Larry Bushart Jr. was just freed from a Tennessee jail cell after spending more than a month behind bars — for a Facebook post.
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 accused in September of threatening 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.
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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 there was no true threat. 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 educators nationwide who allege they were fired 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 plans to file a lawsuit.
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“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.”
A woman hugs a police officer at the entrance of the Covenant School at the Covenant Presbyterian Church, in Nashville, Tennessee, after a school shooting in March 2023. (Getty Images)
Bushart’s arrest calls attention to recent Tennessee laws 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 several free speech lawsuits.
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.
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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.
Dan Losen, National Center for Youth Law senior director
(Dan Losen)
“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 — particularly of kids with disabilities.
‘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., according to a report released in October 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 followed suit with similar laws.
The changes have led to widespread student arrests, 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 lawsuit alleges 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 preventing an attack at a California high school.
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.
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Sandy Hook Promise claims the incident is the 19th planned school shooting they’ve prevented since 2018. School shootings are most often carried out by current or former students, a majority of whom leak their violent plans to people around them in advance, offering officials a window to act.
Mo Canady, National Association of School Resource Officers executive director (Mo Canady)
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, researchers found their threat assessment model 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 clearly within the confines of protected speech. 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.”
