The same day a teenager opened fire at a rural Georgia high school and killed two teachers and two classmates, a 15-year old nearby was taken into custody after fellow students heard him making threats on the school bus about "finishing the job.”
Two days later, a 13-year-old girl was arrested after threatening to carry out a shooting at her Florida middle school on Instagram, a post she claimed was a joke.
On Tuesday, a 12-year-old in Texas was charged with making a “terroristic threat causing public fear” after threatening to “shoot up the school” and showing photos of firearms during a Facetime call with another student.
These are among dozens of cases of violent threats against schools in the week since the the deadly shooting at Georgia's Apalachee High School, threats that led authorities to arrest children and schools to close, lock down or increase police presence, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, USA Today reports..
Among more than three dozen threats logged by the violence prevention group and the newspaper, some are heartrending, such as a gun confiscated from a six-year-old in Tennessee — and others devastating — a 15-year-old boy grievously injured in a shooting an Omaha high school.
How to tell whether threats are real or not is a dilemma that has come into sharp focus since the Georgia shooting.
“The best way to assess the legitimacy of a school shooting threat is to know if there's access to a firearm, because it's just bluster if there is no access,” said Nick Suplina of Everytown for Gun Safety.
“We have to avoid both over-reacting and under-reacting to student threats, and behavioral threat assessment is the best way to do that,” said Dewey Cornell, a forensic clinical psychologist and professor of education at the University of Virginia.
David Riedman, creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, said arresting a child for a threat that is not considered serious is not an effective way to prevent violence in schools and would likely result in them losing access to critical support systems.