KC-area schools had to shut down after shooting threat. How long will we tolerate this?

Welcome to the new reality: It’s not just the terror of school shootings we face, but the threat of them that now affects our daily lives.

Wednesday morning, as many as a dozen Kansas City area school districts in Missouri and Kansas canceled summer classes and activities after Blue Springs police received an anonymous report that a threat of violence had been made in a Snapchat post. The threat mentioned killing people and mass murder, but did not specify any particular district or school.

School leaders cannot risk that any of their buildings would become the site of the next mass shooting. Unfortunately we know all too well — after Uvalde, Parkland, Sandy Hook — that mass murder in our nation’s schools is real. Nineteen elementary school children and two teachers were murdered in their Texas classroom by an 18 year-old with an assault weapon just last month.

Welcome to what our schoolchildren and their teachers now face on a daily basis.

Because we know 18-year-olds can purchase an AR-15 assault rifle. Because our lawmakers have been too slow to do more to keep guns out of the hands of people who would use them to commit mass murder. Because when schools get word of violent threats like the one that came Tuesday night, they have to shut everything down. No exceptions.

We should be grateful, at least, that the threat was seen and reported, potentially preventing a tragedy from occurring. After a tipster alerted Blue Springs police Tuesday, a 19-year-old was taken into custody Wednesday morning for questioning about threats made on social media, said Blue Springs Police Chief Bob Muenz.

The suspect has not been identified. Police said they did not immediately find weapons, but the FBI had confirmed the suspect is “dangerous” and agents were searching his home.

After two mass shootings in the last month by teenagers with assault rifles, it’s not a surprise that Kansas City-area schools chose to cancel summer programs because of the threat.

With every mass school shooting since Columbine in 1999, districts around the country have become the targets for threats of violence. In most cases, those threats prove not to be credible, but they are no less frightening.

While a mass school shooting has not happened in the Kansas City area, schools must still respond to threats. And when the perpetrators of these terroristic threats are caught, law enforcement should prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law. Maybe that would be a deterrent to keep this type of thing from happening.

That this threat was reported after schools had closed for summer break only meant that fewer students — those attending summer sessions — were affected by the shutdowns.

But as Independence School District Superintendent Dale Herl told us, his district, and probably others too, would respond exactly the same way had this happened in September when classes are in full swing. “We want to make sure we take safety for our students and staff very seriously,” he said.

Herl sent a notice to parents about the cancellation of activities as soon as he got word of the threat. “We treated it like a snow day, but obviously the stakes were much higher in this instance.”

Indeed. It’s infuriating that this is where we are in this country: That guns are easily accessible to teens, who can’t even buy a beer yet. That we have a decadeslong history of mass killings of schoolchildren, by gunmen who should never possess a firearm, much less a military-style weapon designed to kill as many people as possible and as quickly as possible.

If lawmakers won’t do what most Americans want and pass some real, effective and warranted restrictions on gun access, then we are left with drilling children on how to react when a gunman comes into their school.

We are left to hope that if there’s a threat of violence out there, someone will see something, say something, and police will do as they did in Blue Springs: Act immediately to let schools know and stop it before a tragedy can occur.

But hope is not a strategy.

Going forward, we need to help our children survive the next threat. For there surely will be another one.

This story was originally published June 15, 2022 at 12:09 PM.