— In North Carolina, the Court of Appeals of North Carolina affirmed that a student’s statement to a group of fellow students that he was going to “shoot up the school” was not protected speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. This upheld the adjudication of the offense of Communicating a Threat to Commit Mass Violence on Educational Property, a felony under state law. The case arose out of an incident in which students reported to school officials that they heard a student say, “that he was going to shoot up the school,” and “I will bring the guns.” The court announced the rule of law as one in which “under the First Amendment, the State may not punish an individual for speaking based upon the contents of the message communicated, (but) there are limited exceptions to this principle, as the State is permitted to criminalize certain categories of expression which, by their very nature, lack constitutional value. One such limited exception is when the criminalized speech constitutes a “true threat.” Under this exception, “true threats’ encompass those statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals. The speaker need not actually intend to carry out the threat. Rather, a prohibition on true threats protects individuals from the fear of violence and from the disruption that fear engenders, in addition to protecting people from the possibility that the threatened violence will occur.” Applying this standard to the dispute, the court held that the student’s statement “was objectively threatening, supporting application of the true threat exception to the free speech protections of the First Amendment.” The appellate court affirmed the adjudication, concluding that, “the student-witnesses in this case did not testify they thought (the student) was joking or that his statement might have been perceived as a joke. To the contrary, the evidence was that (the student) sounded serious. The evidence further demonstrated (the student’s) comment elicited the further comment from a student offering to “bring the guns,” which was overheard by the third student-witness and, itself, caused her alarm….The evidence tended to reflect that, in the context of a school setting, (the student) threatened to conduct a school shooting in a serious tone and students overhearing the threat took it seriously and were scared. Matter of D.R.F.
— In Washington State, “Seattle’s Interim Chief of Police…is advocating for the return of School Resource Officers (SROs), saying they will create a safer environment for students.” In the school year just ended, “69 teenagers have been charged with felony gun offenses.” A prosecutor for King County also confirmed that in recent weeks “we had two children in possession of firearms in two different schools in two different districts, one of which was a firearm with an extended magazine—it was a ghost gun.” The community is taking note of these comments after the fatal lunchtime shooting of a student at a high school on June 6.
— In Nebraska, the board for the Omaha Public Schools is considering a new agreement with the Omaha Police Department that will “increase pay for associate school resource officers by $2 an hour, so each SRO would make $40 an hour during the 2024-25 school year.
— In Tennessee, the Tennessee Governor signed into law House Bill 322, requiring school emergency drills and better collaboration between schools and law enforcement. The new law also, “allocates $230 million for enhanced safety, including $30 million to place school resource officers in every public school, $54 million toward security upgrades for public and private schools, $140 million to place Homeland Security agents in every county to coordinate school security responses, and $8 million to provide new school-based behavioral help staff.”