President Trump has been criticized for daring to suggest school teachers arm themselves to protect students in the event of a shooting. Since the killing of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the counter debate to Trump’s proposal is keeping schools gun-free.
However, according to a school shooter who was in a South Carolina courtroom the day of the Florida massacre said he picked his target because there was no armed security.
In 2016, Jesse Owen, who idolized the Columbine killers, murdered his father and drove to a nearby elementary school and opened fire, killing a 6-year-old boy on the playground. He was unable to kill more because his gun jammed.
The Washington Post reveals Owen’s plans he had written on Instagram:
“My plan,” wrote Jesse Osborne, who had turned 14 three weeks earlier, “is shooting my dad getting his keys getting in his truck, driving to the elementary school 4 mins away, once there gear up, shoot out the bottom school class room windows, enter the building, shoot the first class which will be the 2d grade, grab teachers keys so I don’t have to hasle to get through any doors… I think ill probably most likely kill around 50 or 60,” Jesse declared. “If I get lucky maybe 150.”
And why an elementary school?
“I HAVE TO BEAT ADAM LAZA . . .” he wrote nine days before the Sept. 28, 2016, shooting in a misspelled reference to the Sandy Hook killer, Adam Lanza. “Atleast 40…
Two days later, he debated whether he should attack his middle school, from which he’d been expelled, or his elementary school, just up the road. He decided on Townville Elementary because it was closer and had no armed security. Jesse, who considered himself the victim of an unfair world, announced online that he would kill kids he didn’t know and had never met “before they bullie the nobodys.”
“Itll be like shooting fish in a barrel.”
It is noted that Owens planned his failed massacre for two years. It’s clear that he was and remains a troubled kid obsessed with school shootings sensationalized by the media, which makes macabre celebrities of the evil school shooter — something Owens wanted to be. However, even this crazed teen murderer was capable of deducing that attacking a gun-free elementary school would “be like shooting fish in a barrel.” It was the armed security at the middle school that made Owens choose a softer target.
