Ten school shooting threats we are failing to imagine

Missing the signals before 9/11 attacks was a "failure of imagination". Schools faces the same shortfalls when planning hasn't evolved since Columbine 25 years ago.

“Our predictions often fail when we venture out of sample.”

- Nate Silver, The Signal and The Noise, page. 420

“There is a tendency in our planning to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable. What looks strange is thought improbable, and what is improbable need not be considered.”

- Thomas Schelling, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision

“Doing nothing is a choice. If doing nothing leads to a suboptimal outcome, inaction is a really bad choice”.

- Maria Konnikova, Risky Business Podcast

9/11 was a failure of imagination. We had a strong set of signals showing that a terrorist attack was imminent, but we missed them. During the seven years leading up to the September 11 attacks, suicide terrorist strikes by Al-Qaeda and other Islamist militant organizations increased across the world. There was a noticeable uptick because we had data tracking the number of suicide bombings each year back to 1979.

This chart of suicide terrorist attacks has scary parallels to the numbers of shootings at schools in the United States. There has been a rapid increase the last six years yet schools have made few adjustments in how they think about security since Columbine.

Missing the signals of escalating terrorist violence left us unprepared for planes crashing into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. At schools, not only is the number of incidents rapidly escalating, but the school shooting plots that are thwarted are more complex than they were twenty years ago. Just this spring, a student was arrested with rocket propelled grenades. Another student planned to release sedative gases into the school office so that he could disable the alarm systems before the attack started.

After two decades and billions of dollars spent with questionable effectiveness as schools have become quantifiably less safe, how many school security or police response plans are evolving to imagining the future threats to students?

How many schools are prepared right now for these ten scenarios?

1. Planned attack committed by a teacher

2. Attack carried out by an adult and a student

3. AI swatting

4. Drone attack

5. Deliberate fire or chemical release

6. Rocket propelled grenade attack

7. Cyber attack targeting school security systems

8. Domestic terrorist attack

9. Foreign terrorist attack

10. School shooting committed by a police officer

As scary and outlandish as this list sounds, schools need to be ready for these situations. Military planners at NORAD were laughed out of the room when they suggested planes being used as missiles during planning meetings in the 1990s.

As my favorite Nobel winning economist Daniel Kahneman wrote “we tend to overrate the likelihood of events that are nearer to us and underpredict the ones that aren’t.” Schools and police have a hard time thinking about drone attacks because it’s an abstract that hasn’t happened while a kid with a gun inside a classroom is a familiar scenario to rehearse over and over. When a possibility is unfamiliar to us, we don’t even think about it. Instead we develop a mind-blindness to it (Schelling).

The worst part is many of these “future” threats have already happened at schools. Just like two prior plots targeting the Twin Towers still didn’t prepare the intelligence community for 9/11, school officials and police are missing the signals that we need to recognize to prevent the next attack.

1. Planned attack committed by a teacher

Most school security investments focus on keeping a bad guy out of a school building and outside of a secure classroom. What happens when a school shooter is a teacher who locks the classroom door and is alone inside the room with dozens of students while police can’t get in?

Locking bar that prevents a classroom door from being opened from the outside

This isn’t a fantasy.

A Kentucky teacher was removed from the classroom in May 2024 and charged with terroristic threatening after he told students he would be the next school shooter. An Oldham County High School student notified school staff after Michel J. Tripp told a group of students that he only had a few days left to shoot up the school.

At least 33 teachers and staff members have fired shots inside schools, mostly disgruntled employees who were about to be fired or recently terminated.

In 2023, a teacher having a mental breakdown attempted to set the school building on fire as he roamed the campus shirtless with a pistol.

2. Attack carried out by an adult and a student

Most students are too young to purchase firearms and if their parents keep guns secured or out of their home, these kids will never have access to a gun to bring to school. What if a student plans a school shooting with an adult who can purchase the weapons?

On February 8, 2024, a 14-year-old male student in Cincinnati, Ohio was arrested for plotting a school shooting at Mariemont High School. Prosecutors have charged the teenager with conspiracy to commit aggravated murder. A student who heard about the plot reported it to his father who notified police.

Text messages released by the Hamilton County prosecutors’ office show conversations between the student and a man in his 20s who lives in Colorado Springs (near Columbine) during a five day period between January 13-18.

This is an important plot to explore in more detail because of the complexity and multiple elements that differ from prior attacks:

• Use “anesthesia gas” to incapacitate everyone in the building

• Disable school surveillance cameras

• Use a gun owned by the student’s father

• Wear two sets of clothing to change quickly after the attack

Plan A: Adult would commit the attack on a day when the 14-year-old student was not at the school.

Plan B: Bring two “sets of gear” and commit the attack together.

3. AI swatting

A swatting hoax or swatting calls are making false 911 calls to cause panic and trigger a large police response at a venue date back to the 1970s. In most swatting scenarios, someone makes an elaborate report--shooting in progress with multiple people shot, bombs inside a venue, hostage situation--to dispatch the highest priority police response.