It Could Happen Here - Someone Is Organizing Shooting Threats in Dozens of Schools

Episode Date: September 26, 2022

Dozens of Schools in multiple states have been victims of a coordinated series of fake mass shooting reports. Robert sits down to talk with Molly Conger about a massive, growing problem.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami?

Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Garrison Davis and I like to call here's a problem goodbye episodes. And the problem is that there has been a massive and as far as I can tell, unprecedented wave of swatting incidents against public schools in multiple states over the last couple of weeks. And here with me to talk about that is the person who noticed it first. Anti-fascist researcher and community meeting note taker Molly Conjer. Molly, you are Socialist Dog Mom on Twitter, where you are a sensation with your delightful little pups, and also one of the best researchers that I know in the biz. Welcome to the show. Great to be here. So yeah, you want to start? Yeah, so this has been going on, I guess, for two weeks. There's been this wave of swattings against schools across the country.

And I didn't notice it until it happened here. We had to restart this so many times. I feel. I know. I know. I'm going to say the joke again. It's great, though. You should.

Because it happened here. I love it when they say the name of the show. And we finally get to do it. Yeah. But, you know, my. You know, my attention is primarily local, so on Monday when every cop in the region was dispatched to Charlottesville High School because there was

a false report of an active shooter inside the school, it was quickly determined to be a swatting, right? So they dispatched everybody. They locked the school down. They cleared the classrooms with guns. You know, kids reported being terrified of, you know, because nothing was happening to them. They were just enjoying, you know, an afternoon at high school. Then all of a sudden there's a man with a rifle in their classroom. And it was quickly determined to have been a swatting. And I was listening over the scanner. And by the time they were clearing the scene, that's what they were calling it. So the police identified it as a swatting like through over the. Yeah.

identified it as a swatting like through over the yeah and i think that may have they may have arrived at that conclusion more quickly because a dozen other districts had it at the same time so across the state of virginia um districts you know from hampton roads to arlington culpepper lynchburg like tiny towns in shenandoah county like a town with 4 000 people down um you know in the southern part of the state were hit at almost exactly the same time with these hoax calls about, you know, got to get somebody down to the school because there's somebody with a gun. Good Lord. It's so, you know, it happened all over the place. All of these schools were quickly cleared. No one was hurt. Thank God. But as I think, you know, as the news was coming in, I was picking, you know, picking through trying to find the districts

where this was happening. And I was pulling up you know, picking through trying to find the districts where this was happening. And I was pulling up these news articles and it wasn't just us and it wasn't just that day. So it's I think the earliest I can find in this rash was. What is that? Two weeks ago in Texas, a bunch of districts in Texas were hit. And the one in Houston, I think is particularly grim because the caller, the caller said, you know, Oh, 10 students have already been shot. They're in the classroom. It's two guys with ARs. And they gave, this is one of the,

one of the ones that's the best described in the media is that the caller gave a description of the two shooters. And that's what scares me, right? Is that the cops show up with a description in mind. They're going to act with extreme prejudice if they see someone who fits that description. Yeah, anyone dressed like that. There's a Hispanic guy in the parking lot that, you know, could be at risk. Yeah. Well, and that's the first one. Like, when I shared your early posts on this, people from Houston started showing up and saying, like, hey, you know, we had something like this hit a couple of weeks ago, and it sounds like it's the same thing.

And these are – I mean like number one, the scale of this, it feels unlikely that at some level – I know there's certainly an extreme likelihood that some of these are copycats, some of these are people falling in. But the sheer number of them makes it seem – it's hard to believe that this would all be unrelated all of these calls would be unrelated to each other and then you know i don't know what the background level of normal swattings is right like i'm sure to a certain degree this is happening somewhere all the time you know people are saying oh it's just kids who don't want to take tests. Yeah. Fifteen schools in Minnesota were hit simultaneously yesterday. This isn't kids who don't want to take tests. Right. Simultaneously, so many schools.

And there is a point there, which is, you know, because people, when I started sharing this and stuff, people were like, well, what are we supposed to do? to me is actually not a preventative measure, but is purely just like, well, we should probably have some sort of at least at a state level system at every state for letting people know how many fake swatting attempts against schools are happening, how many like false reports of mass shootings at schools occur. Like it would be because otherwise we can't tell if this is rising above the level of background. I think it's clear this is because neither of us can think of a time when there were this many in such a short period of time.

Dozens a day. Dozens a day. There should be some method of keeping track of that. I mean, I thought that was the lesson of 9-11, right? Is that we don't have interagency communication. Like, you know, on Monday when it was hitting all these schools in Virginia, some of the early reports were, you know, quotes from local authorities saying we talked to the state police and this happened to two other people. It's like, well, I've already found 10 other reports. Yeah.

Did the state police know about those? Yeah. And it's it's this is obviously none of this is as bad as a single actual mass shooting at a school. But this isn't like nothing either. shooting at a school. But this isn't like nothing either. It's not like you file a false report about, I don't know, a break-in and the cops drive around a neighborhood for a while. Like, this is kids getting guns pointed in their faces. This is children thinking that like their friends have been massacred. This is like parents thinking their kids might be dead. This is an act of violence. Like doing this is an act of violence. And it ripples, right? The effects of this are compound and unfathomable.

You know, I heard from friends in the community saying, you know, I got a text from my 13 year old son saying, I don't know what's happening, but I love you. And even if, even if, you know, 30 minutes later, the danger has passed and everyone knows it was a false alarm for that 30 minutes, those parents thought, thought that their kids weren't going to come home. And that, you know, that's a background fear that parents have every day when they send it, but that's the text no parent wants to get, right. You know, before we lost the recording earlier, I was telling you about a, um, a surgeon here in Charlottesville. She's a surgeon at UVA hospital.

So the hospital was alerted about a possible mass casualty incident so they could prepare their, their operating rooms. And so this woman gets the mass casualty incident alert as she's scrubbing in for a scheduled surgery. So she has to walk into that OR without her phone, knowing that her child's school, to her knowledge in that moment, has a mass shooter inside of it. And so she doesn't know if when she walks out of that OR,

are her children going to be in there. That's horrific. That's horrific. That's horrific. And also like that could get somebody killed. And this is nothing against her. That affects the level of care. It would not be surprising if she was less able to properly provide care in that situation. That's just being a person.

So this is serious. Very serious. And so yesterday, a rash of them hit Minnesota. And some locals in Minnesota were saying that. So one of the schools that was hit was East Mankato high school the day before. So the day before yesterday, that high at, at that high school, a student at that high school attempted suicide with a firearm in the parking lot. So kids came back to school the day after this, you know, the student survived and is hospitalized. But, you know, they're coming to school, hopefully to, you know, access counseling resources and deal with the fact that one of their classmates shot himself in the parking lot and suddenly they're sheltering in

place and there's cops with guns. There is a baseline reality for these students every day that gun violence is present. And this is just cruel to them. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though.

I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep

into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters. This is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars,

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where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh.

And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

One of the things that surprises me, you and I, you started, what was it, four days ago now, kind of reporting this on your Twitter, which is where you do your reporting on local news and the anti-fascist reporting as well. And so I started sharing your stuff and we started chatting about doing an episode. And my suspicion, the thing I was expecting was that like, well, we'll probably get scooped on this, right? Like there's probably like Vice or somebody is going to put out something because there's just there's too damn many of these. It's Thursday now. This started Monday.

I still haven't seen any coverage of this as a wave of swattings, and I'm kind of surprised by that. There's a few, like, you know, regionally, people are putting together and doing these little quick hits about like, oh, this happened in a dozen districts in our state. Yeah. But I'm not seeing anyone connect the dots nationally.

Some of these local stories are saying, you know, local authorities are talking to the FBI, but I don't know that there is a cohesive nationwide investigation into this as a phenomenon. Regionally, there is some indication that, like, these calls are connected.

So I saw an article that just came out an hour ago in Minnesota that all of the Minnesota calls came from the same IP address. Ah, so this, that's, I mean, that's what, that's the proof we're looking for, though.

That's the evidence we're looking for, that, like, there's a significant degree to which this stuff is coordinated. And when I, because this is something that, since you started talking about it, every researcher I know who covers extremism has been talking about at least a little bit in, like like private conversation

signal loops. And the thing that keeps coming up is like, is there some shit on Kiwi farms? Is there some shit on 4chan? Is there some shit on like these, these little spaces? I haven't seen anything, nothing. So yeah. Um, you know, to some degree there is the possibility of social contagion, right? Like I found a few stories that don't fit the pattern specific cases. Um, like yesterday in Roanoke, a 14-year-old girl was arrested for making one of these threats. She didn't make all of them.

She made this one. Did she do this? Was she inspired to do so because of this? Was it unrelated? It's hard to say. So at some point, even if it did originate in one incubator, it breaks containment.

And I am certain that's part of the intent, right? Like when you do the benefit of if you're thinking about because, again, we don't know who did this. We don't know what kind of ideology or whatever or why was behind it. But we know that a significant number of them like occurred from a single source, which means like something coordinated was happening at some stage of this. That's a reasonable conclusion to draw from the extent information. And I think it's just pure psychic terrorism, right? Because my first thought on Monday was, is this someone testing the fences?

Is this someone timing response times? Is this someone watching local news coverage to see what kind of equipment the police have? That doesn't make sense at this scale. This isn't how you would do that because this is going to draw too much attention, right? And like, why would you want to know the, you know, the police capabilities in Emporia, Virginia, which is just like three truck stops in a high school? No offense to the beautiful town of Emporia, Virginia. It is Virginia's greatest speed trap. God bless them.

Yeah. But like that, that theory immediately fell by the wayside for me because it doesn't make sense. But it is interesting. So I've been, you know, trying to compile follow-ups on some of these reports because the initial reporting is vague and people use 911 as shorthand. So they'll say a 911 call, but was it actually a 911 call? Because that makes a huge difference here. But was it actually a 911 call? Because that makes a huge difference here.

Dialing 911 is, you know, I'm not a genius about how technology works. But if I dial 911 here from my living room, it hits my closest emergency communication center, right? It's my local 911. If these calls are being made from out of state, it takes a high degree of technical ability to hit a 911 dispatch center where you aren't yeah right so we know we're not dealing with someone who is capable of that alternatively we know perhaps that this person knows that making a false 911 call is a separately prosecutable crime right so like a lot of the articles that are specific will say that the call came in directly to police dispatch or the call came in to the front desk at the sheriff's office. So these people know well enough how to contact the front desk at the police department and the name of a school that's nearby.

Right there. It's not. It's not so vague as to just be dialing random police stations and saying, go to the high school. Well, no, and that also, again, because we've just mentioned, I haven't seen any evidence of this in the places you would expect if this was the way a lot of these doxing campaigns have gone, the way a lot of Kiwi farm stuff goes, the way a lot of swatting happens, where like, you have a shitload of people openly talking about and talking about bad things happening to a targeted person. And then some of those people do swattings, right? There's no evidence of that. And the way in which it seems like the bulk of these have gone doesn't seem like the way it would happen if you were just kind of targeting someone in a public area and hoping that enough

people made the decision independently to make these calls. and hoping that enough people made the decision independently to make these calls. My other thought, too, is that, you know, it's sort of a libs of TikTok phenomenon. Like they're targeting schools with, you know, woke policies, CRT, gender inclusion. They're not. I mean, they get Lynchburg, Virginia, which is Jerry Falwell country. There's no demographic or political consistency to the districts being targeted. Well, and the right hasn't picked this up at all. I haven't seen any kind of like very no one.

Very few people seem to have at this point. So this is just such a. If I were if I were to guess where this is going down, it's some some sort of communications platform where people have a degree of privacy. And I don't know, if it's not testing the fencescat effect will just keep it going for a significant period of time, of shutting down dozens of schools around the country, of traumatizing kids, of continually making those schools roll the dice. Because any time you have a cop with an AR busted into a fucking school, hyped up, thinking there's a shooting, there's a chance someone's going to get shot, right? Right, and that's, I mean, there have been deaths from swattings and that was that was my you know but so it happened here two days in a row on tuesday it happened at our middle school and so like the second time they responded they didn't respond as hot and heavy uh but yeah anytime you get you know cops charging

into a scenario where they think they might get to or have to depending on how you feel about it use their guns the risk of someone being shot by accident is astronomical. Yeah. And I'm honestly, I'm kind of shocked that hasn't happened, especially in the cases where, you know, the caller gives a specific suspect description that, you know, puts anybody who vaguely meets that description at great risk. But I think this is just, you know, Joker mode nihilism. I think this is just, you know, Joker mode nihilism. Yeah, that's that is if I were to like make a raw, irresponsible, like public guess. Not that I don't think this is actually that irresponsible, but like we just don't know. But that's that's what this that's the the M.O.

This fits best so far is kind of raw. I want to disrupt the system. I want to scare people. And I want to do so in a way that's the problem with a mass shooting from the perspective of someone like this is that you're going to die or get arrested doing it, right? That's the way all of them end. And so that limits the number of people who are going to be inspired to carry out a mass shooting. If you can show that, yeah, people can call in dozens of these fake reports, and some of them, you know, are going to end violently, then maybe a bunch more people are

willing to do that. And the overall level of disruption and chaos that you cause is substantially higher. Right. It's a relatively low threshold for involvement, right? You don't have to be ready to die. And maybe you won't get caught. Although I think because especially in the Minnesota case, they're going to catch somebody. Governor Tim Walz's son goes to Mankato High School. No, I mean, you upset the governor's son. You're going to get caught. the FBI is looking at this. They never, I mean, it's policy. They're never going to confirm that until the point at which, like, it becomes, it's a big enough story

that they kind of have to for PR reasons. But I would be surprised if there was not an investigation at the moment. Every couple of days when one of these regional stories comes out, you know, they'll quote the local FBI field office saying, you know, we're working with local authorities

to help them investigate. But the FBI is absolutely investigating this nationwide. There's no chance that they're not. Yeah, it's it's too it's too clear of a pattern. And it's not unprecedented, right, that a couple of years ago there was that Atomwaffen swatting ring that those guys did go to prison for. Yeah. So it doesn't have to be a lot of guys. This could just be a couple of people. So, you know, we're saying we're not seeing this leak out anywhere. It's not being discussed anywhere. It could just be, you know, three or know we're saying we're not seeing this leak out anywhere it's not being discussed anyway it could just be you know three or four guys yeah it could be four four people in a discord with some like auto dialing apps that they've they've either coded or found somewhere on the internet um which if they if they are using some sort of like

program to do this that's meant for i don't know sketchy uh salesmen or whatever there's a decent chance that's what brings them down um because all of that shit has terrible security but um so does discord i don't know like i i it'll be interesting to see what happens here i think one of the questions for from the perspective certainly of like people listening what can be done here well on a local level, one thing people can fight for and advocate for, especially if you're involved in local government is like, I would like to know every year how many times the police go to a school over a false report of a shooting, right? How many times are classrooms being cleared? How many times are the cops showing up for this? Because that's important information. And that also should tailor the way the police are being trained for this and the ways

like the, there's a number of things that you should be doing if you know, hey, we had no mass shootings this year, but the cops showed up with guns drawn 45 times, right? That should inform the way you do things in the future in order to minimize the trauma these kids go through. That's one thing that is an immediate thing people can take and that you can do. People can advocate for locally. I mean, it's a tough line here, right? You know, I think every district is really eager not to be the next Ubalde police. Of course. Yes.

They're showing up hot and heavy. They're going right in there, you know, knocking down doors and pointing guns at kids. They're going right in there, you know, knocking down doors and pointing guns at kids. You know that the video that came out from that classroom in Houston, they frisked several children at gunpoint. I'm not sure why that if they were sitting at their desks, they were obviously not committing a mass shooting. Or in Denver on Monday, they evacuated the whole school onto the football field with their hands in the air. Like, was that necessary? Which is horrifying. Right. Right.

That's even as a police abolitionist, I recognize that in the system in which we currently live. Yeah. There is no response to a school shooting that does not involve the police. That's right where we are. But are they doing this smart? Yeah. As a rule, I think everyone can agree that given the current realities of the world we live in, if a guy is shooting up a school or a lady, it's good for people with guns to come and stop them. And that's realistically going to be the police in our current system.

But that doesn't mean we can't be like, well, okay, they came up 50 times falsely and traumatized all these kids by pointing guns at them on the fucking football field. We should change the way in which they're responding to these. That shouldn't be the default. These are things people can lobby for at a local level that will have an impact on at

least the quality of life for kids in the schools. And for parents, you know, like in Uvalde, there was the parent who, you know, slipped around the police line and got into the school and got her kid yesterday. No, two days, two days ago in San Antonio. They had a hoax call. Somebody called in. SWAT showed up. And parents showed up because they got the emergency alert text.

So the parking lot fills with parents. A father punched through a window, cut his arm up, and was tackled and handcuffed by the police because he just wanted his fucking kid. Of course. This is going to keep playing out or here on

tuesday at the middle school you know i was listening to my scanner after the you know they cleared the buildings the police left and then a call came over the scanner and said the school is requesting that the police come back to handle the parents because parents are angry of course they are so how do we how do we navigate this tension of yes we need police to respond if there is a school shooting but how do we as community communities navigate this space where we also don't want them to point guns at our kids we don't we don't have a lot of trust and communication with our police department so i don't know if that's a space we can navigate Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love

technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. dot com. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories.

of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami.

Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a problem that has to be adapted to, right? There is the potential, you have this problem, right, which is that it is apparently easy to weaponize the reporting system for mass shootings. The problem is compounded by the fact that you can't ignore the risk of a mass shooting

because kids can die. People will get killed if you are wrong about that. At the same time, it is unreasonable to say that every single time one of these reports happens, if the ratio is hundreds of false reports to one actual shooting, every time it happens, you go and you stick guns in the face of a bunch of kids and you traumatize all these parents who wind up going crazy for understandable reasons. There are structures that can be built into the system to mitigate those harms, at least. And I think that is, you know, from the perspective of who is doing this and how can they be stopped? That is a question that will be answered either by law enforcement or by independent researchers. But but that's that's a research problem, right? That's a cracking a case problem.

My fear is that the response to this will be putting more cops in schools, right? It's, you know, the cop in the school doesn't stop the school shooting. We know that from, you know, empirical evidence. Yeah. From 20 years of data. In several of these cases, you know, the news story says, you know, dispatch contacted the school resource officer who said, no, I don't see anything. So is the solution going to be put a guy in there who can look? Yeah. He's not going to do anything, but he's gonna let you know he will say charlottesville the city of charlottesville took our school resource officers out of schools last

year two years ago time's now um so my my fear is that even people who applauded that decision will at this point say maybe we should put him back maybe we need a guy in there with a direct line to dispatch yeah and i and maybe we do i just just don't think it needs to be a man with a gun who has the ability to arrest children, right? Having a first responder on scene at every school who can be the, yes, there actually is a shooting or no, there's not, maybe a medical training is perhaps a different thing that could happen rather than let's put more armed men in schools right like that right that's not an inherently unreasonable proposition but i don't know i don't know that police are going to be receptive to the idea of let's ask some questions first right because as i was listening to the scanner again you know i have the most information about the two incidences that were in my neighborhood um i was listening to the scanner on tuesday and it takes time for cops to arrive at a scene even in a relatively small town by the time they had dispatched this response to the scene they had already spoken to the principal over the phone they already knew this was not true

we'll see and there's another solvable problem because if you're if you're having guys with guns still show up because it's policy when someone at the school has said no there's not a shooting well that's again that is a problem that can be altered or that can be fixed to mitigate harm. That seems pretty simple, which is be like, well, maybe if somebody at this, maybe if the school's principal says, no, nothing is happening here, you don't send the gun guys. Maybe you still send a squad car to check it out for diehard purposes. I'm sure we all remember what that movie has to say about these kinds of problems but um you know i i there's a lot that can be done with

the information that this is a problem and to a certain extent i think i'm hopeful that once this kind of blows up and i'm certain this well i'm certain that maybe even by the time launches, there will be some big national stories about this because this is a really substantial problem, very obviously is a substantial problem. I hope that one of the things it does is perhaps lead to the authorities taking swatting and threats of swatting and communities that engage in swatting much more seriously because by god they have not so far and it's not the laws about it are not super consistent state to state that you know there have been some attempts on the federal level to make you know blanket legislation about this specific because you know it's illegal to make a false report to the police it's illegal to make you know a false 911 call but to specifically and intentionally weaponize an armed police response because you hope it will hurt someone in most states isn't its own crime right

like in i think in california they have specific legislation that like you can be charged like financially responsible for whatever it costs to have that response yeah like there's not uniform agreement that this is a separate crime. This is a separate harm that should be punished in a specific way. And maybe we'll get that out of this. I don't know that that solves it. But again, it will, like you were saying, that this is a lower barrier to entry crime. But if you up the punishment, maybe that threshold to decide to do it goes up.

Yeah. Yeah. Again, I think there's a variety of things that can be done now that we know this is a problem. And one of the reasons why I think this is important for us to cover on a show like this is a lot of these are problems that can at least be mitigated at the local level, right? You do have power if you're involving yourself in local politics to do things like advocate for a system in which you track how often this is happening, to do things like advocate for changes in how the school handles this sort of thing.

Like that is a thing that you, that people can handle locally. And that is, you'll get a faster response handling it locally as well than you will trying to advocate for some sort of big national swatting law. And you're going to get, you're going to get faster and better results changing local departmental policy than you will getting any law that changes how the police behave. That's highly unlikely. Yeah. And so I think this is important. I think it's important for people to engage with this from the perspective of like, we don't know why this is happening or who is doing it yet.

And it may be a while before. I'm certain we will find out at some point. These people will get caught. But it almost doesn't matter because the system is so easy to weaponize. The solution is to try to find ways to make it less harmful without reducing the ability of people with guns to show up if they need to to stop someone who's murdering kids right those are the two things that need to be done not reduce the efficacy of the system which is not very good to be honest at stopping mass shootings and and it's piss poor at that so it would be hard to make it worse i will say when people talk about well what happens if they well they're bad at it now they're

terrible at it now so it's not like i i'm not worried about making a change to like mitigate the response of swattings in this instance harming kids because as it is the system almost never saves them when there is an actual mass shooting so simply reducing the amount of time that kids have cops pull guns on them in these false reports um that's more of a priority to me than anything else um yeah when we're talking about the issue of swatting and i think there again there's just there's things that can be done there molly is there anything else you wanted to get to on this on this subject no i think that covers it i just um all right this is still happening it's happening today like it's it is still ongoing phenomenon is ongoing, and I think it will

continue to build until it hits a breaking point. Like you said, I definitely think some of these people will be caught. But I don't know what that changes, right? Once this breaks containment, once people see that this is a thing that they can do. Yeah. Do we deal with a wave

of this before it gets under control that gets even bigger? Or is that what's actually happening right now? I don't know. And does this and does this, I don't know, desensitize people to the idea of these threats? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. But, you know, no kids get shot. I hope no kids get shot. If you're a journalist and you're trying to you are trying to report on this in some sort of concerted way uh you can find molly on twitter at socialist dog mom she's done i think she's written most of your article for you you can steal like but i don't want to tell people to steal your

work i think it's important to tell them, ask the right questions, right? Like when you're, you know, when you're getting your three questions into the press conference with your local sheriff's office, ask specifically, where did the call come in? What number was dialed by the caller? Yeah. Right. Because I don't think these are 911 calls. I think people are using 911 as shorthand. So ask where the call came from, the substance of the call.

Because I think, I imagine that some of these calls are verbatim and we just don't know that i think some of them are probably identical and we just don't have any way of it's hard to connect the dots when the police won't tell us um so i think if you know if journalists are listening ask more questions than you got in the press release that's critical because if there were if there was Because if there was a Virginia State repository where every time we get a false swatting attempt against a school, we report when it came in,

who was called, and what was said over the call, right? All of which are things that they could pretty easily get because this shit is always recorded. I don't know that that's true, though. That's another sort of tactical thing, right? 911 calls are recorded. But if you call the front desk at the police station, it probably isn't.

That is a fucking good point. In any case, that is another thing that could be dealt with because then you would at least be able to see, oh, there's 40 swatting attempts in the state in the last five days. And 38 of them, it was the exact same script. There's probably a single source of this that we should be like looking at um and that can help not just law enforcement who's generally bad at these sort of investigations but people like you who are good at these sort of investigations and can maybe then start doing keyword searches and figure out where the fuck this stuff is originating from if it's anywhere on the semi-open internet um again

things there's a lot to be done to respond to this problem that that doesn't start with like throwing more cops at it or or or whatever like there's there's a number of different problems that this has revealed um so hopefully those get solved anyway molly you got anything else to plug before we go oh defund your local police department yeah subscribe to your local newspaper sure um and uh yeah if uh if you're at a school right now good good luck those poor fucking kids yeah they Really, the kids these days are dealing with a lot. I'm more grateful every year that my my childhood was as uneventful as it was because boy, howdy, is it rough to be a student today? And they still have to take their tests. And they still have to take their fucking tests.

Yeah, they have to go to school. They got to read The Great Gatsby while this is going on. Unbelievable. Sorry, they have to go to school. They gotta read The Great Gatsby while this is going on. Unbelievable. Um, sorry kids. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check

us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails,

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