As School Threats Proliferate, More Than 700 Students Are Arrested

silence7@slrpnk.net to News@lemmy.world – 228 points –
nytimes.com

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.

He is 10.

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It's crazy to me a 10 yo has access to snapchat

I was on IRC and BB’s by 10.

Being on SC talking to friends and classmates isn’t crazy to me, arresting a kid and holding him for 10 days is tho.

What’s really crazy is a society that lets guns proliferate through it to the point school shootings are common.

no way to stop this says only country where ... yadda yadda you know the drill

IRC took some effort to set up, and some patience with the internet back then. These modern methods like snapchat are easy mode

In my day we had to walk uphill both ways to get to the Internet. Darn kids don’t know how good they have it.

Where are they learning this behavior, I wonder?

Turns out the President of the United States is going to be a role model for American children whether we like it or not.

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.

Kids are so dumb.

Yeah, but as far as I know, they always got away with it. Just like the kids that pulled the fire alarm for the same reason.

The kids at my school didn't get away with it because social media and all that shit. This was also in 2014-2015, so tracking down whodunnit was exceptionally easy lol

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.

Some dumbass at my kid's high school recently wrote on a bathroom wall, "Gonna shoot up the school on [date, three days from now]."

They figured out who it was, he's been charged with four felonies.

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.

If "inducing panic" is a chargeable offence, I think I know an orange terrorist and his sidekick that need to spend a few nights in jail.

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.)

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.”

Maybe school is the problem? Kids might not like being locked up for 8 hours a day in an underfunded cell with zero agency.

How Many More Shootings Before We Question Compulsory Schooling Itself?

Bah.. schooling is good, apparently the way it is done isn't. Especially in the US militarizing everything... do something about the guns ffs.

But then immediately questioning compulsory schooling.

Is was made mandatory to avoid discussions with parents who would rather have the income from having their kids work a factory or a mine.

With the child labor laws under attack in the US, this is not a path you would want to go down. At least I think.

after Columbine I would wear a trench coat to school and tell people "don't come to school tomorrow" for a laugh.

imagine trying that shit now, they'd never let you out.

Cool story bro. Probably one you don’t want to broadcast to the world cuz it’s a pretty fucked up thing to do.

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.

Ok but you do realize that it’s largely because of people like you who did it to be edgy and shit that it’s such a big problem now..? Like you get that, right?

Like sure some places overreact a bit, but that’s not really… justification? And it doesn’t absolve you of contributing to the problem we have now by making people scared by being a weirdo edgelord copycat for funsies.

No, it's a largely because of the kids shooting up schools.

Sane gun laws are the only reasonable response yet here we are 25 years later critiquing my stupid ass high school sense of humor instead of doing anything about it. but keep telling yourselves it's anything besides the kid with access to a gun, it saves the Onion writing a different article.

They're mad at you because you made jokes of a serious issue that only exists because the US is a dumb pace where guns have more rights than kids. If it were anywhere else it would just be an edgy joke. In the US it's like dressing up in an SS uniform to a Holocaust convention.... A little too edgy...

You can't even threaten to murder everyone around you anymore...