Boy, 16, caught with loaded gun at NYC high school charged as officials reveal the weapon was one of 4,000 seized in NYC this year

The 16-year-old boy caught with a loaded gun at a Queens high school Thursday was slapped with charges, officials announced Friday as they revealed that the weapon marked one of 4,000 taken off the city’s streets so far this year.

The Benjamin Cardozo High School student was charged with criminal possession of a weapon and making a terroristic threat as an adolescent offender after cops found him toting a semi-automatic handgun in his backpack, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch told reporters at a morning press conference.

The 9-millimeter Taurus GX4 – loaded with 13 rounds in the magazine – was seized just over two hours after the teen allegedly posted an ominous Instagram photo threatening that he was “Boutta Shoot the School Up.” 

The swift investigation also led cops to the teen’s bedroom, where two additional 9-mm bullets were found that were compatible with the weapon, Tisch said. 

The weapon was found to have been “purchased legally by a licensed firearm permit holder in South Carolina on January 9, 2025, making the time-to-crime 252 days,” the top cop said. 

The Joint Firearms Task Force – which includes the NYPD and the ATF – has opened up an investigation to determine how the weapon made its way from South Carolina to Queens, she said.

Tisch, alongside Mayor Eric Adams, touted the recovered weapon as part of a bigger accomplishment for the NYPD so far in 2025.

“This year, we removed 4,000 illegal guns off our streets, and one of those guns was removed yesterday with a 16-year-old child that was in possession,” Adams said. “Stopping the flow of guns is something that we need our federal partners to help us [with], but what the police department is doing every day – zeroing in on illegal guns – the guns that we remove [are] saving lives.”

Tisch called the milestone the “result of persistent, highly proficient precision police work,” noting that for the past 8-and-a-half months, NYPD officers seized an average of 15 illegal guns per day.

In all of 2024, a total of 6,150 illegal guns were removed from the city’s streets, and 4,061 people were busted for gun possession, according to the year-end crime statistics. 

And more than 23,700 illegal guns have been taken off the street since the start of Adams’ administration in 2022, the mayor said Friday.

“Those are 23,000 guns that are not going to be used to harm innocent people, take the lives of family members, kill or maim our police officers and countless numbers of people who are victimized by gun violence,” Hizzoner added.

The announcement came days after the mayor’s management report revealed that major crimes in New York City dropped nearly across the board, with six of seven major felony categories seeing marked declines.

Tisch and Adams on Friday credited targeted NYPD deployments in its notoriously high-crime “summer violence reduction zones,” gang takedowns, and “upstream solutions” such as programs for the youth and the formerly incarcerated for helping to stifle the violence. 

But the mayor called on the criminal justice system to do its part to keep violent offenders behind bars. 

“Each gun we take off the street has a positive and protective impact that ripples out across our city and uplifts every aspect of our lives, but every firearm taking off our street is only one part of the journey,” he said. “The criminal justice system is made up of several components. We need our lawmakers and our judges to do their job…It can’t continue to be a revolving door each time we have a shooting and see a long list of gun charges on a person who committed the shooting.”

“That sends a terrible message that we are not taking this violence seriously,” he added. “We’re doing so as police officers – as crisis management teams – we’re asking the other parts of this system [to] do your job. Let’s make sure dangerous people don’t go through the revolving cycle of being back on our street.”