Earlier this month, a detective knocked on Shavon Harvey’s door, in suburban Ohio, to ask about her son. The son had sent a Snapchat message from her phone to his friends, saying there would be shootings at several schools nearby.
She rushed to the police station, where her son was already in custody, but the police did not release him. He was charged with inducing panic, a second-degree felony, and officials kept him in detention for 10 nights.
In senior year, my school district had 30+ bomb threats in one year. Every time we'd hear the loudspeaker ring, we'd just start grabbing our shit. They stopped telling people about them after a while because evacuating the kids once a week was a shitshow. Every threat was linked to a handful of kids who wanted attention or wanted to get out of tests/homework. I was out sick on the day the feds showed up and started arresting kids.
We got 4 or 5 a year before big tests when I was in high school in the 90s.
The funny part was that there was a pay phone outside the school but right by the main walkway everyone used to get into the school. I guarantee you the bomb threats were always called anonymously from that pay phone, almost in view of the office.
5 or 6 here in Terre Haute, IN from both high schools and middle schools. We're not a small town, but we're not exactly a huge metropolis either. This is happening all over.
Wow, small world. I'm in Terre Haute a couple times a year for business and will be out there again in a few weeks. I'm amazed it's a problem there too.
Alyse Ley, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Michigan State University and the director of a program aimed at preventing adolescent targeted violence, said that “behavior is a way of communicating” — and that it is the job of adults to figure out what students are trying to say.
Lately, she added, it seems that “kids are screaming out for help.”
Kids will push the limits, school shootings are a thing, kids are going to joke/mull the concept of shootings like anything else.
I guess the plan is to increase school shootings and their prominence in people's minds, but also come down increasingly hard on anyone who happens to have it affect them the wrong way.
(The child must learn how to hide from shooters. It must wear bullet proof backpacks. It must hear about shootings all year, every year. It must never make light of this topic, or else.)
What pissed me off at the time (although at least I was a few years out of high school by then) was that practically all of my friends in high school wore black trench coats. I personally wore all black all the time- black trousers, never jeans, black turtleneck and black trench coat.
And then suddenly kids who dressed like I did in high school were getting suspected of being school shooters and not just weird drama club kids that thought that was the way trendy Europeans dressed.
It's not fucked up. School shootings and processing them as children is fucked up. It's like saying a child is fucked up for lying about being sick when "wow bro you know people actually get sick and die? And now you're just playing??" It's a child.
and yet despite how extreme and dark (and edgy) it was I suffered zero consequences and now we're throwing babies in prison for eating a sandwich so it kinda looks like a gun.
I'm just pointing out there's a middle ground we probably should be aiming for and we've blown right past it at some point.