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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, 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.