on the first search return page. Because of the ease in finding how to make these things, no place, including school, is absolutely safe. That kid could have very easily taken those bomb parts to school without any suspicion and construct it during his lunch period in the library. These kinds of scenarios are both scary and possibly real.

I'm not saying that all kids would be constantly scrutinized for any kind of unusual behavior and things like that, but I believe that being more aware of the individuals around you might help reveal certain danger signals that might be missed by the unaware person.

Anonymous said...

Problems such as these are out of the schools control. They are out of pretty much everyones control. That though is terrifyig, but not to scare everyone, it can happend everywhere! The kid can make a bomb at anytime and kill anyone.Its a scary thought, and to prevent it would be costly. We will never really kow how safe we are I guess.