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Drawings of Weapons Led To New Jersey Student's Arrest
First time accepted submitter gannebraemorr writes with this news, snipped from a CBS News report out of New Jersey:"'The Superintendent of the Greater Egg Harbor Regional High School District said around 2 pm Tuesday, a 16 year old student demonstrated behavior that caused concern. A teacher noticed drawings of what appeared to be weapons in his notebook. School officials made the decision to contact authorities. Police removed the 16-year-old boy from Cedar Creek High School in Galloway Township Tuesday afternoon after school officials became concerned about his behavior. The student was taken to the Galloway Township Police Department. Police then searched the boy's home on the 300 block of East Spencer Lane and found several electronic parts and several types of chemicals that when mixed together, could cause an explosion, police say. The unidentified teen was charged with possession of a weapon an [sic] explosive device and the juvenile was placed in Harbor Fields.' If 'chemicals that when mixed together, could cause an explosion' is a crime, I'm pretty sure everyone's cleaning cabinets are evidence just waiting to be found. Bottle of Coke and Mentos... BRB, someone knocking at the door."
Think of how safe everyone will be when EVERYONE is locked up!
At a shed , one being for the tractor the other for the plant. Having two chemical substance which when mixed can cause explosion and a few electronic part means *nothing* without a context. The question is : do the authority exagerate the context to make a case, or was it a real plan from a disturbed teenager, or was it a disturbed teenager which would never have gone further but now whatever MAY happen will be forever marked as that "insane guy which wanted to explode a school" ? Wihout further info none of us are able to say. But I am willing to bet there will be a media circus.
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That treatment will certainly help him become a well-balanced member of society.
Am I glad I don't go to school in this modern age!
Back in MY day you could bring your (real) Katana to highschool (and leave it in the office) for martial arts practice afterwards.
I used to draw fighter jets and machine guns and all sorts of stuff when the teachers were being boring, but that was probably in grade school.
Now if you DRAW A PICTURE OF what "appears to be" a weapon and have an interest in electronics and chemistry you get charged.
I guess that liking science before college is going to be outlawed soon...
repeat after me: "I am free."
Keep repeating until you believe it.
This is the kind of environment that the gun-control nuts want to create for the rest of us. Imagine having to justify every substance in your home under presumption of guilt.
The harm done is to the Constitution, which is the only thing (not our safety) that public servants/government employees are actually SWORN to protect.
We're going to spend the next 10 years as a nation obsessing over guns in schools. We're going to talk non-stop about arming teachers, arming janitors, putting cops with assault rifles in the halls, defining exactly what assault rifles actually are, glorifying the idea that those with guns stop crimes, making movies and TV shows about the topic, design special gun models for school protection, and perhaps even speculate that students themselves should be allowed to carry guns for their own protection.
But on the other hand, the first time any student mentions the word "gun" in class, they're pulled from class, suspended for weeks, arrested, put in psychiatric care and scarred for life. Seriously, this is like one level down from the brainwashing scene in A Clockwork Orange.
Unless there's a boatload of details absent from that account, it really is time for me to find another country to call home... while I can still emigrate without being renditioned for being a traitor/terrorist.
If he wasn't going to do anything with these chemicals, then fine, no big deal, no harm done.
No harm other than the kid being removed from school, arrested, charged with possession of a weapon, and then sent to juvenile hall.
yeah.. no harm at all.
Its people like you that are wrong with this country.
"His name was James Damore."
This is the kind of environment that the gun-control nuts want to create for the rest of us ?
I hear the NRA thinks we should be investigating video games and movie. Last I heard there were such things as movie and game ratings, but the NRA hates gun control... ANY gun control. That's what the NRA wants: No bounds on any weaponry but Tom and Jerry can be blamed for the violence in the country.
Linux is only free if your time has no value. Windows is only free if you threaten to use Linux.
"If 'chemicals that when mixed together, could cause an explosion' is a crime, I'm pretty sure everyone's cleaning cabinets are evidence just waiting to be found."
This is the reality of how the BATFE interprets the laws surrounding guns and explosives; the regulation of both is derived from some of the same laws. Having the parts to make something constitutes intention to make it, and is punished the same as if you had made it.
The state of BATFE's regulatory interpretations of the law allow for farmers, or even just gardeners, to be prosecuted for having ammonium nitrate fertilizer and fuel because they could be assembled into a bomb, regardless of whether they had a detonator, or knowledge of how to do it, or intent, or a motive. It gets even more confusing and nonsensical when it comes to their published regulation of gun parts. If you own a pistol, and a means by which to attach a butt-stock to it, then you're in possession of an unregistered short barreled rifle, regardless of whether you've ever assembled them.
Thought crime is alive and well in the BATFE, and has been for decades.
You do realize that something as simple as soap flakes in your powdered laundry soap can be used to make explosives.
If you arrested everyone that had explosive chemicals in the house, then you would have to arrest everyone that cleans anything.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
"Cedar Creek opened in September 2010 as a magnet school with programs focusing on engineering and environmental sciences and specializing in hands-on learning."
You sir are an idiot - of course there was harm done. An innocent, intent, driven student was arrested for no good reason other than sheer lunacy by faculty with delusions of grandeur.
I used to draw weapons, space weapons, combat aircraft, tanks, spaceships - all in combat - blowing shit up, etc...
I built model rockets (missiles), had high explosives (rocket engines) in my possession lots of times, hell,I even made some with explosive warheads and fired them for fun. Note I said fired, not launched. I had rocket tubes on my dirt-bike. I could fire these horizontally at whatever my bike was aimed at. They made very cool explosions on impact (old tree stumps, falling over barns, etc). Good thing I had teachers that were happy to have students that learned and experimented (in safe ways). They encouraged learning about anything and everything.
I read up on chemistry in old encyclopedias. By the time I was 13 I could have made nitro-glycerin in my kitchen.
Knowledge and materials are not crimes. Using said would have been.
Without people that know how and what can be used, we can no longer prevent others from doing the same.
This school's administrators should be cuffed and stuffed for harming a youth's ambition and drive to learn.
Today's government wants to lock up *dangerous* knowledge. They want to make everyone a specialist and end generalist behaviors.
If no one is a generalist, they cannot see the big picture for what it is.
Allow assault rifles to be sold over the counter, but lock up everyone who so much as thinks of drawing one on paper. Your rights to own lethal weapons trumps the right of children not to be shot in the head, but the notebook doodles of frigging sixteen-year-olds are grounds for arrest.
Fuck the NRA.
Thank you very much for being the voice of reason. Your post is, of course, the most sensible here.
I wager that, despite Slashdot's sensationalism, the authorities began their actions out of due caution. That they are indeed cable of reason and did take context into consideration. I'm 80% sure that this was not about soap in the cabinet, but that this kid was indeed attempting to manufacture explosives. I'll take it a step further and say that, just because he may have been trying to make explosives doesn't mean that he was planning any harm whatsoever.
I recall my own middle school years. I had an intense fascination with explosives and weapons. Fire crackers were awesome and I went to great lengths to increase their yield. What happens when you take the powder from 4 M80s and build a single large 'M320'? What if you sink it in a pond before it goes off? (Awesome!!!! ...Then the fish float up. Run!)
I fondly recall the fit my mother threw when she found me drying my own home made black powder in her oven. 'Relax! I know what I'm doing. What could possibly go wrong? It's just a little black powder. Sheesh.' She didn't know about me taking my half pound of home made "explosives" to the school bus stop the next morning where me and my friends enjoyed blowing up anthills and lighting long lines of my concoction(epically smokey). Mean while my friends wielded "flame throwers" made of cans of deodorant and Bic lighters.
Despite all that, no harm was ever meant to anyone but ants. No one was hurt(save for minor burned fingers), No one became a terrorist, arsonist, or anything else. The next year, girls redirected our attention and life continued as normal.
Why don't we sentence that student to a picture of a prison.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
When I was in high school, I had sketchbooks that I filled to the brim with detailed drawings of planes, battlemechs, rockets, Warhammer dudes, and yes, lots and lots of weapons. Many of them attached to planes or in the form of swords and axes being held by fantasy roleplaying types, but also plain-old modern day guns. I think I turned out pretty well, and in my entire life I've never even so much murdered anybody. I was even still in school when the Columbine shootings went down, and even after that fact with all the paranoia swirling around, nobody cared about me or my notebook. Do you know why? Because it didn't fucking matter. It's what boys of that age tend to do, and back then people still managed to understand this.
This is knee-jerk paranoid reactionist ego-stroking BULLSHIT of the highest caliber. This poor kid's harassment and arrest is in no way, shape, or form designed to keep anyone safe or protect anybody from anything, but to intentionally scare people and stoke a bunch of "it could happen here" sensationalistic paranoia for the sake of inflating some school administrator's ego. The real intent of this, which is going to have real-world consequences of ruining this kids future -- Which, I hasten to point out, this superintendent and his cronies in no way care about or will show responsibility for -- is propaganda. To create the appearance that the school administration is "doing something!" and being "proactive and tough on violence!" to direct attention away from the fact that, back here in reality, this kid's school is undoubtedly zero percent safer today than it was last Friday.
This is why we are constantly blindsided by headline grabbing violence int his country: We are SO paranoid about not letting the imaginary "bad guy" in the front door that we're diverting all our attention to chasing shadows and tilting at these goddamned windmills. Meanwhile, the real enemy is free to sneak in the back door whenever he feels like it.
(Obligatory "that's what she said," by the way.)
The people who did this to that kid are the ones who need to be arrested -- every last one of them. Stripped of their ranks, stripped of their certifications, their badges taken away, and relegated to flipping burgers at McDonald's for the rest of their pathetic little lives, because people who straight-facedly make such poor decisions as these have NO BUSINESS BEING IN POSITIONS OF AUTHORITY, period.
If this kid was acting crazy in high school in the 1970s, my generation, he would have been sent to the principals office and possibly suspended. If the drawings were any good, the principal might have encouraged the kid to think about mechanical engineering as a career path. But today, the cops are involved, the local newspaper does a story, and screwed up kid makes national news. That, I think, is part of the problem.
The level of paranoia as alluded to in the summary struck me as ridiculous.
Welcome to America. Land of the fearful, home of buttheads.
Where a school decided that they should strip-search a 13-year old girl because another girl with a grudge said she had ibuprofen. This had to go all the way ot the supreme court before the school figured out they were acting ridiculously.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
And a police-state presence in every school. And a registry tracking all people treated for mental disorders. But not a registry on guns.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I find America a very baffling place, sometimes. In one news story, a child whose parents belonged to the militia movement who were stockpiling weapons goes on a killing spree in a school, and one of the most vocal responses is "it wouldn't happen if only there were more guns in school- armed teachers, armed kids, armed minimum wage guards on the door!". And anyone suggesting that gun possession might be a bad thing is shouted down for trampling on our freedoms. Then in the next news story, it's a criminal offence to be a teenager who draws weapons and has common household chemicals in their house. Also, we should ban (in no particular order)- violent video games, nudity in films, rap music, and skirts that end too far above the knee.
Very odd place.
I know almost nothing about the NY Daily News, but if they have a news story about weapons followed immediately by an active plea to fill out a petition to ban weapons, I'd have to say their motives for printing not only the story itself but the uncited photograph fall very short of journalistic neutral positioning... so I gotta see that uncited photo for what it is: unrelated unless otherwise specified.
"Here's a photo of some explosives in a basement. I'm not saying it is from this kid's basement, but I'm not NOT saying that either, and we're leading with the photo, anyway. You figure it out."
Oh no! They found out that I have a bag of flour in the pantry and some old party baloons and a book of matches in the junk drawer! OH noes! They found the funnel!
(Clicky)
Oh noez! I hope they don't find the bottle of dilute battery acid (sulfuric) in the automotive supplies cabinet in the shed! Why, they might think I intended to concentrate it and mix it with sugar! Certainly not to top up my wet cell automotive batteries in the summer at all! (Like it says on the bottle.)
(Clicky!)
Oh NO! Not the 9v battery and the steel wool! Oh shit, they found some wire too!
(Clicky)
No, they found the scott's brand nitrate grass fertilizer! They are asking me all kinds of questions about being a terrorist, with all this stuff in my house!
Seriously, WTF.
People are scared stupid, and are punishing children for doing things that are completely normal for children. Also, seeing bombs where they are not.
Stupidity is more dangerous than malice.
No, I suspect there are good reasons to arrest this guy because, usually, the police have good reasons when they arrest someone.
Where there is smoke there is fire, huh? Guilty until proven innocent. I just hope you're never on a jury.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Better lock up all the farmers, they might have dangerous fertilisers that really can blow things up. Just as well they don't also have access to diesel fuel, or they really would have a bomb.
So, as a non-american, explain to me the logic of locking up children who doodle a gun, as we all did, but allow everyone slightly older to have assault weapons. Are you sure you are sane?
Already enacted "zero tolerance" policy + "OMG! Kids were shot! Do something!" == "well, we have run out of sensibled things to do to increase security a long time ago, so...."
Essentially, we have locked down schools that are essentially jails for children, coupled with officious authoritarianism as the established policy, being told to "do something! Kids aren't safe! OMG!"
More illegal to draw a gun than own one.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You didn't think that once they started going after the Second Amendment because of school shootings, they'd leave the other amendments alone, did you? Thow one out, throw all of them out.
"run out of sensible things"
Even before the NRA came out with their little statement, I was already saying that we need MORE weapons in schools.
That principal who lunged at the shooter? That was brave. It was admirable. The lady knew she was going down, but she refused to go down peacefully, or silently. She lunged at the shooter. No one has said how close she came to getting her hands on him.
Imagine - if she had a .357, or even a .38 at hand, she wouldn't have had to lunge. Pull that sucker out of her desk drawer, or handbag, take aim, and squeeze.
Likely, she would have been hit by the semi-auto fire, but she could have died a real heroine, having put down the dog that threatened her students.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I don't think so. If this never gets to court or if he's acquitted, the constitution is fine.
The constitution that allows such an arrest is not by any definition "fine".
You can walk into any house in America and find what they allegedly found. Gasoline, cleaning fluids, flour (yes flour), steel wool scouring pads, and matches, wires for the lamps, cell phones, the list of things that police can designate as bomb making materials is endless.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
This.
An armed society is a polite society.
For ever nutter that want's to go on a rampage there are several hundred that just want to live long enough go home after work.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Now imagine some six-year-old kid pulling that sucker out of her desk drawer, thinking that it's a toy, and killing somebody. Even in the best case, more guns in the hands of teachers would just replace a handful of occasional massacres with a much larger number of accidental shootings. The body count doesn't decrease; only the concentration does.
Now if you had said an armed guard, I might agree—someone trained to use weapons, carrying that weapon on his or her person at all times. As soon as it is in the hands of someone who isn't physically in contact with the weapon at all times, however, it becomes a far greater threat to the children's safety than the threat it is trying to prevent, statistically speaking. Far, far greater.
There's no better proof of that than what happened last week. The very first victim was heavily armed. That didn't help her any; in fact, that's probably why she got killed in the first place. Weapons are only useful for defensive purposes if you have them out, in your hand, ready to use, and you're awake and not distracted. Locked away in a closet or cabinet somewhere, they're useless.
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When they took the 5th amendment, I was silent because I was innocent.
Sorry. Once they take the fifth amendment away, you're no longer allowed to stay silent.
I disagree: everyone who passed high-school chemistry should know how!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz