LOWELLVILLE — A gun was found in the backpack of a third grader at Lowellville Schools at the start of the school day Tuesday and recovered as he went through the metal detector at the school entrance.

The gun did not have a bullet in the chamber and could not have been fired by the 8-year-old boy because of his age and strength level, said Rick Alli, Lowellville police chief. “At all times, the weapon was safe. It could not have had an accidental discharge,” Alli said. “There was never any kids that were in any danger.”

Because the weapon was not “charged, you could pull the trigger all you want and it would not have gone off,” Alli said. “You could have dropped that gun off of a building and it wouldn’t have gone off.”

It was stored in the “standard way you are supposed to store a weapon,” he said.

The weapon was found “during the standard screening procedures that we do at the school,” Alli said, noting that metal detectors became standard screening devices in the school district after an incident in May 2022 in which a student shot himself in the school cafeteria during lunch in May 2022 in front of other students. He died from his injuries.

Alli said the investigation determined that the child involved in Tuesday’s incident was brought to school by one of his parents. “He is not a troubled kid, a problem child, and we are looking into that, and right now we are in the middle of the investigation because we have to look not only into getting the child assessed to confirm with professionals that he doesn’t have any mental health problems. We also have to conduct an investigation of his home life.”

Alli said it will be a while before any other information might be released.

He said when students enter the building, officials monitor students, checking backpacks or anything they bring into the building. The students walk through the devices the way a person would at the airport, Alli said.

“You set procedures like this not so much that something is going to happen, but we want to do all of the deterrence we can, and this proves that our process is working. So I was very happy it works. Our goal is to make sure we don’t have another unfortunate incident like last year,” he said.

This was the first time that the metal detector identified a gun since the current screening process was implemented. “We’ve been running this program for a year and almost a half,” he said. “Our system worked,” Alli said.