The 61-year-old retiree and former cop — who had a penchant for posting provocative progressive memes that made him stand out in his deeply conservative community southwest of Nashville — was to shoot up a local school. 

The evidence, which the county’s elected sheriff used to hold Bushart in a cell on a $2 million bond until last week, is a meme accusing President Donald Trump of dismissing the lives lost in a 2024 school shooting in Perry, Iowa, while pushing punishment for critics of slain right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk.

The charges were dropped and Bushart was released from the Perry County Jail in Linden, Tennessee, only after Sheriff Nick Weems acknowledged in a TV interview that Weems initially claimed that Bushart’s post set off “mass hysteria” that he was plotting a shooting at the local Perry County High School. 

The high-profile arrest appears to be part of a broader crackdown by Republican lawmakers — including the Trump administration — on Americans whose social media posts about Kirk’s killing they found to be offensive. Among them are in violation of the First Amendment for online posts about Kirk’s Sept. 10 death. Bushart’s case is an extreme example, civil rights advocates said, and may be the only one where someone has wound up in handcuffs. He

“This guy should never have been arrested in the first place, but the second that there was real scrutiny of the meme that he posted — and it was very apparent that he was not in any way suggesting that he intended to commit a school shooting or anything like that — he should have been released immediately,” said Brian Hauss, an American Civil Liberties Union senior staff attorney who focuses on free speech issues and called Bushart’s arrest “an absolute travesty.” 

Bushart’s arrest calls attention to applying strict penalties for school shooting threats and mandating police officer involvement in campus threat assessments intended to ferret out students with violent plans before they act. The bipartisan laws, passed in the wake of the 2023 mass school shooting at a Christian elementary school in Nashville, have led to a wave of student arrests and have similarly become the subject of . 

The state’s new and “incredibly broad” laws can be used as a “convenient tool,” Hauss said, for law enforcement officials with “political grudges to settle.” 

Weems, himself an avid Facebook user who warned after Kirk’s death that “evil could be standing right beside you in the grocery store,” didn’t respond to interview requests. Neither did Bushart nor the local school district. 

While Bushart’s school days are long behind him, his case is a prime example of why police shouldn’t be “part of the broader role of educators” in scrutinizing students’ behaviors to distinguish an “off-the-cuff remark of a frustrated student” from a threat of violence, said Dan Losen, a senior director at the National Center for Youth Law who has spent more than two decades researching school discipline policies and the so-called school-to-prison pipeline.  

“Once the police are involved, they’re entrenched,” Losen said, adding that officers can make arrests even without the support of educators on threat assessment teams. While law enforcement should be called in threatening circumstances, he said there’s a greater risk for “law enforcement to abuse their authority” if they’re regularly asked to evaluate student conduct through a policing mindset. 

“They can, at any point, decide that a student is a threat,” Losen said. “They can go after people that they don’t like — they can go after their kids.”

Losen said he initially saw value in school-based threat assessments as “a clear process” to evaluate students’ conduct and react appropriately. In recent years, however, he’s come to believe the research supporting the model lacks rigor and that it’s led to a surge in unjust suspensions and arrests —

‘I don’t care, I want him arrested’

In states across the country, police officers have become routinely involved in evaluating students’ behaviors and motives as members of formal campus-based behavioral threat assessment teams. School-based threat assessments have become mainstream, particularly in the aftermath of the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Schools nationally have assembled teams of teachers, mental health officials, police and other campus adults to identify students who pose safety threats and intervene with counseling and other services — and sometimes arrests — before anyone commits violence. 

Such teams are used in 85% of schools across the U.S., by the nonprofit Learning Policy Institute. Forty-five states have policies that establish the teams in public schools, the report states, and 20 have laws requiring them. 

District leaders have also turned to technology for school safety, using artificial intelligence-powered surveillance tools to scan social media websites in search of posts that could spell danger. 

Threat assessments have prompted concerns from civil rights groups that the method could misidentify struggling students as future gunmen and unnecessarily push them into the juvenile justice system. School shootings are statistically rare yet student behaviors that are often factors in threat assessments — like alcohol use and a history of mental health issues — are exceedingly common.

In 2023, Tennessee lawmakers passed rules requiring every school to have threat assessment teams that included police officers. That same year, lawmakers established mandatory yearlong expulsions for students who make violent threats against schools. In 2024, lawmakers increased the penalty for threats against schools from a misdemeanor to a felony. Georgia and New Mexico have since . 

The changes have led to , according to reporting by The Tennessean. Last year, 518 students statewide were arrested under the new law, 71 of them between the ages of 7 and 11. Some of the arrests were preceded, the outlet reported, by ill-advised jokes and statements erroneously perceived as threats. 

In one case, a high school student was arrested for allegedly making a “Hitler salute” and, despite a lack of evidence, the principal said “I don’t care, I want him arrested.” The teen was reportedly taken into custody, strip-searched and placed in solitary confinement at the local juvenile jail. 

When speech becomes a ‘true threat’

The rate of school shootings has surged in recent years, yet early interventions have received credit for saving lives in several instances. 

In September, the nonprofit Sandy Hook Promise — which was formed in the wake of the 2012 mass school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, that left 20 first graders and six school staffers dead — boasted of .

A high school student reported to the Say Something Anonymous Reporting System “detailed threats on social media,” to shoot up a local school complete with images of ammunition, a mapped-out attack plan and access to a gun, according to the nonprofit, which notified a local school district response team. The student who made the alleged threats was ultimately detained by the police. 

Sandy Hook Promise claims the incident is the 19th planned school shooting they’ve prevented since 2018. School shootings are , a majority of whom leak their violent plans to people around them in advance, offering officials a window to act. 

Mo Canady, the executive director of the nonprofit National Association of School Resource Officers, said the police play a critical role in assessing school threats and preventing campus violence. Canady acknowledged that social media, in particular, “is not an easy environment to navigate” when trying to decipher whether someone’s speech constitutes a threat.

But the focus needs to be placed on keeping campuses safe, he said, rather than “being hyperfocused on, ‘Oh my gosh, am I violating someone’s First Amendment rights?” 

“People have a right to say what they want to say, but there are also consequences at times to what they say,” Canady said. “From a behavioral threat assessment standpoint, I don’t think there’s ever an intent there to try to squish anyone’s First Amendment rights. That’s not what this is about.”

In its new report on school-based threat assessments, the Learning Policy Institute concluded that the approach appears effective in preventing violence at schools where it’s implemented with high fidelity and where educators receive instruction from expert trainers. In the absence of adequate staff and training, educators often turn to suspensions, expulsions and arrests to handle students who are viewed as problematic. 

Poorly designed assessments have led to concerns they “may target and potentially traumatize the most vulnerable students, including through the exclusion and criminalization of historically marginalized students.” 

It also called for additional research into threat assessments, noting that much of the existing evidence supporting them comes from a team of University of Virginia researchers who developed a model used in schools nationwide. In one 2021 study, resulted in low student disciplinary rates and didn’t exhibit racial disparities in outcomes. 

Psychologist Dewey Cornell, the principal author of the university’s Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines, declined an interview request, but argued that First Amendment implications were rare.

“Free speech objections to threat assessment don’t come up very often in school threat settings,” Cornell wrote The 74 in an email. “There is case law on how threats are excluded from free speech protections.” 

The Supreme Court has set a high bar for what constitutes a “true threat,” and the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank, said Bushart’s Facebook post fell . In a 1969 Supreme Court opinion, the group noted, the nation’s top court “made it crystal clear that only true threats are exempt from the freedom of speech — not hyperbole and political bombast.”

 In 2023, the Supreme Court further strengthened First Amendment protections, finding someone can only make a “true threat” if they knowingly disregard a “substantial risk” that their speech would cause harm. 

In Bushart’s case, it doesn’t matter whether the sheriff’s actions were the result of a misunderstanding about the intent behind the Facebook post or an effort to censor speech he found objectionable, the ACLU’s Hauss said. The monthlong confinement violated the Tennessee citizen’s constitutional rights. 

Hauss said he understands “the very serious security concerns when it comes to school shootings.” But campus safety matters, he said, “should not be left up to people who can’t distinguish political speech from threats of violence.”

That’s the message that federal law enforcement officials touted Tuesday during a first-ever hosted by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a division of the Department of Homeland Security. While a demographic profile of school shooters doesn’t exist, according to , soon-to-be gunmen exhibit signs that can be identified prior to attacks — such as a fixation on violence or a history of depression. 

Officials endorsed “threat assessment,” an approach pioneered by the Secret Service that’s become a common but controversial strategy in schools to predict future perpetrators and prevent targeted campus violence. The Secret Service is part of Homeland Security.

“We’ve seen the tragedies that have happened when that information, on behavior that objectively elicits concern, was not acted on,” said Lina Alathari, chief of the . “But we also need to make sure we’re setting a lower threshold for what we want to intervene with — such as being bullied, depression, suicidality — because we’ve also seen those in the background of these students that resorted to violence.”

Following the mass school shooting in May at a Uvalde, Texas, elementary school, districts statewide are set to receive for campus security, including for the creation of threat assessment teams. 

Yet the deployment of such teams, which generally include school administrators, mental health officials and police officers, has civil rights groups on edge. Critics warn the approach could misidentify struggling students as future gunmen and unnecessarily push them into the juvenile justice system. While school shootings remain statistically rare, student behaviors that are factors in threat assessments — like alcohol use and a history of mental health issues — are exceedingly common.

Such concerns were largely downplayed at this week’s summit, a three-day virtual event where law enforcement officials, educators and other experts gathered to offer recommendations in responding to a range of campus security risks, including mass school shootings, cyber attacks and online extremism. 

Steven Driscoll, the threat assessment center’s assistant chief, stressed that the approach is not “based on profiles or identifying types of students” but rather a focus on identifying threatening behaviors and intervening early. 

“Schools need training not only on the behavioral threat assessment process best practices but also on things like implicit biases which have historically permeated a variety of school-based programs,” Driscoll said. 

In a letter to the Education Department last year, a coalition of 50 student civil rights groups warned that the adoption of threat assessment in schools is “likely pushing many children of color and children with disabilities out of school, into the school-to-prison pipeline.” 

“These ‘threat assessments’ are likely to target large numbers of children who aren’t actual threats — including disproportionate numbers of children of color and children with disabilities — and cause them significant and lasting harm, while doing little or nothing to increase safety in schools,” according to the letter, which was signed by groups including the National Center for Youth Law, the National Disability Rights Network and the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates. “In addition, they may refer children to services that do not exist.”

Last year, a analyzed 67 school violence plots that were thwarted between 2006 and 2018, finding that plotters in each case were met with criminal charges or arrests. Yet the “primary objective” of threat assessments is not to administer discipline, the report notes, but to “identify students in crisis or distress and provide robust interventions, before their behavior escalates to the point of criminality.” 

Amy Lowder, the director of student safety and well-being at a suburban Charlotte, North Carolina school district, acknowledged during the summit that threat assessments conducted improperly can have detrimental effects on youth, including unnecessary student expulsions and juvenile justice referrals. That’s why it’s important, she said, for threat assessment teams to take “a whole-child approach in gathering the necessary information” about students causing concerns. 

Meanwhile, Greg Johnson, a high school principal from West Liberty, Ohio, said that school leaders must balance students’ civil rights against their need to ensure campuses are secure. Johnson was principal of West Liberty High School in 2017 when a classmate. 

“You’ve got that balance because you want to support student rights and individual rights but you also want to keep people safe and that’s a huge responsibility,” Johnson said. “That’s a huge responsibility to keep your students safe.” 

In an interview with The 74 that opened the summit, Homeland Security Secretary Alejando Mayorkas noted that there have been more than , more than any other year on record. 

Given the reality that school shooters often leak their plans to friends or online, summit panelists also endorsed a need to monitor students on the internet — a practice that has raised a separate set of civil rights and digital privacy concerns. That’s why it’s important for districts to employ experts in digital analyses, said Colton Easton, the project and training manager at Safer Schools Together, a Canadian-based, for-profit company that offers threat-assessment training and a team of threat analysts to assist districts in investigations. 

“Maybe a student made a threat involving a gun and we see that gun posted on TikTok, we would consider that behaviors consistent with the threat and law enforcement could obtain a search warrant and remove access to the means,” Easton said. “Today, digital leakage is that golden ticket for school safety and threat assessment teams.”