A year ago, Georgia sheriff’s deputies showed up at the door of high school student Colt Gray, questioning him about an online threat to shoot up his school. Last week, the 14-year-old was charged with shooting and killing four people at Apalachee High School.

As more details emerge, the question for Georgia lawmakers is: How should officials respond to these types of warning signs in the future?

Lawmakers have already signaled that they plan to take tougher action against students who make threats. In a Sept. 12 letter to members of the Republican House of Representatives, House Speaker Jon Burns wrote that one of his goals in the next legislative session will be to “increase penalties for making terrorist threats in our schools — and make it clear that here in Georgia, threats of violence against our students will not be tolerated and will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” (Burns did not respond to a request for comment.)

But as ProPublica reported this year, increasing penalties can also have consequences: trampling on the rights of children who pose no danger to anyone.

Two weeks before the Apalachee shooting, we published a story about a 10-year-old boy in Tennessee who was suspended from school for a year after angrily pointing his finger into the shape of a gun. The article examined how a state law, passed in response to the shooting at Covenant School in Nashville last year that left six people dead, requires schools to expel students who make threats of mass violence.

In July, another law in Tennessee went into effect that upgrades the charge of making a threat of mass violence from a misdemeanor to a felony — without requiring officials to consider actual intent. Many experts and some officials see both laws as too big a leap.

There is no indication that the 10-year-old from Tennessee whose case we investigated posed a danger to his school or his community. The fifth-grader did not have access to a gun, his mother said. She said school officials described him as a good kid and expressed regret at having to send him away. (The assistant principal in his school district declined to comment, even after his mother signed a form giving school officials permission to do so.)

Meanwhile, law enforcement officials in Georgia were alerted a year ago that Gray was making threats, and they learned directly from his father that the teen had access to guns. (School officials said the warnings were never passed on to them.)

As Georgia lawmakers consider what they can do to keep students safer, experts say they need to consider the implications their decisions could have for a broad spectrum of children — from the 14-year-old with access to assault rifles to the 10-year-old pointing a finger gun. Those who study the warning signs and lawmakers’ responses to school shootings have long warned that zero-tolerance policies like Tennessee’s are not proven to make schools safer — and could actually hurt students.

To deter violence, experts say, the research suggests the most effective strategy is not mandatory expulsions and felony charges but a different tactic, one that federal officials have touted based on decades of interviews with mass shooters, political assassins and survivors of attacks. Threat assessments, when done effectively, bring together mental health professionals, law enforcement and others in the community to help school officials separate credible threats from simply disruptive acts and get students the help they need.

“It’s the best option we have to prevent these kinds of shootings,” said Dewey Cornell, a psychologist and a leading expert on the use of threat assessments in schools. A threat assessment team should interview everyone involved in a threat to determine whether the student poses an imminent risk to others. And it should warn all intended victims of major threats, take precautions to protect them, and explore ways to resolve conflicts.

Cornell said law enforcement involvement and strict discipline should be reserved for the most serious cases — the opposite of zero-tolerance policies. Tennessee, along with 20 other states, requires threat assessments in schools. But because the state also mandates expulsions and misdemeanor charges, many students are ostracized and isolated instead of receiving the ongoing help that experts consider one of the threat assessment process’ greatest strengths.

Suggesting that schools and authorities should closely monitor and assist students who make threats can feel counterintuitive, especially as fear and frustration mount, said Mark Follman, a journalist at Mother Jones and author of the 2022 book Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America.

It’s also easy to understand why people would want to be punished for threats, Follman said, but it can make the problem worse. Sending away a potentially dangerous student leaves school officials and others with little ability to control them. And, crucially, “you’re also potentially exacerbating their sense of crisis, their grievances, particularly if it’s the school,” he said, pushing them toward a point of attack rather than away from it.

For his book, Follman interviewed leading experts in threat assessment and joined a team at an Oregon school district. He points out that the threat assessment process only works if it is done correctly. “Most, if not all, of the examples I’ve seen of stories about threat assessments negatively impacting students and families are cases where it’s not done right,” Follman says.

Tennessee school officials are inconsistent in their threat assessments, as our story last month showed. Some are letting police take the lead on minor incidents, resulting in criminal charges against children who made threats that school officials themselves did not find credible.

At least one Tennessee lawmaker is responding to the Georgia shooting by saying it validates the harsh punishments for students who make threats. Sen. Jon Lundberg of Tennessee, who co-sponsored both of Tennessee’s sentencing bills, told the Chattanooga Times Free Press this week: “The Legislature is constantly looking at, ‘What else can we do?'”