Police shot and killed an eighth-grader who brandished a weapon at his school in South Texas Wednesday morning, NPR reports.

It’s a both sobering and shocking reminder that bringing weapons to school is no joke. 

Students at Highlands Intermediate School in Pearl City learned that last year in a less traumatic incident involving no serious injuries, but it could easily have been an equally sad story of one student killing another.

There were 25 firearm incidents in Hawaii schools last school year (2010-2011, which is the one for which we have the most recent completed data) — 19 of them involving airguns, and three involving explosives.

We’ve reported before that by percentages, that’s twice the national rate of firearm incidents in school, leaving a lot of room for improvement.