Averted school shooting in rural Tennessee

A parent found a video with two students discussing a plan to attack McMinn County High with firearms and explosives. A list of specific students they targeted was also found.

“We avoided a significant incident at McMinn County High because a parent notified us about a problem.”

Last Thursday night (2/6/2025), a father discovered a video that his son had recorded three months ago, and he called the sheriff directly to tell him about it. In the video, two masked students (14- and 15-years-old boys) talked about specific students they were going to target during an attack at the school with firearms and explosives.

Both students were taken into custody on Thursday night. One of the teens is being held in a mental health facility and the other is in a juvenile detention center.

The sheriff said that he has a personal relationship with the father of the student and believes this school shooting was stopped because this parent was assertive about watching out for warning signs and monitoring his son’s electronic devices.

Based on my analysis of 125 averted school shootings between 2019-2024 (real plots with planning, capability, and intent to cause harm), tips from students and parents are the most common way that school shooting plots are detected and violence is prevented.

A formal threat assessment team rarely has access to information in private chats, encrypted apps, or files on a personal computer/phone. These are systems that only other classmates, friends, siblings, and parents can monitor and access. This is why it’s essential to setup a nation-wide reporting system so that anyone can easily make a report. Most parents don’t have the sheriff’s cellphone number!

Profile of McMinn High School

McMinn Central High is located in the town of Englewood in McMinn County, Tennessee (population 1,550). The school has a full-time school resource officer and threat assessment team.

After every school shooting, people say “we never thought something like this could happen in our community”. Planned attacks at schools happen most frequently in small, rural communities like the school shootings at Perry Middle/High School (IA), Mount Horeb Middle School (WI), and Apalachee High School (GA) in 2024.

The high school serves the entire county and has an enrollment of 1,408 students. 78% of the students are white. This is a poor county with a medium household income of $31,919. Englewood, TN is a railroad town with a coal mine and no other major industries or employment opportunities.

While the school has a 95% graduation rate, the students only score 13.4/100 on the US News college readiness scale.

Preventing Future Attacks

This school shooting was prevented by an assertive parent who had the courage to notify police. Meanwhile, the school had a formal threat assessment system that failed to detect the warning signs during the 3-month period since this video was recorded.

Based on my research with Dr. Dan Hamline (still unpublished because the peer-review process for an academic journal article takes years), more than 80% of averted school shootings between 2019-2023 were stopped because of tips from other students or parents. Empowering the community to speak-up and take action is the most effective way to prevent violence at schools.

I wish I could put a link here to the nation-wide reporting system, but it doesn’t exist. Here is my explanation of how we can create a version of the National Poison Control Center for investigating, preventing, and collecting real-time data on school shooting plots.

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David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.