What's behind gun threats in Arizona schools? Emotional distress, bullying top the list

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All it took was losing a game of trivia.

“I’m gonna bring a gun,” a student at Desert Willow Elementary School in Kingman told his teacher during class.

“I’m gonna bring a knife.”

“I’m gonna set this school on fire. I’m done.”

In the Flagstaff Unified School District, a student said he "kind of wanted to shoot up the school" because the staff did nothing about bullying.

Emotional distress and bullying appear to be major drivers of school gun threats that elicit a police response, according to an analysis by The Arizona Republic, which examined almost 2,200 reports of incidents in which students threatened gun violence at school.

Bullying and emotional distress aren't new. But social media has further complicated and amplified students' struggles.

As school shootings grow more common across the country, students can see gun threats as a means of empowerment — with or without the intention to follow through on those threats.

“It doesn’t take much for people to make threats anymore,” Kingman police Chief Rusty Cooper said.

The Republic filed public records requests to all existing Arizona police departments asking for calls for service on gun threats in K-12 schools. The request sought a catalog of incidents for almost four years ― from Jan. 1, 2019, through the date of the records request submission in October or November 2022.

It wasn't until April 4, 2024, that The Republic obtained responses from all agencies and was able to analyze those police records to contextualize why students make threats and how school officials and law enforcement respond.

There were 2,196 known incidents involving a police response to reports of a student making a gun threat at school from 2019 to 2022, according to The Republic's analysis. Of those, 96 involved an actual firearm on school property.

Gun threats eat into limited police resources and cut time out of learning. Most of all, they are a cry for help by students with mental health challenges.

When mishandled, experts say, students could be further traumatized and isolated.

Mental health resources, threat assessments and relationship building may help address cases in which students make gun threats while in emotional distress, behavioral experts say.

The stakes of bullying are high, and schools must take multiple approaches that address the direct incident and work to create an environment where bullying is less likely to occur, said Chad Rose, a professor of special education at the University of Missouri.

Doing that means not only addressing behaviors but equipping students with better communication and social skills, he said.

'We're seeing it at younger ages'

In November 2022, an eighth-grader in Flagstaff threatened gun violence and said Jewish people should not exist. He previously communicated statements of self-harm and was counseled for anger issues. He was suspended for the comments and referred for charges.

A referral could mean the responding officer referred the child to juvenile court for consideration that the child be processed through the juvenile justice system. For more serious charges, the officer could refer the child to a prosecutor's office. It could come in the form of an arrest and booking into jail or submitting a written referral.

A 10-year-old in Lake Havasu was upset that his peers were being mean to him and told them he’d bring a gun to school and shoot them. An April 2021 police incident report notes he was not referred for charges because of his autism diagnosis.

“We’re seeing it in younger ages,” said Dr. Paula McCall, a certified child psychologist based in Chandler. “Not to say it hasn’t existed in younger ages before ...”

Now, there’s more vocalization from youth and more heightened awareness among adults, McCall said.

“To me, it’s a good thing that we’re noticing that ― not so great that it’s there, but it’s good that we’re noticing.”

A troubled child, a repeated pattern

An aggressive reaction to losing a class trivia game wasn’t the first sign of distress exhibited by the Desert Willow Elementary School student, according to police reports.

When he made threats to bring a gun to school and burn the school down, the teacher reminded him that when he threatened self-harm the previous week, the office had to be called. According to an email from the boy's teacher that was documented within a Kingman police report, the teacher told the boy his statements of harming others would be no different.

After the boy refused to go to the office on his own volition, his peers were removed from the classroom. The boy became disruptive and a school resource officer was called to help restrain him. However, his foster parents picked him up from school before the SRO arrived.

An officer with the Kingman Police Department later visited the boy and his foster parents at their home.

“We discussed the dangers and possible consequences of making these statements,” the officer wrote in his case report.

The officer also noted in the report that the boy was diagnosed with ADHD as well as reactive attachment disorder and had been prescribed antipsychotic medication often used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

According to the police report, the boy’s foster parents requested the boy be charged so that he could “understand there are consequences.”

The boy was referred for a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct.

Sometimes, a referral leads to court-mandated assistance with mental health or other resources. It’s unclear whether the Desert Willow Elementary schooler was offered assistance through the court system after the May 2019 incident.

Three months later, an officer visiting Desert Willow Elementary for an unrelated reason found the boy hysterically crying in the assistant principal’s office.

The boy was again referred for a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct. He had falsely claimed he had a gun in his backpack and that he wanted to kill his teacher, according to a police report dated August 2019.

It’s unclear if the second referral yielded further court-assisted resources or help for the boy.

The officer was advised, however, that the boy would be permitted to come back to school the next day.

Cooper grew up in Kingman, joined the Kingman Police Department in 1991 and took over as police chief in 2020. He says he has seen firsthand how the schools he attended and his community have changed.

He points to a shift in family dynamic. “We’re getting more calls to police for different issues in the home. Now, we’re the first ones people call,” Cooper said, explaining that the community, both within homes and in schools, has grown to depend on police officers to solve social issues the agency isn’t equipped to effectively handle.

McCall suggested school workers and law enforcement ask key questions when responding to a child in emotional distress, including: What is the motive behind the child's behavior? What's going on in the child's life?

Sometimes, children are trying to grasp control over a situation over which they have no control, McCall said.

"When we see someone who has acted aggressively ... we paint them as a bad person. We do that because we can’t make sense of it otherwise," McCall said.

"It’s really hard to make sense of someone doing something like that if we see them as a regular person. But it’s a shift we need to make in terms of mental health."

Bullying: A common thread in gun threats

A high school student in Oro Valley was fascinated by the 1999 Columbine High School massacre and expressed wanting to hurt a friend and ex-girlfriend. His October 2021 arrest record, obtained by The Republic, mentioned struggles with mental health and indicated he had experienced bullying.

An anonymous caller told authorities he was "seriously concerned" that the high school student would harm his classmates in a possible school shooting.

Investigators found several posts on the boy's Instagram account referencing the perpetrators of the Columbine school shooting, including a photo of the boy wearing an outfit identical to one of the perpetrators.

"(The student) indicated that he is bullied a lot and he just wants people to leave him alone," the police report said. "(He) stated that he posted these things as a scare tactic."

The student admitted to police that he had a fascination with the Columbine shooting and sympathized with one of the perpetrators. Three days later, he was taken into custody for bringing a knife to school, according to a police report.

One of the responding officers wrote that they were informed that the student had expressed a very specific plan to "shoot up" the school on April 20, 2022 — the anniversary of the Columbine shooting.

In 2022, Glendale police responded to at least four incidents of student gun threats, two of which involved bullying. In March, one student posted threats to his school website over spring break, according to police reports. The student's mother told police that her boy was bullied for his sexuality and being biracial.

When officers asked the boy about the threat, he began to cry and apologize, police said. The boy was not charged and was, instead, enrolled in online schooling and put on a health and safety plan, the report said.

Bullying in schools manifests in the form of relentless teasing, derogatory social media posts, spreading rumors or physical violence.

At the core of those behaviors is an imbalance of power, whether in age, stature or academic achievement, behavioral experts said.

Bullying is notable because it is an intentional behavior, said Missouri professor Rose, and a behavior that is likely to be repeated.

While many bullied students don’t make gun threats, decades of research have shown that a key commonality in the experience of school shooters is that they were bullied at school.

Tarinda Craglow is a social worker at a series of alternative charter schools in the Phoenix area and chair of the Social Emotional Learning Alliance for Arizona.

Bullied students turning to gun threats as a response is not surprising, she said, but certainly a signal for schools to act quickly.

“When you’re being bullied, of course, that moves into a whole different level of: no one’s protecting me, how do I protect myself?” she said.

Arizona law requires schools to develop a plan to deal with instances of physical, social or emotional bullying.

What does Arizona law say about bullying?

Language prohibiting school bullying on school electronic devices was added to state law in 2011. In 2016, the law was updated to state explicitly that bullying legislation also applied to charter school networks.

The challenge is how to identify the bullying when it takes place away from the eyes of school faculty and staff.

Experts say that school communities that identify and intervene when bullying occurs enable students to feel connected and responsible to each other. That, in turn, can help reduce bullying and school gun threats.

It's a particular challenge for school officials, who must take gun threats seriously and ensure a threat is not an imminent danger, while also supporting students who have made the threats.

In Kingman, Superintendent Gretchen Dorner says her district has, at times, struggled to make parents feel satisfied with how teachers and administrators engage with bullying.

“We need to also teach resiliency, and relationship building, and community and culture so that people have avenues to talk … and we know how to treat one another,” she said.

But when a student threatens to bring a gun to school, the consequences are more clear cut and unavoidable regardless of the root reason behind the statement, Dorner said.

“If you're interrupting the instructional environment pretending to have a gun, you're gonna get the consequences that go with it,”  she said.

Rose suggests schools build lessons into a range of classes that help students develop social and communication skills that make them more likely to be able to empathize with others, take perspective on emotionally charged situations, and embrace individuality.

Rose cited the move toward standardized testing and increasing pressure on schools to reach academic benchmarks, which he said has pushed out instruction on social skills.

How school officials assess threats of violence

Sid Bailey is the Arizona Department of Education's associate superintendent for school safety and discipline. He trains principals every year on how to respond to bullying.

He defines being bullied as any time students' concern for their safety or how they will be treated by another student disrupts their education. School officials always should take bullying seriously, he said.

“If a student perceives they are being bullied, that is a front-burner issue for me,” Bailey said.

Gun threats, according to Bailey, are a separate issue and he suggests principals treat them as such.

“When you start threatening with weapons … there is no tolerance for that,” he said.

If a student threatens to physically harm someone, whether it is spoken, written or gestured, the Arizona Department of Education encourages schools to have a threat assessment protocol and team to determine whether the student legitimately poses a threat of violence.

A threat assessment is a preventive, multidisciplinary process.

Experts stress it should be approached with care and compassion for the student. Schools should define concerning behavior that may not necessarily be indicative of violence but could warrant intervention, according to a 2018 Secret Service report on averting school violence.  And schools should aim to intervene before a student’s behavior warrants legal consequences.

The threshold for intervention should be relatively low so that a threat assessment team can identify students in distress before their behavior escalates, according to the report.

Here are the signs school officials are advised to look for:

• A marked decline in performance.

• Increased absenteeism.

• Withdrawal or isolation.

• Sudden or dramatic changes in behavior or appearance.

• Drug or alcohol use.

• Erratic, depressive, and other emotional or mental health symptoms.

If a student makes a threat, campus security experts say an effective threat assessment team is well-rounded, collaborative and prioritizes understanding underlying issues in order to resolve a crisis.

Matt Liston is an instructor with the National Association of School Resource Officers. He helps provide high-level training to SROs throughout the country. Liston suggests bringing in an adult on campus who the student trusts to sit with the student during the assessment.

“The scariest part to me … the scariest threat assessments I’ve been a part of, is when we’re looking at a student and we’re trying to find a trusted adult inside that school that the student has a relationship with,” Liston said. “And we can’t find one.”

Bullying expert Sheri Bauman wants to see school workers consider why a student is showing bullying behavior, not only why a student may be on the receiving end.

“We need to do a better job of assessment, not just of the victim but to understand the bully’s motivation,” Bauman said.

Districts have developed different approaches based on their staffing levels and approach to school culture.

In the Tolleson Union High School District in the West Valley, for example, students are taught schoolwide lessons on healthy relationships and communication. Students can report bullying through an anonymous line.

If students are involved in bullying, they can receive disciplinary actions for threats or intimidation. The district also offers a mediation option if both involved students are on board. Students who take part in bullying can be asked to sign a no-contact contract promising not to interact with a bullied student. At the most severe level, the student can be removed from a campus.

“We always ensure students are aware of the ways to anonymously report any concern to allow for further support,” district spokesperson Joseph Ortiz said.

If a student’s behavior escalates toward threatening, child psychologist McCall advised that school workers approach the child with the compassion they would toward a student threatening suicide or self-harm.  Suicidal ideations and threatening behavior have overlapping elements, she said.

“We need to stop looking at it like they’re two completely different things. Suicide risk and threat risk are very much aligned in that inner turmoil.”

Coming Thursday: Why adults aren't charged when kids get access to firearms

Have you been impacted by gun violence or gun policy? Reach breaking news editor and reporter L. M. Boyd at LMBoyd@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on X at @lillianmboyd1.

Yana Kunichoff is a former education reporter at The Republic.

Free mental health resources are available to anyone in Arizona. A statewide mental health crisis line is available at 844-534-HOPE (4673). Another resource for 24/7 help is to dial 988, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. 

Teen Lifeline is for kids to call and get free, confidential and anonymous help from trained peers at 602-248-8336 (TEEN) or 800-248-8336 (TEEN) outside of Maricopa County.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Guns in schools in AZ: Bullying, emotional distress behind many threats