A video goes viral, but not in the way one Monterey High student intended it.

If you’re a student, teacher, staff member or parent of a student at Monterey High School, sometime in the past few weeks you likely received an invitation to counseling, provided by the school at no cost. The invitation happened after a student, who I’m not naming because he’s a minor, posted a video of himself on social media; he’s holding a rifle, aiming it at some unidentified target, and captioned it as follows: “Me when I see a black guy minding their own business.”

The fallout wasn’t immediate. It took awhile for someone to take a screenshot of the post, which happened on Aug. 16 while the student was in another state, and then to have that screenshot circulate. It made its way to MHS administrators on Sept. 25, when a family came to the school to express their concern about a potential threat of violence. It made its way to the superintendent’s office and to the Monterey Police Department. It made it to Twitter, where someone posted, “This kid goes to Monterey High School and is posting racist shit like this threatening black lives,” and ended with the plea, “This cannot keep happening.” And from there the discussion flew, with the police and school district being tagged, with some people opining it was a joke, and others opining that the kid needed to be jumped and beaten. Still others suggested he needed counseling, and others suggested he should be expelled.

I don’t know how the Monterey Peninsula Unified School District is dealing with the student at the center of all of this, although someone on Twitter posted he received a one-day suspension. Superintendent PK Diffenbaugh tells me that privacy laws prevent him from talking about what punishment or requirements (community service or counseling, for example) were meted out. But I know they’re taking it seriously, and that Diffenbaugh was willing to talk about it, at some length.

After they received notice of the post, Diffenbaugh says they worked closely with the Monterey Police to make sure there wasn’t a direct or specific threat. Monterey PD determined the kid hadn’t made a credible threat (Monterey Police Lt. Mike Bruno tells me based on their investigation, there was no credible threat, and the weapon pictured, while illegal in California, resides in another state where it is legal). From there, the superintendent’s office and the school sent out messages: This happened, there’s no credible threat, but here’s what we have to say.

“We wanted to get that message out quickly, reiterating that it wasn’t a threat to the community, but also denouncing any type of offensive, racist, discriminatory remarks, and we kept it at that high level,” Diffenbaugh says. “We also provided extra counseling services, and let people know should they feel like they need someone to talk to we have a professional available and it may be helpful.”

Diffenbaugh hasn’t met with the kid, but says the MHS principal describes him as as having “a sense of remorse and a sense of embarrassment and feeling horrible about the situation.” In an apology he posted to his social media, the kid says he meant it “ironically as a joke” and described himself as a “complete and total idiot.

“I don’t expect people to forgive me for what I did,” he writes, “I just wanna say I’m sorry and I never meant to hurt anyone. I messed up and I want to admit it and own up to that. I will never post another thing of this nature again. And if you hate me for it please talk to me.”

I hope the kid is having some sort of reckoning, because it seems the school system is certainly having one because of him. It’s a tough lesson to learn that words mean things, and that words have consequences.

But I imagine it’s tougher to be one of the only 68 black students (out of a total student population of 1,306) at Monterey High knowing that one of your fellow students thought it was a joke to talk about training a rifle on an unarmed black man.

Diffenbaugh tells me the state requires students take a lesson on digital citizenship, but that he wants discussions to go beyond stuff like don’t be a jerk online.

“A single class won’t go deep enough to get at the heart of the issue,” he says. “We need to be able to have difficult conversations as to who we are as a school and a society and what we expect of each other.”

MARY DUAN writes The Local Spin for the Weekly. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com or follow her at twitter.com/maryrduan