How to talk to your child about posting images or words that could be construed as a violent threat.

On August 25, 2019, Alaska authorities arrested two 13-year-old students for planning to bring a gun to their school and shoot people, the Juneau Police Department said in a press release.

Officers took the juveniles into custody Thursday morning at Floyd Dryden Middle School after receiving a report the previous night. It’s among the latest in a string of arrests for mass violence threats since the back-to-back shootings this month that killed 31 people in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio.

A classmate overheard the male students discuss the shooting plans. The student’s parents reported the threat to police. The Juneau School District Superintendent, Bridget Weiss said, “We really want students to know there are significant consequences now to making threats like this…Words and pictures matter.” They do indeed.

I served on my county’s Behavioral Threat Assessment team and conducted more than one hundred threat assessment investigations. The majority of my inquiries were students who said something inappropriate, in-person or online, that sounded like a violent threat. These “threats” usually boiled down to be nothing more than an inappropriate joke. What the student didn’t realize, in this concerning climate of school shootings, the consequences for their “joke” was severe. Most people don’t understand what makes a threat a felony crime. The threatener does not need to intend to carry out the threat whatsoever. The words or pictures merely need to be threatening and cause fear in the intended victim. Saying you didn’t mean it or it was just a joke will not suffice anymore. ...