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Boy, 8, Brings Loaded Pistol to Brooklyn Public School

An 8-year-old boy brought a loaded semiautomatic pistol to an elementary school in Brooklyn on Friday, the police said.

The episode occurred at Public School 91 on Albany Avenue. A teacher there discovered the gun, which was loaded with four rounds, around 11:30 a.m. when the boy refused to put down his pack, the police said. The teacher lifted the backpack, noticed that it was unusually heavy, opened it and found the gun, the police said. The teacher told school officials, who called the police.

The police said there were no arrests, but that they were looking into who owned the gun and how it came into the boy’s possession.

In recent months, Families for Excellent Schools, a pro-charter school advocacy group that often opposes Mayor Bill de Blasio’s education policies, has said that New York City’s schools are growing more dangerous under Mr. de Blasio. The organization recently joined a group of public school families to sue the Education Department, contending that students were being deprived of their right to an education free of violence, bullying and harassment.

The data, however, is mixed. The advocacy group, using state statistics collected by school administrators, maintains that the number of violent episodes rose 23 percent from the school year that ended in June 2014 to the one that ended in June 2015.

But John B. King Jr., the federal education secretary who was previously New York State’s education commissioner, has said that the state data was inconsistent and that it “rarely reflects the realities of school health and safety.”

The Education Department, citing Police Department data that tracks any episode in a school in which the police are involved, said that crime in the city’s schools declined 29 percent from the 2011-12 school year to the 2014-15 year.

As of Friday, seven guns had been found in schools so far this school year, one fewer than had been found by this point last year, according to the police.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 18 of the New York edition with the headline: Boy, 8, Brings Loaded Pistol Into an Elementary School in Brooklyn. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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