Georgia high school shooting highlights missed warning signs

By James Densley, Metropolitan State University and Jillian Peterson, Hamline University Students kneel in front of a makeshift memorial on Sept. 5, 2024, in front of Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga., where two students and two teachers were shot and killed the day before. Jessica McGowan via Getty Images Most school shootings don’t just happen out of nowhere – there are typically warning signs. A year before a 14-year-old boy was arrested for allegedly opening fire in his high school math class in Winder, Georgia, on Sept. 4, 2024 – killing two teachers and two students – authorities visited his home to investigate several anonymous tips about online threats to commit a school shooting. When they interviewed the boy, who was 13 at the time, he denied making the threats. The father told police there were hunting guns in the house but that the boy didn’t have “unsupervised access” to the weapons. The FBI said in a statement on the day of the shooting that there was “no probable cause for an arrest” and that local law enforcement “alerted local schools for continued monitoring of the subject.” Teachers at the school had been supplied with special identification cards with...