The six-year-old school shooter in Newport News has made a lot of people very nervous. That’s understandable, really. Such a young child not just getting a gun, but taking it to school and shooting his teacher? That’s really pretty disturbing.

As a result of the shooting, people are desperately trying to find something to blame for it.

We have reason to believe the mother, whose gun was used, hadn’t properly secured the weapon. This seems to be pretty obvious, really. Yet it also seems she wasn’t the only one who dropped the ball.

New details are revealing more about the hours leading up to the shooting at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News. A 6-year-old boy is accused of intentionally shooting his first-grade teacher, Abby Zwerner.

…

Superintendent Dr. George Parker III said the boy accused in the shooting arrived to school late that morning, and that his backpack was searched after someone reported he may have had a weapon.

The person who searched the child’s bag didn’t find a weapon. A few hours later, Zwerner had been shot. The school division did not say say who searched the boy’s bag.

Well, whoever searched the backpack apparently sucked at it.

See, they’d been told the kid had a gun. They took the threat seriously enough to conduct a search. They found nothing.

A short time later, a teacher had been shot and a six-year-old shooter had pulled the trigger.

I can’t make this stuff up, folks. They searched the backpack of a six-year-old kid and didn’t find a gun.

Now, it’s theoretically possible he had it somewhere else on his person, but that’s unlikely based on what we know. For example, officials have said the shooter carried the gun in his backpack, so it seems like they don’t think he had it tucked in his waistband.

Let’s just call it a hunch.

Anyway, what happened is all kinds of awful, but it’s curious just how often these awful events that supposedly illustrate the need for gun control also seem to have a component of someone in authority dropping the ball.

Sure, there are times when we can find shootings similar to this happening with no one necessarily missing anything or screwing up, but there is an alarming number of them where someone screwed up. Despite those mistakes, though, people expect others to forfeit their right to keep and bear arms to some degree as a way to cover up for those mistakes.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not remotely interested in doing any such thing. Especially not when all of this could have been avoided with someone managing to spot a firearm in a kid’s backpack.

Frankly, I think we all know this “search” was nothing more than a cursory inspection of a potentially cluttered backpack that figured since a gun wasn’t clearly visible, there was no point in digging any further.

Well, there was.

Look, if you get a tip that a kid has a gun, maybe you should actually look a little deeper.

I get why the individual who conducted the search isn’t being named. That would probably be bad for him or her. But I also hope they receive some kind of discipline for failing to spot, you know, a freaking gun.