In a CNN poll, twenty percent of American teenagers said that “they know someone their age who has talked about committing a serious act of violence at their school, such as shooting a student or setting off a bomb.” Most of these teens said they “never told an adult about the talk of violent behavior.”

The number of U.S. teenagers skipping school for fear of getting hurt has been climbing. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention attributed this rise to schoolyard threats and lingering fears over high school massacres. One-third of polled teenagers said, that they “think an incident similar to the shooting in Littleton, Colorado, is likely to occur in their own schools,” and more than half the respondents said, that the Littleton massacre “has given ideas to troubled students in their own schools to try something similar.”

Does living in a small town of the U.S./Canadian Border insulate International Falls from these fears? If not, why?