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The two most active threads yesterday were ones that I have already discussed and will, therefore, skip. The first of those was the Gaza war thread which racked up nearly 700 new posts. The second was the thread about the murders in Fairfax. That was has turned into more of a discussion of au pairs and the family's income than the crime itself. The most active thread after those two was titled, "Student with Gun found at Walter Johnson" and posted in the "Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)" forum. The original poster simply pasted the text of a message from Walter Johnson High School's principal which informed parents, students, and staff about an incident involving a gun that had occurred at the school. Apparently, one student informed school administration that another student was believed to have a gun. Police were called and, when the second student was searched, a gun was found. No information was found suggesting that there was any threat to the school or an intention to harm anyone. Nevertheless, the situation is being taken very seriously. To explain the responses in this thread, a little background is in order. In Montgomery County, there is a group of high schools, including Walter Johnson, that have the letter "W" in their names. A second group of schools are joined in a consortium called the Downcounty Consortium, or DCC. The "W" schools are frequently considered to be better and more prestigious whereas the DCC schools are stereotyped as having more problematic students and not being as academically strong. It is fairly common for posters who are believed to be associated with a "W" school to make derogatory comments about DCC schools. Posters supportive of DCC schools, in turn, have developed chips on their shoulders. This conflict was apparent in the very first response to the original poster in which a poster claimed that she has been chastised for sending her kid to a DCC school and, in light of this incident, the "W" school parents should rethink their "false sense of security and superiority". I wish someone had immediately reported this post so that I could have removed it. But, since that didn't happen, the thread largely devolved into a rehash of the "W" school vs DCC animosity. Intermixed among the airing of DCC grievances were a few posts injecting other hot button topics such as some posters' desire to have metal detectors installed at schools and continued anger over the removal of police officers, or School Resource Officers (SROs) as they are called, from schools. Every few pages there is a post about the incident itself, the main one being that the 17-year-old student will be charged as an adult. But, for the most part this thread is a fight between "W" school and DCC school partisans with a few posts — almost seeming to be off-topic — about the gun incident.