A 13-YEAR-OLD Kansas student was arrested and charged with a felony after police say she made a gun-like hand gesture at multiple students, U.S. media reported over the weekend.

The girl, who attended Westridge Middle School in Overland Park, Kansas, made the gesture at four of her peers and then toward herself Sept. 18, after being asked which five people she would kill in her class, according to Overland Park Police Chief Frank Donchez. He said the context of this conversation was unclear.

The student, who was unidentified due to privacy laws, was arrested and charged Sept. 19 with a felony for threatening a mass shooting, a spokesperson for the Johnson County District Attorney’s Office said.

“Overnight, some of those students contacted the school administration and expressed their fear of this individual, that based on this incident, they were in genuine fear of this individual,” Donchez said in an interview with USA TODAY.

The school conducted an investigation Sept. 19 in which they interviewed the individual and other students. They proceeded to contact the school resource officer assigned to the campus, who conducted his own investigation.

Donchez said that there were previous encounters involving the student that resulted in classmates being “fearful” of her. That investigation resulted in the arrest of the student, where she was transported to juvenile detention.

Dave Smith, a spokesman with the Shawnee Mission School District, told KSHB-TV that her arrest “was a municipal police department decision,” and that the school district played no role in her arrest.

She is expected to appear in the District Court of Johnson County as a juvenile tomorrow.

This isn’t the first time this year a gunlike hand gesture has been in the news. In August, a Pennsylvania man convicted of disorderly conduct for making a shooting gesture with his hand lost an appeal to overturn the ruling.

Recently, in Pennsylvania, a man was fined US$100 for making a gun-like gesture at a neighbor.

The court had deemed that the man who had made the gesture made his neighbor feel “unsafe.”

A Tennessee teenage student was arrested last year at a Knox County Middle School for pointing his gun-like finger and saying “you’re on my hit list” to a teacher.

And finally – and, perhaps, more comically – a Louisiana student was investigated after a panic was caused over a square-root symbol on his homework looked like a gun.  (SD-Agencies)