New info about Apalachee High that schools and parents need to know
New info about Apalachee High that schools and parents need to know
A $2.99 cardboard poster can defeat millions of dollars in school security equipment.
For the first time in court yesterday, law enforcement officials and prosecutors in Georgia revealed new information and evidence about the school shooting at Apalachee High.
These new details highlight three big issues that extend beyond Georgia to impact schools and parents across the United States.
Failures at home
There are red flags before a school shooting and there are OVERT F*CKING WARNINGS. Per testimony during the father’s initial court hearing, the teen had a shrine to the Parkland, FL school shooter in his bedroom. Having pictures of mass murderers on the wall of a kid’s bedroom is not a subtle hint of a problem.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the teen allegedly asked his dad to buy him an all-black “shooter mask,” saying in a joking manner that, “I’ve got to finish up my school shooter outfit”. The teen also had a written notebook that detailed his plan with maps of the school and how many victims he intended to kill and injure in each room.
Aligning with prior reports, the court proceedings allege that the father gave his son the AR-15 rifle he used during the school shooting for Christmas in 2023 and the teen had open access to unsecured guns inside their home. Georgia does not have state laws that require guns to be locked or stored unloaded inside a secure container or safe.
Parents—and all responsible adult gun owners—need to keep every gun inside their home locked and ideally disassembled with ammo stored in a separate locked case. Parents also need to look inside their kid’s room and read the contents of notebooks, especially if their kid is obsessed with school shootings.
No simple solutions for school security
Teens are smarter than simple solutions to school security. If a kid is obsessed with school shootings and writes out a detailed attack plan, he will probably think of ways to bypass the security systems that he sees at the school every day. The Apalachee High school shooter hid an AR-15 rifle inside a cardboard posterboard.
How can this simple piece of cardboard defeat the most common school security systems?
Metal Detectors: During most metal detector screenings, students put their bags on a table and walk through the metal detector. It’s unlikely he would be told to carry the oversized posterboard through the metal detector. If it did go off, he could say there are metal parts in his project.
Smart Scanner: To avoid false alarms from laptops, tablets, and binders with metal rings, students are told to hold their school supplies in front of them or over their head when they walk through smart scanners. If Apalachee High had smart scanners at the front doors, he would probably be told to hold the posterboard over his head or put the board on a table beside the scanner while he walked into the school.
X-Ray: Most posterboards are 36” wide and can’t fit into a standard x-ray machine.
Manual Search: If a student has a taped up posterboard with a science fair project, is a school security guard going to open it up and risk damaging the project? When there are 2,000 students waiting to go through security, even if the guard wanted to look inside, is there time to untape and close back up a carefully packaged school project?
AI Camera: Camera software that detects guns can’t see a gun inside a piece of cardboard. Per reports, when the teen came out of the bathroom with the rifle, he held the cardboard poster over the gun so that it was not visible on the CCTV. If a company heavily advertises how it works, a kid researching school shootings will probably figure out how to defeat it.
A tri-fold cardboard poster that costs $2.99 can easily defeat security systems that schools are spending millions of dollars on.
Parents need to recognize school shooters
There has been a ‘no notoriety’ movement which encourages the media not to share the names and images of school shooters. While it seems like a good idea not to glorify and ideologize mass murderers, not naming or showing photos just hides their identity from casual observers like parents.
Kids can find out anything they want to know about school shootings and mass shootings on thousands of internet forums with pictures, videos, discussion boards, and even fan art idolizing the attackers. Since Twitter removed all safeguards, children and teens can easily find violent content that glorifies school shootings. Every parent should also understand how Discord works and why the school shooting community content on distributed private servers isn’t moderated.
Instead of pretending like school shooters don’t exist, parents need to be able to immediately recognize their faces, names, nicknames, and symbols associated with school shooters. For a parent to spot red flags, they need to know who and what to look for.
Solutions to prevent attacks
There are not any physical security products on the market that can prevent every school shooting. We don’t want schools to be like prisons and even inside high security prisons, there are still drugs, weapons, cellphones, and other prohibited items because bad actors always innovate one step ahead of security.
Here are three steps we can take to stop many school shootings:
Public education and standardized reporting system similar to “see something, say something” after 9/11 so that anyone who spots “red flags” can easily report them to police. The system needs to be managed federally so that every report is investigated, the dots are connected, and critical information doesn’t slip through the cracks. (Read more: What can the average person do to prevent the next school shooting?)
Fully funded crisis intervention programs in every community to help someone who is suicidal or shows risk factors before they decide violence is their only option. (See: The Off Ramp Project)
Every state needs to pass laws that require guns to be stored inside a locked safe and hold the legal owners criminally and civilly liable for crimes that are committed with their unsecured firearm. When an adult buys an AR-15 for a 14-year-old as a Christmas present, this is a ‘straw purchase’ where a legal buyer is obtaining a firearm for a prohibited person (kid under 18). Parents need to be held criminally responsible if they provide firearms to children who can’t legally own or buy them.
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.
I enjoyed reading your outline on the school security.
Ultimately, failures in the school and at home contributed to this event.
I will state though it does not matter if we have 2,000 or 5,000 students to process in the morning for security checks, it needs to be done. We cannot pick and choose or worry about boxes taped up for a science project. The bottom line is security and checks need to be done for everyone's safety.