Youths Arrested in Armed Robbery Plan : Weapons: A 13- and 14-year-old are found on McGarvin Intermediate School campus with a loaded .357-magnum handgun. It’s the fourth violent incident this week involving children and guns.

A 13-year-old and a 14-year-old planning after-school robberies were arrested Friday when authorities found them with a loaded gun at McGarvin Intermediate School, police said.

“It’s mind-boggling,” Police Sgt. David Stronack said. “We’re talking about two kids who plotted and planned to rob an adult at gunpoint and got a gun to do it with. That’s fairly sophisticated, and they fully intended to carry it out.”

The incident capped a particularly violent week in Orange County involving minors and handguns.

On Tuesday, a 14-year-old boy accidentally shot his 17-year-old friend to death in Westminster while playing with a gun. The same day in Garden Grove, a 4-year-old accidentally wounded his 3-year-old cousin in the face after picking up his father’s gun. On Wednesday, someone fired shots at the Marina High School parking lot in Huntington Beach, damaging cars but injuring no one.

The McGarvin students, whose names were not released because of their ages, were being held at Orange County Juvenile Hall in Orange on Friday night on suspicion of possession of a firearm on a school campus and conspiracy to commit armed robbery, Stronack said.

School officials called police at 1:10 p.m. after being tipped that the boys had brought a gun to campus at 9802 Bishop Place.

One of the boys, who reportedly had taken the gun from a relative, told officers that his friend had the firearm in another classroom, police said. A .357-magnum handgun was found in a duffel bag next to the other student.

“One of the boys knew where one of his relatives had hidden the gun so he went to borrow it without their knowledge,” Stronack said. “The gun did not belong to a parent.”

Stronack said the boys planned to commit robberies after school, although they didn’t know who their targets would be.

The school, which has 536 seventh- and eighth-graders, is in an upper-middle-class neighborhood where violence is uncommon, he said.

“It’s very out of the ordinary,” Stronack said. “We are not talking about a school where you would expect something like this. This whole situation, especially because of their age, is hard for even us to believe.”

Garden Grove Unified School District spokesman Alan Trudell expressed shock over Friday’s incident.

“It’s really unfortunate,” he said. “Luckily, these incidents are pretty rare for our district. It angers us that there are students like this who go to school anywhere.”

So far in 1993, seven students in the district have been expelled for bringing weapons to school, already exceeding the total in each of the last two years.

“School districts everywhere are feeling it,” Trudell said of the disturbing upward trend of students bringing weapons to campus. “It’s become a prevalent issue in what was once quiet, suburban Orange County.”

Trudell said the district has a “zero tolerance” policy in regard to students who bring any type of weapon to school. He said the two McGarvin students face expulsion.

“Our primary concern along with education is the safety and welfare of our students,” Trudell said. “We are confident that we have implemented measures pro-actively and reactively to curb and control these kinds of things. In situations like this, students will be dealt with swiftly and harshly.”

The school district, which has more than 41,000 students and 60 schools, serves most of Garden Grove and parts of Santa Ana, Fountain Valley, Westminster, Stanton, Anaheim, and Cypress.

“We are a large urban district,” Trudell said. “Obviously, a school district reflects the community it serves and this is a sad commentary on our time.”