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: High
In 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.
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The post How 106 People Got Together to Stop a School Shooting — Before It Happened appeared first on New York Times.
