What if . . . FBI investigations, gun control legislation, and direct action by the President weren’t necessary to prevent schools from becoming free-fire zones?
Today I stopped running out of the grocery store, transfixed by the headlines of the local paper. I don’t get the local paper; I don’t have time or interest in the intricate machinations of the County Board or the successes of the high school sports teams. But the headline caught my eye: Louisa County High School student arrested Monday night for making threats against school. Oh no, I thought. Not again. Not so soon. Not HERE.
Louisa County lies halfway between Richmond, VA and Charlottesville, a poor rural area in the midst of wealthy urbanization that my first (and former) real estate agent referred to as “outer bumfuck”. Naturally there are, on average, as many guns here as there are people. As I type this diary I can hear neighbors out shooting dinner. Some nights it takes a while for the hunting pack down the road to settle down, and the barking goes on for hours after sunset. The one time I was called for jury duty, one of the first questions they asked the pool was, did you own a firearm? Every hand in the courthouse shot up. The case was for reckless discharge, and nobody thought they’d have a problem convicting if they felt the charge was warranted. You can assume that gun control as a means of preventing violence isn’t very popular around here.
So what happened? A teenager made a threat on Snapchat that he was going to “shoot up the school”. And nobody called the FBI. The FEDERAL Bureau of Investigation — that is, the national police arm charged with investigating interstate drug running, organized crime, and international money-laundering — was never involved. The social media platform was never notified or asked to sift through their user records and violate privacy guarantees (which as we all know are meaningless, but can cause handwringing, dithering, and delay).
Instead, the school principal called the county sheriff. And the county sheriff immediately drove to the kid’s house and arrested him for “threatening to commit serious bodily harm to persons on school property, a class 6 felony”. It was all over in 45 minutes. He was detained at the regional juvenile detention center, where he can await a fair trial while his classmates continue their school schedules as normal. The principal sent an explanatory letter out to all the parents. And nobody got hurt.
The young man making these threats won’t be shot or face years in jail. He won’t commit suicide after committing multiple murders. Authorities will have the chance to assess his mental stability and provide/propose treatment as appropriate. He will also have the chance to stand a fair trial, to be represented by legal counsel, to be found innocent if it was all a bad joke gone wrong and if he is under age, to have the record stricken when he becomes an adult. If he is returned home, most likely it will be under conditions that require his parents to assure that he has no access to firearms for a while. And just perhaps, a quick brush with the Law will teach him that he doesn’t really want to go down that road and give him the opportunity to step back from rash and purposeless violence.
Tonight, I’m rather pleased to live in one of the northernmost counties in Redneckistan. It makes me wonder . . . why can’t we do it this way all the time? You can’t expect the FBI to go running after every high school kid with a chip on his shoulder. You can’t expect tech networks with a hundred million users to sort out which ones are potential mass murderers (hell, they can’t even teach an AI to chat realistically). In order to be fast and effective, action needs to be local.
