WCSC reported that a South Carolina High School student was arrested and suspended after writing about killing a dinosaur using a gun in a class assignment. Attorney David Aylor, who is representing 16-year-old Alex Stone, said his client's arrest over a creative writing assignment was "completely absurd," and is seeking to appeal the suspension. "Students were asked to write about themselves and a creative Facebook status update – just days into the new school year – and my client was arrested and suspended after a school assignment."
Stone said he and his classmates were told in class to write a few sentences about themselves, and a "status" as if it was a Facebook page. Stone said in his "status" he wrote a fictional story that involved the words "gun" and "take care of business."
"I killed my neighbor's pet dinosaur, and, then, in the next status I said I bought the gun to take care of the business"
“I could understand if they made him rewrite it because he did have ‘gun’ in it. But a pet dinosaur?” said his mother Karen Gray. “I mean first of all, we don’t have dinosaurs anymore. Second of all, he’s not even old enough to buy a gun.”
Additional coverage here.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @12:48PM
Mixing “smart quotes” and standard "ASCII quotes" in the same submission is supremely annoying to those of us with a typography sensitivity. It's like being sucked into a vortex of punctuation. Please, think of us typographiles.
Ok, carry on
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Friday August 29 2014, @01:35PM
Before I comment on your offtopic comment, I have to agree with the kid's lawyer. "Absurd" is absolutely correct. Idiots are teaching our kids!
As to your comment, Soylent having smart quotes now is news to me, and good news indeed.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 3, Funny) by Buck Feta on Friday August 29 2014, @01:37PM
It's a writecrime right in the middle of a story about a writecrime. Well, off to the the slammer with you Pickens.
- fractious political commentary goes here -
(Score: 5, Insightful) by aclarke on Friday August 29 2014, @12:53PM
According to the police, something very different happened:
Translation: Everything spun ridicoulously out of control due to some keywords in an assignment. Apparently the 16 year old was the only one smart enough to realize this, and he got (justifiably, IMHO) irate. He refused to back down in front of authority figures, and since the police took that as a pissing match and they're the ones with the guns and handcuffs, they arrested him.
Maybe the school wasn't being disturbed until the police showed up and started searching the kid's locker for a gun after he said he'd killed his pet dinosaur? Did they search is back yard for the 100m wide hole where he stashed the body?
As a teenager I got SO SICK of arbitrary shows of authority. It's a wonder any of us turn out as well as we do, and it's a wonder that so many of us then go on to behave like asshole gods as adults.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Sir Garlon on Friday August 29 2014, @01:00PM
That sounds like exactly what happened,
The cops who decided to arrest a sixteen-year-old for giving them attitude are a complete waste of air.
I wish the kid's lawyer all the best in showing the cops' superiors that hiring punks and giving them free rein is a costly mistake.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Silentknyght on Friday August 29 2014, @01:13PM
Agreed.
Disorderly conduct seems like such bullshit. If you don't do exactly what the officer says---no matter what they say or ask you to do---they charge you with that. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the police force, in general, know & understand it's complete bullshit but use teach other officers to use it anyhow because it offers them such wide latitude to deal with virtually anything.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by TheGratefulNet on Friday August 29 2014, @02:12PM
'you can beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride'.
you can't fight cops. they always will have the upper hand. fighting with them is futile.
what you CAN and SHOULD do is avoid giving them more room to fuck with you and take the fight to court where you DO have a chance to win. slim, but at least its in semi public view and you can't get broken bones while defending your position in court.
now, you need money to go to court and that's the failure of our system. if you can afford it, you have a chance to teach the bad cop a lesson; but you have to have quite a bit of money saved up to afford lawyer fees.
if there was a paypal fund, i'd donate to this kid's cause. this shit pisses me off. cops are now the bad guys in our society and that's such a damned shame ;( if I encounter a random 'scary guy' in the street, I don't worry so much. otoh, if I see a cop, I do worry; they have the ability to cause great harm to any of us and they so often do, these days, it seems.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by strattitarius on Friday August 29 2014, @02:38PM
cops are now the bad guys in our society and that's such a damned shame ;( if I encounter a random 'scary guy' in the street, I don't worry so much. otoh, if I see a cop, I do worry; they have the ability to cause great harm to any of us and they so often do, these days, it seems.
See that bad guy has something to lose. If he mugs you, he might be shot, stabbed, or beat up. It's at least a possibility. He also might get caught and go to jail.
While cops do have to worry about being shot, stabbed, or beat up, they do not have to worry about going to jail. So, if they take the time to determine you are not a lethal threat, they know they no longer have anything to fear from that encounter. This is what we must change. There should be a disorderly conduct for LEO, and it should be a criminal record and not just a suspension and not just documented in his employment file.
Slashdot Beta Sucks. Soylent Alpha Rules. News at 11.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by mcgrew on Friday August 29 2014, @01:45PM
As a teenager I got SO SICK of arbitrary shows of authority.
The bad news is it seems to be worse now than it was when i was a teen. If something like this [slashdot.org] happened today they'd send a SWAT team. I was able to talk my way out of punishment.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday August 29 2014, @03:37PM
Heh, I liked the story.
Although I'm not sure whether I'd use the word "incompetent" to describe the teachers (maybe "close-minded"?) I'll admit it definitely sounds plausible.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by wonkey_monkey on Friday August 29 2014, @02:34PM
You seem to be reading a lot into "continued to be disruptive" - i.e., that he was only reasonably disruptive under the circumstances and that handcuffing him and arresting him wasn't warranted.
How do we know he didn't start physically pushing people around, or throwing chairs around the room?
There's a wide range of possible levels of doucebaggery from both the cops and the kid here.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 1) by aclarke on Friday August 29 2014, @03:44PM
Throwing chairs around? The guy should be promoted to management!
You're right that I was reading a lot into it. It's conjecture, but it's the most reasonable explanation I personally have after reading the two articles. Doesn't make it true though.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Friday August 29 2014, @04:07PM
We can make a good guess that if he had actually pushed anyone or thrown a chair the police would have tried to call it assault. Also, the press would have gleefully detailed it.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday August 29 2014, @04:14PM
There's no story in "kid gets arrested for perfectly clear reason."
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 4, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Friday August 29 2014, @02:58PM
"Very irate"? Is it possible to become slightly irate? People always try to make everything sound as dramatic as possible :P
It's news like this that pushes me towards the Aneristic Delusion. While the act itself is done by the authorities (arresting him), and thus "orderful," it's an arbitrary-sounding decision to get all butthurt about it in the first place. And coming in, confronting him, and then arresting him on the justification of his reaction is dishonest.
Finally, as has been pointed out before, when there's enough rules that you're functionally always breaking at least one, they can arrest you for a "legitimate" purpose whenever they want.
Hail Eris
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Friday August 29 2014, @03:02PM
*And coming in, confronting him, and then arresting him on the justification of his reaction (if they didn't have a valid reason to arrest him in mind when they got there) is dishonest.
Don't our police forces have anything less pointless to waste our tax dollars on than arresting schoolkids who pose no threat to anyone? I'm recalling that article not overly long ago about the girl who got pressured into violating her constitutional rights by a police officer in the principal's office without them even notifying her parents.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Friday August 29 2014, @06:21PM
It is akin to saying "very dead".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Marand on Friday August 29 2014, @10:46PM
The latter part of that isn't a surprise: bullies will be bullies, and a lot of the same people that were assholes as kids grow up to be assholes as adults. You also get people that were bullied as kids growing into spiteful adults that get a kick out of "getting even", too. Unfortunately, positions like law enforcement attract people like that, because it gives them power they wouldn't have otherwise, so things like this aren't as surprising as they should be.
I'm not saying that every cop is bad, there are some awesome ones out there that do it because they still care about the "protect and serve" part, but there are just as many bullies that get into the work because they get a kick out of the power they have over others. You also see this to some extent with security guards, which sometimes attracts the bullies that can't cut it in law enforcement.
For example, at a job I had years ago, there was this one older, ex-cop security guard that I had a rather unpleasant encounter with once. I kept seeing him hanging out by a dumpster smoking, rather than walking the property like he was supposed to be. Didn't know the guy, so I didn't say anything, but after about an hour or so another guard joined him. I knew this guard well enough that we would tease each other for stuff, so when I saw him, I made a bit of a joke about it. "Great job," I told him, "nobody's going to be stealing that trash bin while you guys are on the job. Shame about the rest of the property, though."
The guard I knew laughed, able to appreciate a bit of ribbing. He knew they were slacking off. The other one, though, wasn't amused. It turn out that, due to being an ex-cop, he was the only one of the guards that was allowed to carry a firearm, and when I made my joke, his response was to reach for it.
That's right, this ex-cop security guard's reaction to a joke I made to another person was to pull a gun on me. The other guard stopped him, so I didn't get to find out if he was actually going to act on that instinct, but it was pretty telling of his nature, regardless. I found out later that he was trigger-happy and it wasn't the first incident, which is probably why he was an ex-cop in the first place.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Friday August 29 2014, @01:18PM
The kid for writing about killing extinct species?
The teacher for reporting an obvious threat to an imaginary prehistoric animal?
The cops for detaining this kid for disturbing a school with a death threat to a dinosaur?
Why didn't they send him to the counsilor if they were that worried about it? If the councilor thought there was a problem, then they should call the cops. No other students should have known anything about this. What, did the cops kick in the classroom door and start drilling him about the death threats to Dino with a knee jammed down on the back of the kids neck?
Maybe the teacher and the cops were fanatical paleontologists.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Rivenaleem on Friday August 29 2014, @01:21PM
The answer is simple, the person who abused their authority the most.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Friday August 29 2014, @03:04PM
Obviously, it was the kid who abused his authority the most. He abused his authority of free speech and must be punished accordingly.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Friday August 29 2014, @03:31PM
> "told in class to write a few sentences about themselves, and a "status" as if it was a Facebook page"
The teacher who gives absurdly shitty assignments to 16 year-olds.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @04:17PM
This seems like a perfectly valid "update" of the ever-popular "what I did this summer" writing exercise: dumbed down from a couple of pages to a couple hundred words; grammar optional; pictures welcome.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by bob_super on Friday August 29 2014, @05:13PM
For elementary school kids maybe!
I'm pretty sure that when I was 16, my teachers were trying to fill our brains with Ensembles, Logs, Limits, rotational momentum, XXth-century history, two foreign languages (optional extra dead one), tech drawing and automation, obscure literature, and even formal philosophy...
No time for "what I did this summer" BS!
Now get off my lawn before I start ranting about US education rankings...
(Score: 2) by Marand on Friday August 29 2014, @09:52PM
I detested those writing assignments when I was in school. Not only because they were inane, boring assignments, with very little freedom to do something interesting; but also because I resented having my personal, school-free time turned into a school assignment. Even worse was when the teacher made everyone read them in class: no matter what school, there was always a small group of students that used that as an opportunity to remind you of how rich or well-connected their families were.
Occasionally a teacher would fail to define it as a factual, non-fiction writing assignment and I got to have a bit of fun, at least. Not that any of that would fly these days; some of the fanciful stuff I wrote in those cases would have landed me in a cop car or on a shrink's couch. The teachers always started being more cautious about explicitly setting assignment parameters afterward, but no cops ever got involved, and I usually got an A grade after a brief interrogation about motive. "Why did you make stuff up? I didn't say to do that" "You didn't say I couldn't, either. Fiction counts!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @04:26PM
The parents for raising an ignorant ignoid.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @01:25PM
You're missing the bigger problem!
> said his mother Karen . “I mean first of all, we don’t have dinosaurs anymore.”
Did you catch that!?
> “We don’t have dinosaurs anymore.”
How about now?
> “Anymore.”
Those bastards had dinosaurs! Yes, he's a deeply disturbed individual, and at some point we need to pursue that, but we need to find out what happened to the dinosaurs first! And how did they get them?
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday August 29 2014, @02:38PM
The kid shot them. With a gun. He confessed in writing!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by tathra on Friday August 29 2014, @03:27PM
have you never seen the documentary "Jurassic Park"?
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Friday August 29 2014, @06:13PM
That's the problem. He's not a creationist.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by monkey999 on Friday August 29 2014, @01:26PM
This wouldn't have happened if he'd said he killed it with a bow and arrow.
It's the school principal and teacher who should be arrested:
Firstly, the first amendment is there for a reason: schools should not be censoring students.
Secondly, they were wasting police time. They had no reasonable suspicion that a crime had been committed.
The US is becoming more like North Korea every day.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Friday August 29 2014, @01:35PM
Guns and taking care of business. Words that'll get you in trouble in school due to all the school massacres. But.... It was about A FUCKING DINOSAUR!
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @02:16PM
Wait, it was about a fucking dinosaur? So, basically he wrote dino porn? :-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 30 2014, @01:30AM
No, he wrote dino snuff porn.
(Score: 2) by tynin on Friday August 29 2014, @01:58PM
This should have been handled so differently. Perhaps it could have been a lesson in decorum that the teacher could have helped persuade the kid that writing about killing your pets is in poor taste. Instead it got turned into a lesson that authority is not your friend. I suspect this kid is going to live a life of disdain and distrust of the system, and as someone who was also arrested in school at the age of 16, I feel for him.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @06:41PM
Surely there's no laws against shooting a dinosaur. But they can let a 9 year old shoot an uzi at a gun range, resulting in the instructor being killed.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by deathlyslow on Friday August 29 2014, @01:56PM
As a resident of SC. I would just like to apologize for some of the stupidity that happens in my fair state. We are not all backwoods rednecks or uber conservative Bible thumping zealots. Many of us are fair minded moderates. I fear for the kids in this state.
(Score: 1) by Username on Friday August 29 2014, @02:26PM
I’m pretty sure if the teachers were backwood conservative rednecks they would have congratulated this teenager, gave him a free AR-15, and took a photo over the dead dinosaur to prove that evolution doesn’t exist. But no, sadly they were more than likely liberal douchebags who hate anyone and anything gun related.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Friday August 29 2014, @05:16PM
Wait, now i'm confused. Who are the good guys and who should i be distancing myself from?
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by bucc5062 on Friday August 29 2014, @02:59PM
I feel like I wrote this while sleep walking for it would be almost verbatim from my own mind. Amazing. As to Username, I fear he represents the more typical SC citizen which I unfortunately run into more often than I like.
The more things change, the more they look the same
(Score: 3, Funny) by Tork on Friday August 29 2014, @03:45PM
As a resident of a superior, yet still amusing at times, state let me assure you that Florida and Texas are keeping the attention off you.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1) by J053 on Saturday August 30 2014, @12:17AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @02:05PM
Sorry government, we're revoking your internet license; you're simply too dumb for it.
(Score: 1) by Wootery on Friday August 29 2014, @03:00PM
Wikipedia [bbc.co.uk] are ahead of the curve, huh.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday August 29 2014, @02:42PM
And that seems to be all we know about why he was arrested.
For some reason a lot of people seem to think that's enough information on which to decide that the kid was unfairly treated.
Now, was it dumb to call the cops in over a piece of writing? Well, probably. But I'm not the kid's teacher, and I don't know anything this kid. Maybe he's got form. Who knows?
This isn't going to be one where you can easily identify "the truth" by reading a few articles.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @03:25PM
About 2 hours late, not bad mate.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by theluggage on Friday August 29 2014, @04:05PM
Yeah, especially when the media take delight in ensuring that their reports are garbled, ambiguous and deliberately "spun" to make for sensational headlines. Couple of thoughts (on top of the parent post's observations):
1. Its very unclear what the kid actually wrote. Some of the accounts suggest that there were two separate "posts" - one talking about killing a dinosaur, the other talking about "buying a gun to take care of the business".
2. Its equally unclear (a) whether this was actually posted online or handed in as an assignment and (b) whether the 'alarm' was raised by the teacher marking the assignment (which would be stupid) or another teacher coming across the "buying a gun to take care of the business" status post out of context.
So, "Kid was arrested for causing disturbance at school after he was questioned after apparently claiming to have bought a gun" seems to be an equally fair - possibly more accurate - summary of the available evidence.... but it just doesn't have that clickbait factor, does it?
Then, all this is happening in a crazy society where even gun "instructors" think its OK to hand a Uzi to a 9-year-old girl* and where kids turning up at school with semi-autos and shooting up the place is not unheard of.
You might also blame 'courtroom culture'. In the unlikely (but not impossible) event that this kid had gone postal, you can be sure that the victims lawyers would have spent months poring over any scrap of evidence (while getting paid more per hour than the teacher gets in a month) and, if with 20:20 hindsight, any teacher found to have ignored the kid saying that they'd bought a gun would be accused of negligence, adding another zero to the damages claim against the school. That's part of what breeds stupid zero-tolerance policies. The staff are probably under standing orders to call the cops if a student so much as considers thinking about contemplating the possibility of turning up with a gun.
* Seriously: teaching kids to use and respect guns is a good idea if you're going to have them on sale in every high street, but that doesn't entail letting a small girl fire a gun that can spit out half her weight in lead in a minute. If the reporting in that case was accurate it would seem that the gun instructor should be nominated for a Darwin award.
(Score: 2) by The Archon V2.0 on Friday August 29 2014, @07:27PM
> If the reporting in that case was accurate it would seem that the gun instructor should be nominated for a Darwin award.
What do you mean "if"? They released a cellphone video that cuts out just before the bullet-meets-the-brain moment. Even if you don't read any of the text, it's pretty easy to call Darwin on the guy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @03:08PM
what we really learned from this:
evidently this kid never posted original material on facebook, because this is just poor creativity. otherwise i feel sorry for the particular situation
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @03:55PM
If he were old enough to buy a gun,
He would have been able to defend himself.
(Says the NRA.)
(Score: 1) by tniemi on Friday August 29 2014, @05:07PM
Truly, the guy is an artist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp) [wikipedia.org]
It is art when they drag it out, ridicule and brake it.
(Later they will create a replica and put that into a museum, but then the thing is already passé.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 29 2014, @11:52PM
I've experienced this first hand in middle school. Another student was constantly bothering me during an in-class assignment despite me repeatedly telling him to stop. The key part of the conversation went something like:
"I'll punch you."
"That won't kill me."
"But the poison will."
The teacher heard this and I was dragged to the principal's office. The principal was sympathetic, but he said he had to punish me due to the No Tolerance policy, so I got a one-day suspension (which was mind-boggling to me because it meant I'd get in trouble if I went to school and didn't skip class; why would you use a punishment that punishes the good kids and rewards the bad ones?).
Anyhow, later the other student and I became pretty good friends and I got through school without another incident, graduating high school as the valedictorian.
(Score: 1) by richtopia on Sunday August 31 2014, @01:26AM
This story is much more feasible when you consider that dinosaurs include birds. He was probably thinking of non-avian dinosaurs, but you need to be specific!