Slashdot Mirror
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.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
That treatment will certainly help him become a well-balanced member of society.
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.
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."
"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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
No, people are stupid to begin with. The sensationalism of freak-events that are unlikely to ever even remotely impact them only serves to take advantage of that stupidity.
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.
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.
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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.