A 15-year-old teenager in Florida was arrested for threatening to conduct a mass shooting at a school

The teen made the threat under using the fake name Dalton Barnhart on Discord

The Volusia County Sheriff’s Office posted the video of his arrest where his mother was seen arguing he is just a child

Since the El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, shootings there have been at least 30 arrests for threats of mass shootings across 18 states

A viral video shows the moment a Florida mother tried to argue her 15-year-old’s arrest after he threatened to conduct a mass shooting at a Florida school under the name “Dalton Barnhart” on Discord.

According to the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office, the teen ⁠— who has not been identified ⁠— posted a message on Discord that read, “I Dalton Barnhart vow to bring my fathers m15 to school and kill 7 people at a minimum.” The VCSO posted the video to their Facebook page where it was shared over 13,000 times.

The teen told law enforcement he was only joking when he made the post on Discord. The FBI alerted Volusia County authorities last week and authorities arrested him the following morning. In their Facebook post, the VCSO said “Joke or not, these types of comments are felonies under the law.”

In the video, the mother is heard saying her son is “just a little kid playing a video game.” The officers seem unswayed by her argument. “These kids say stuff like that all the time. It’s a joke to them. It’s a game. And it’s so wrong. I hate that game,” the mother continues.

The mother repeatedly argues that her son is not one of those “crazy people.” When one of the officers asks if she owns a gun she responds yes. “Ok, he has hands and feet and he can grab your gun and go do something,” the officer responds. The defensive mother immediately argues that he would not do that.

The mother later explains that it is just her and him that live together and claims “it has always been that way.” While the officers seem to understand her emotions, it did not change the fact that her teenage son made a very direct threat online to cause another mass shooting in a country where a mass shooting appears to occur every other week.

Since the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, at least 30 people have been arrested across 18 states for threatening a mass shooting. According to the Gun Violence Archive there have been 263 mass shootings in 2019. The archive defines a mass shooting as four or more people wounded or killed.