A 12-year-old boy in Michigan carried a gun to school. Situations like this tend to end tragically, and a fellow schoolmate who is 1 year younger didn’t wait to find out, so he took the gun, disassembled it, and was rewarded with an expulsion from his school.
The mother of the boy who disassembled the gun, Savitra McClurkin, said she considers her son’s actions heroic. McClurkin’s son was enrolled in Dwight Rich School of Arts up until May 2025, and on a fateful day he saw a classmate come to school brandishing a gun — he chose not to run but to disassemble the gun in his attempt to help his classmates.
The number of sadistic shootings is sadly a common occurrence in the US, and as the one that happened concurrently with Charlie Kirk’s death showed, they’ve gotten to a point where they might not even be the most shocking thing that could happen with a gun on any given day. As lawmakers drag their feet on a decision that would finally make school shootings a rare occurrence at schools — learning institutions throughout the country have taken their own steps to try and figure out how to reduce the occurrences.
For Dwight Rich School of Arts, the answer is expulsion if you’re found with a gun at school. People reports that when Lansing School District was approached with questions about the expulsion, they responded, “In May 2025, a serious incident involving a firearm occurred at Dwight Rich Middle School. After a thorough investigation, and in accordance with Michigan law regarding dangerous weapons on school property, the Lansing School District determined that expulsion was necessary.” They expressed regret and stood their ground without going into detail as to why McClurkin’s son’s actions in particular were not seen as an exception.
When retelling the order of events, McClurkin states that her son has never been in any trouble, first and foremost. According to her GoFundMe, her son took the schoolmate’s gun, disassembled it, and threw away the bullets without reporting the matter to the teachers. It’s the last part that seemingly got him into trouble with the school. However, his mother explains, “He didn’t want to implicate himself in it, nor did he want to tell on the person that actually brought the firearm, because he knows firearms aren’t supposed to be in school.”
Now, her son has been barred from all school platforms because of the expulsion that is tied to guns in school. The 11-year-old boy is now enrolled in a non-accredited online program to keep him on track as the situation is still being resolved. His mother sees their predicament as setting her son up for failure. She is also asking for help from donors and well-wishers who want to help her family out in this unfortunate predicament.
It’s certainly not the first case where someone trying to do the right thing had it turned around on them. Just recently, an Arkansas man chased after a sex offender who had kidnapped his daughter in the middle of the night. And after a confrontation — he shot him in alleged self-defense. Of course, people see it differently from the law that views things in black and white.
In this particular case, McClurkin’s son’s story will certainly go a long way into making people think about how a child helping out classmates during a school shooting should look like versus how it actually does in real life.
