A 10-year-old boy was arrested and charged for joking about carrying out a school shooting

A fifth-grader in Florida was arrested and charged this past weekend for threatening to carry out a mass shooting over text message.

On Saturday, the Lee County sheriff’s office said that it had learned earlier that day of a “threatening text message” sent by a student at an elementary school.

The sheriff’s office said that its local school threat enforcement team was immediately notified of the message and started to investigate. The 10-year-old boy who sent the message was interviewed by the authorities and later charged with “making a written threat to conduct a mass shooting,” NBC News reported.

The police shared a video in which the 10-year-old boy can be seen being led into a police vehicle.

Noting that the mass shooting threat came just days after the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in a statement, Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno said, “This student’s behavior is sickening, especially after the recent tragedy in Uvalde, Texas.”

The sheriff continued, “Right now is not the time to act like a little delinquent. It’s not funny. This child made a fake threat, and now he’s experiencing real consequences.”

Marceno said that his team “didn’t hesitate one second … not one second” to investigate the incident.

Marceno’s emphasis on his team’s rapid response to the threat comes as law enforcement officials in Uvalde are facing intense criticism over their response to the May 24 school shooting after it came to light that they waited for roughly an hour for backup instead of immediately moving to neutralize the gunman.

In response to the atrocity in Uvalde, Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives are moving to advance a series of comprehensive gun control bills.

Reportedly, congressional Democrats want to implement gun control legislation that would raise the age requirement to buy a semi-automatic rifle from 18 to 21 years old; make it a federal crime to import, sell, manufacture, transfer, or possess high-capacity magazines with a grandfather clause for existing magazines; require existing bump stocks to be registered under the National Firearms Act; ban new the purchase and manufacture of new bump stocks; codify into law the Biden administration’s regulations on so-called “ghost guns”; restrict straw purchases for firearms; and create new requirements for storing firearms in homes where minors and young children are present.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her leadership team reportedly have been discussing actions they might take on gun control in the wake of the Robb Elementary School and Buffalo grocery store shootings.