While I understand the need, the very fact that schools have to have procedures in place for found guns is wrong on soooo many levels!

You gotta have a rule in place for this sort of thing. Sure, it's never happened, but the last thing they want is a teacher walking down the hall with a loaded, chambered gun, to turn it into the main office.

One unwritten "house rule" at my high school was to never answer a ringing payphone--the high school has several payphones scattered around campus. Apparently, students call bomb threats into the payphones, hoping an employee answers, at which point they have no choice but to act on it and evacuate the entire facility. If the call was never answered, no bomb threat was ever made. This "don't answer" rule in itself shows the absurdity of over-reacting to bomb threats: you _know_ they're always false, but politics force you to evacuate.

Fortunately, I've never received a bomb threat call, so I've never had to act on one. I'd love to just hang up and ignore the bomb threat, however, I wouldn't want to be fired when the threatener calls someone else at my workplace and says "I called _____ and he just hung up on me!" So sadly, I'd act on a bomb threat for no other reason than self-preservation of my own job, despite the fact that shutting down the entire facility for a single day over an empty threat would probably cost my employer more than I make in a year. If I were the business owner, sure, I'd hang up in a New York minute.

Funny thing about bomb threats is that, when they're real they're used to concentrate a group of people in an area where the most damage will occur. For example, a phoned in bomb threat (or even a small device) is activated. The school evacuates everyone to a "safe" area. That area is known to the bad guys and the real bomb is planted near there. Everyone gathers and... Boom! Maximum number of casualties.

Yes, there are also those who will also use one to remove innocents from an area before damaging infrastructure as well, such as in cases where someone is pissed off at the government and wants to destroy the (whatever) building but not hurt the poor folks that are just visiting or trying to make a living.

Good guys and bad guys are always trying to stay one step in front of the other but we have to play by the rules and they don't. Makes the game very difficult to win.

In the time that I was going to college the first time I dropped out, early 70's, we would regularly get bomb threats. The policy at the time was to announce the threat and give the students the option of continuing what they were doing or running screaming from the building. Almost all were adults and capable of making risk-based decisions.

In almost every case, we went ahead with what we were doing unless the class was particularly painful. The people making the threats soon learned that the threats would not generate the expected panic, and they soon ended.