People got together to stop a school shooting before it happened

Summary

He was 16, bullied at school and living with his grandparents in a home stocked with firearms. Classmates called him “the next school shooter” and taunted him that he was going to be a drug addict like his parents.Finally, one winter morning on the school bus, he turned on his tormentors. Curling his fingers in the shape of a pistol, he said, “I hope you all die.”It was a situation that has become grimly familiar in recent years: an alienated young man with a festering grievance and access to guns. Too often, it has ended in horrifying bloodshed.But what happened next, in this small community in central New York, upended decades of thinking about how to prevent mass shootings.Threat Level: HighIn May 2022, after a gunman killed 10 people at a Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, Gov. Kathy Hochul ordered each of the state’s 62 counties to create plans to stop the next threat before it ended in more deaths.The strategy, developed by the Secret Service, begins with the understanding that mass shooters do not just one day “snap,” but build up to the act. They leave warning signs and are often even questioned by the police but then ignored because they have not committed crimes.The approach aims to intervene during the buildup, using mental health services and other agencies, teamed with law enforcement, to get people off the pathway to violence early — into counseling, drug rehab or other support networks.“Thoughts and prayers aren’t enough,” said Jackie Bray, commissioner of the state’s Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, which trains and pays for the county teams. “Mitigating these things — security cameras, security guards, school drills — isn’t enough. You have to act to prevent them, because they’re happening at an ever-increasing clip. And if we prevent some, that saves lives.”In Madison County, a rural region east of Syracuse, the threat on the school bus that morning in February 2023 became the first challenge for a newly formed team.Madison Count...