Around the country, communities are being battered by a wave of school shooting threats, sparking emergency notifications, urgent group chats and heightened fears among parents that their child's school could be the next Parkland or Sandy Hook or Uvalde - or any other town hit by mass shootings .
On Florida's Atlantic coast, Sheriff Mike Chitwood of Volusia County said he got some of these same notifications after he walked his grandchildren to school this week.
"It just stuck with me because my cell phone was going off telling me about the other threats. Thinking to myself, how many parents in this country have done just what I just did," Chitwood said, "and they never, ever, ever get to hold their loved one again."
Fed up with school shooting threats in his community, Chitwood pledged to publicly identify students accused of making such threats.
On Monday, he posted the name and mugshot of an 11-year-old boy arrested for allegedly threatening to carry out a shooting at a middle school in his county. The decision swiftly drew praise and criticism amid the ongoing national debate over what it would take to stem the gun violence plaguing the nation. On Wednesday evening he released another video online showing two more young people, identified as 16- and 17-year-olds, in handcuffs and being led to jail over what he called another school threat.
