The first intervention is to talk to the kid. But so much of that has been done in a kind of authoritarian fashion, and educators have not been trained in what is really a psychological intervention. You want to talk to the kid, just get some information about what might be going on with him, who they might trust enough to confide in. It goes in steps -- you do an informal assessment, where this and that are some of the things you should look for. You just need to be finding out what is going on with this child in a way that says we are watching, we care about you, we want everything to be alright. If they give you other, more dangerous signs and signals, violent or suicidal ones, then you need to make an immediate referral and get the parents in there. I think schools are going to have to come to the point where they have to suspend some of these children until there can be a thorough evaluation.

One of the circumstances is when the parents themselves are pretty obviously disturbed and have mental health issues of their own. One of the most familiar signs of a potentially violent child is a violent parent. Some of the kids I have consulted with will tell you about beatings going on in the home. It can be pretty tricky when the parents are either in denial or extremely defensive about it. Another thing, even the most well-meaning parents are the ones who really just cannot believe that their child would say or do anything like that and really mean it. It's so unimaginable or terrifying to them that they are just in denial, and that's very dangerous. Depression in children, especially very fragile ones, can often play itself out in some kind of violence.

Oh, yes. You see it in the profiles of most of kids that did these shootings -- they're not known troublemakers, most of them. At Columbine, although they had been in trouble with the law, they were not troublemakers in the classroom, they got good grades, handed in their work. That's the thing that's most troublesome, that if these boys had been identified earlier could have played out very differently. If you have an obvious troublemaker, then he is in the spotlight; you are watching them. Interventions happen and they work, but when you have this kid who's not acting out in all those typical ways, then he doesn't get the intervention. Teachers just need more information and more training in what to look for.

You'd think they'd be doing everything they could to see that every school is safe, that they're learning about intervention, that every school and every teacher are as trained in crisis management, like they're doing in Muscogee County. But it's not happening, and that's just unimaginable to me. But that's how powerful denial is -- people just don't believe it's going to happen here, wherever "here" is. It's not because we don't care, but because we don't believe.