Police are praising two 9-year-olds who found a suspect's discarded gun at their bus stop

Two 9-year-old boys were kicking the snow while waiting for their school bus when they made a scary discovery. Now, police are applauding how the boys handled the situation.

Sam Gonzales and Landry Collins were waiting for their bus on Friday morning in their neighborhood of Pleasant Grove, Utah, when they noticed something sticking up from the ice near the sidewalk.

Landry assumed it was a phone, and Sam believed it to be a harmonica. “So I started chipping up the ice,” Sam told the Salt Lake City news station KSTU. When the item began to reveal itself, Sam realized right away that it was a gun. “It scared me a lot,” said Sam.

“I’ve been told that you should treat every gun like it’s loaded,” Landry told the news outlet. His older brother, Brody, told the students at the school bus stop to leave the gun alone until they could notify an adult.

The boys assumed that the gun might have been dropped the night before, because there was police activity nearby. Police believe that the weapon was used to hold two women hostage inside a home, which resulted in a SWAT standoff and led to the arrest of 38-year-old Nicholas William Haun.

When the boys’ school bus driver arrived, they notified her of their discovery. She took the gun and kept it away from the students until the police could come.

Police are proud of how the students handled finding the gun and alerting an adult.

“It’s OK to teach your kids about guns. They can be very dangerous and in this situation, it could have very well have been,” officer Steven Brinton of the Pleasant Grove Police Department told the news outlet.

The Pleasant Grove Police Department did not immediately respond to Yahoo Lifestyle’s requests for comment.

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