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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!
For drawing giant killer robots, ninja's, tanks, spaceships with tentacles & housing of poor construction quality when i was 8.
If he rats them out maybe he can cut a deal.
The closer you are to the code, the happier you are. - Ancient Geek Proverb
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
This is a complete violation of his first amendment rights. This puts a chill on free expression which, in this case, is art.
Although the story seems disturbing, it never goes into any detail about the student's behavior which prompted the search nor does it say what exactly was found in the student's home. Without more details the story, left this vague, is borderline sensationalism. The student could have been exhibiting some extreme behavior which the school could have been subsequently been lambasted for not following through with.
That treatment will certainly help him become a well-balanced member of society.
In which of the following ways would you have been arrested if your child-self had gone to school today:
1) possession of a chemistry set;
2) possession of a pocket knife;
3) terroristic threatening ("Man, I'm gonna kill you at Mortal Kombat tonight.");
4) all of the above
The pendulum of concern for "the children" has swung all the way to the extreme again. The tyranny of schools and authorities to quell anything other than "the norm" is still stuck on "status quo" (fortunately for all of us /s).
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...
Someone's life is fucked over for real. No laughing for them.
Fuck CBS and their fucking mind control bullshit.
Benign household chemical #1 + benign household chemical #2 == harmless.
Benign household chemical #1 + benign household chemical #2 + brain == dangerous.
Benign household chemical #1 + benign household chemical #2 + brain + hand-drawn pictures of weapons on paper == imminent terrorist threat that must result in immediate arrest?
Only the ultra-paranoid would think this math actually adds up to a crime. I mean, heck, if you're going to arrest people for keeping things together that could *theoretically* be put together into something dangerous, then an awful lot of people are deserving of arrest, particularly the smarter ones. Where's the evidence this student was actually planning to act on any of this in a malicious way, rather than just "blowing stuff up in the backyard", like plenty of kids are prone to do with dangerous devices such as pop and mentos?
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.
Its amazing the stuff that everyone has gallons in their car and how is can blow up.
That sounds like me as a child... and now I have subcontracted for the DoD as well as other private defense companies! .. Coincidence? I think not.
Weird kids are just that, weird. Why put them in a room with a bunch of people telling them to turn that genius into something evil?
Does anyone remember the collapse of eastern Europe?
THIS IS HOW YOU CAUSE SHOOTINGS!
If he wasn't going to do anything with these chemicals, then fine, no big deal, no harm done. If he was, then a disaster was prevented, and a lot of kids may have been saved.
5) None of the above (I did not go to school in the US)
I'm sure glad they weren't this paranoid when I was a kid. I remember sketching various nuclear weapon designs and discussing them with my physics teacher after class. I suppose it was OK because I didn't have a supply of fissionable material.
Either this is a travesty of justice, or there is not enough information in the article. I suspect that there are good reasons to arrest this guy, but I, also, think the reporters think that what they wrote about what the guy did is sufficient cause for him to be arrested. The article should read, "Student acts in manner that arouses suspicion of teacher. Police investigate and arrest student." The rest of the information appears to tell us something without actually doing so.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Going from one extreme to the other. US seems to continue not being able at being proactive, and think long term when it comes to internal affairs. That said, they're always perfectly proactive when it comes to corporate driven external policies (Not that it's bad, it's just the way it is)
In related news, half the school was arrested on suspicion of rape, after evidence of drawing penises was found.
Good thing I burned off the rest of my stash last 4th of July...
Oh, hey, I have some shotgun shells. Crap. CRAP.
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.
Imagine what they'd have found in my room back in the '80s... Chemicals of all sorts, the more boom the more fun after all... electronic components disassembled from old broken unrepairable stuff and sorted into categories, ready to be assembled in new things. This including 'scary' stuff like CTV line transformers etc. Half-repaired electronics. A charged tractor battery under the bed with some carbon rods (from old batteries) to be used in carbon arc light experiments. A functional pulse jet engine, scarily-looking, cobbled together with moped parts to be auto-starting. An air gun. An electric guitar made from more moped parts and some pay phone speakers for pick-ups. Need I go on?
And to think that I've never even had so much as a speeding ticket...
Of course I lived in the Netherlands, and it was 30 years ago...
--frank[at]unternet.org
I drew guns, tanks, bombs and other unsavoury things when I was a kid - that did not mean anything more than the potential to be an artist.
Hell, several of us drew swastikas around the classrooms - that did not make us Nazis, we just thought the teacher was.
Americans need to take a chill-pill, have a cup of tea and a little nap.
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.
In the day (1950s), your shop teacher would smack your knuckles & **send you home** if you FORGOT to bring your pen-knife to wood-working class. Vis' lathes and bandsaws, absent a pen-knife kinda like not having an editor when writing code. A few cities still have 1st-rate "shop" class systems (ex) Spokane Wa. Wonder what is their policy?
the financial terrorists who threatened to blow up the world economy get away with fines to be paid by someone else and deferred bonuses.
Ok well ... Let's just arrest everyone !
Bleach + Acid based Drain Cleaner = Chlorine , yay you now have chemicals that can be mixed to get a weapon ... Let's arrest you ... Let's arrest you ... Let's arrest you
Styrofoam + Gasoline = Something pretty close to napalm
Powdered aluminum (Etch-a-Sketch) + Rusted iron (Woolp Pad) = omg Thermite
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.
Do not let anyone know that you have urinated - the process to take urine and make it into ammonium nitrate is not that hard.
Hell, make sure no-one sees you taking a number 2. The explosives that can be made with human faeces would blow your mind.
I remember drawing pictures and B-52s and mushroom clouds. These days I'd be in Gitmo being waterboarded.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Fuck Yes!
Second Amendment FTW!
Every Dead American Is A Good American. (TM)
We need to start cracking down on these little psychos.
If you've been diagnosed with bi-polar, asbergers, schizophrenia, or whatever, you shouldn't be out loose. If your wracked out on PCP, Prozac, or Xanax, you shouldn't be out loose.
"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.
"Cedar Creek opened in September 2010 as a magnet school with programs focusing on engineering and environmental sciences and specializing in hands-on learning."
ever hear of
judge Dread? Look up Judge Death.
Arrest every game designer that ever had a gun in it. That's every game designer from games like Sam and Max and all the way to Halo, Space Games etc.
Then arrest almost all of the movie and TV industry (producers, actors, cinema staff) for any show that has ever had a gun in it.
Then arrest any author (and the publishers, printers, book store staff) that has ever described or even just included a gun in a story.
[The Universe] has gone offline.
That will be available in about any household. Remember how to make a Molotov cocktail?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I think maybe, possibly, there is a difference between supporting control on firearms and supporting control of drawings of firearms along with controls on common household items like shampoo. I know it's quite a subtle distinction, but I think if you consider it for a while you'll see that drawings and reality are somehow not quite the same thing.
If the government keeps that bullshit up there will be more terrorists than they can handle.
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.
Where does this sound familiar from?
the new post columbine hysteria has started. They are going to ruin far more kids lives than kids who died in the last shooting, or shootings in general.
We need to put our foot down, and stop this cycle of scape-goat finding based on stereotypes being passed off as valid research and response NOW.
Hell yes! Turn gun owners into criminals and then you can make sure only criminals own guns! Well played!
I'm sure the war on guns will be just as successful as the war on [anything else our government tried to stop, ever in history].
You can buy drugs in every single town in america, and anonymously online. 350+Million guns in America alone and over 1 Billion guns in the world... Yeah I'm sure we can keep the bad guys from having guns by taking them from the good guys.
Perfect sense is made.
oh. wait.. it did not come out right.
Every classroom should be secured by a policeman armed with a picture of a weapon. How about that!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
The acts of jackassery that result from fear are amazing. Fear throws out rational thinking.
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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
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
It's not the chemicals but the strange behaviour - though he wasn't allowed to he picked his nose. This incident shows that he is willing to break law and do harmful things and that he intends to be evil and destroy the world and that he already had planned it. In fact his drawings were active terrorism as it worried the teacher.
Then obviously we shouldn't have any laws at all since the government is so inept at enforcing them and people still get murdered all the time. /trolltastic post fellow AC!
I'm 62, and the direction this country is going makes me absolutely sick to my stomach, but if you were to leave for another country, where would it be? As bad as America is getting, its still FAR better than 99.99% of the rest of the world. Take Australia for example.. I visited there twice back in the 70s, once on US Army RnR from Vietnam and once on temporary duty with my Army unit, for a total of just over 2 weeks. I was so taken with the people, the VAST open spaces, and the opportunity, I came very close to emigrating there. When I was there I read the papers (Sydney) and saw virtually no violent crime during both visits. But now, I read that violent crime is WAY up, since the Australian people have, essentially, been disarmed, like Britain. Not to mention, all of the Orwellian stuff that the current Australian (and UK) governments are constantly trying to shove down the peoples throat... TL;DR; I have NO idea where you could go that's any better than the USA..
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
My biggest thing with this is not that they found a drawing disturbing, but that somehow a drawing is probable cause for a completely separate building to be searched? I don't see how his family lawyer isn't going to have a field day with this.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Kneejerk reactions are to be expected after a tragedy. Every school is going to be gone over with a fine tooth comb for a while, taking drastic actions over the smallest of incidents. I haven't read the article, so I don't know if there is more to this story than "kid draws pictures of guns and gets punished for it." If there is, then there's little to discuss. If there isn't, then it's, of course, an extreme overreaction.
In light of recent events, schools seem to be adopting zero tolerance policies. My old high school (I attended in 2002-2006) had such a policy against the word "kill." If you said that heinous word, even in jest, you'd get punished. Of course, students didn't take such a threat seriously, and I can't recall any incidents where action was taken (my graduating class was
The student in this case didn't exactly make the best of decisions: With tensions high, it would probably be better to not be drawing guns or give any potential "danger indicators" to school officials, etc. I don't know if the kid's school announced either changes in policy or the like, but I'm not sure they'd necessarily have to.
Going on the assumption that all the kid did was draw the guns, is this wrong? Of course. Will it be ironed out over the next week or two? Probably. Is this the Sign of Things to Come (as I'm reading in some comments here)? Doubtful. If this sort of draconian enforcement takes place six months from now, maybe I'll consider starting to worry, but for now, it's nothing but kneejerk reactions and trigger-happy (pardon the pun) folk.
Look up suck my nuts, I'm not in buttfuckistan and the US government aint got no drones over me
I'm noticing lately that authorities are displaying traits of fascism. We need to blow up all the police stations and the offices of educators who are attempting to train a new generation of bad guys.
Nip it in the bud, I say. In the bud.
worst than China.
Probably that whole "shall not be infringed" thing - sort of the way the ACLU spends all its time working against people who mess with the First Amendment (and, oddly enough, any other Amendments except the Second and Tenth)...
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I drew weapons, war, combat, death machines, space lasers, tanks, missiles, bombers, apocalypses... all throughout school.
At no point was I ever angry at anyone or ever interested, even slightly, in actual violence.
What the fuck, humanity? What the actual fuck?
I think you're narrowing your view a bit too much. I agree that UK is going down the same insanity route as the US (dunno about Australia, haven't followed that too much), but there are hundreds of other countries on the planet. For example, I liked Amsterdam very much when I visited it this year, although this city might be a huge culture shock for typical US citizens.
If being in posession of chemicals, that when mixed together can cause an explosion, gets you arrested then I am in trouble. I walk around with a deadly concoction in my bowles everyday.
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.
Liberal. Coward. Liberal. Storm. Trooper. Security. Theater. None.
Say those first two words together and realize that's what the administration is comprised of at this school.
Say words three through five together and realize that is what the police force in this town is comprised of.
Say words five and six together and realize what all of this crap is.
Realize that the last word is how much more safer you are in the over-stimulated, hyper-sensitized, oppression-bent liberal cesspool that the left wing of the democratic party has become.
Way up?
Ok...
Well yes as you parrots keep parroting, only outlaws have guns here, well not here, in melbourne but whatever.
But it wouldn't really matter if I was in melbourne, carrying a concealed weapon.
One, they just keep taking out rival criminals... yawn who cares.
Two they are actively harrassed by the cops constantly, think Al Capone, they'll get 'em sooner or later.
Three my pop-pop- pistol ain't worth pulling out against a streetsweeper shottie.
Even in the insane US, no one is carrying firepower to deal with a heavily armed gang except gun shows and SWAT
There is no such "right not to be shot", as that will require the consent of your assailant, which you will never get as long as you are defenseless. Furthermore, you have no rights which infringe upon the natural rights of others.
I'm 80% sure that this was not about soap in the cabinet, but that this kid was indeed attempting to manufacture explosives.
This is why I took a plea deal when I was falsely accused of a violent crime. People like you would probably have been on the jury. You believe that police are always rational and reasonable. That where there is smoke there is fire. That if you are accused you must have done something. The police would never go after an innocent person! They are the good guys! Amirite?
See where I said 80%. That's 20% uncertain. I'm making a harmless assumption in a casual "conversation". Were I a juror, I'd require evidence and proof. I'd make no assumptions about the accused or the police. So, you're wrong. You're wrong about me and you may have been wrong to take the plea deal rather than fight the charges... Unless you were black*.
* Formerly black = humor.
Best places to live.. Canada and Scandinavia.
http://www.myfoxphilly.com/story/20385390/fi
"He drew a glove with flames coming out of it," his mother said.
She says his passion for collecting old stuff, taking it apart and rebuilding things lead to this arrest.
"He takes the parts and he builds things with them. Good things," she explained.
Folks, this is just about power grab nothing more. It's in human nature to oppress one another and it's been done by tribes and governments throughout history. This government is not absolute, and when the government gets even more worse than this, the people will not take it anymore and will eventually have to overthrow it.
I used to draw guns in my notebook when I was a kid and I don't own any guns in real life. The kid and his parents not only need to sue but file charges against the state and federal government for kidnapping and the act of terror. We the people, really need to start evaluating this government that we have now and see if its worth keeping it or just form a new one, but, this time with real checks and balances not the bullshit we have now.
You think they shouldn't arrest someone for having that LOOKS like a scary gun, right? My friend, that's basically the definition of "assault weapon" from the law - a gun that looks scary. An "assault weapon" is functionally equivalent to any other rifle. So if you yhink puerile shouldn't to prison based on something looking scary, you agree with the NRA. You just didn't know enough about guns to realize that.
Sounds like someone was having a case of the Mondays on a Tuesday.
This news doesn't exactly surprise me. I'm originally from southern NJ and Galloway cops are pretty much known for being aggressive and doing what they want regardless of the law. We used to avoid Galloway if we could help it especially at night because they would to pull you over and harass you just for being there...
was eight to help him do geophysical exploratory work in the summer when I was out of school and he hired me to work on his field crew. This was the US Govt we're talking about. How times have changed.
Another 15 year old female student in another Jersey High School was arrested Friday for circulating a text that could have been a threat....here we go.
http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/story?section=news/local&id=8926756
How will he/she learn to be an adult then. Isnt this what we have in our nation, government, police, boss, authorities, society ... always having to fight to get your own way, always having to be right, always having to push boundaries,
And other nutters want to blame the lack of God and Prayer in schools... this wouldn't have happened if kids were forced to pray after-all. (eye roll)
Everyone is dancing around the root cause(s) of real problems in this country...
In the US, the majority of gun deaths, not necessarily counted as "gun violence" (ominous voice), are suicides. As tragic as suicide can be, (I've known more than one person that sadly, chose that path) I will defend an individual's right to leave this world as they see fit. It should be considered a basic freedom to be secure in our own body, and not held hostage for any reason.
The other minority% of gun deaths in the US are the "gun violence" (ominous voice) that so many want to put an end to. Of those, the vast majority are directly related to our puritanical "war on drugs" (and sex) which has been proven to be a total and complete failure. Prohibition, and the black markets it creates, is the true cause, the true root of, quite a few of the problems getting media attention these days.
Anyone that wants a reduction in "gun violence" (ominous voice), should be against prohibition.
Anyone that wants to see a balanced budget in the next 100 years should be against prohibition. We imprison more people than China. We spend BILLIONS chasing and jailing people for non-violent drug-related activities.
Anyone that wants to see the trends in childhood obesity reversed should be against prohibition. When many inner-city parents are asked why they let their kids sit and play video games, many say it's not safe for their kids to just "go outside and play". End the failed "war on drugs", collapse the black markets, and make the streets safe for them to go outside and play, less obese kids...
End prohibition, and collapse the black markets, and you remove the profit motives behind the vast majority of "gun violence" (ominous voice) incidents in the US. If a rival dealer moves into your territory, you aren't taking him to small claims court. Under current prohibition laws, you're already a criminal, and he's stealing from you, so the path is clear. Never mind the "gun violence" (ominous voice) tied to gang initiations, gang wars, etc. Remember, criminals don't care about laws, least of all gun laws, they're already criminals!!!
Sigh.
The remaining minority percentage of "gun violence" (ominous voice) incidents are caused by the nuts. The crazies. The people who are purely coocoo for cocopuffs. The people that are bound and determined to do harm. Of course, if we stopped spending billions on the failed puritanical "war on drugs" (and sex) there'd be more funds available to improve our mental health system in this country....
Many point to countries with less "gun violence" (ominous voice), and point out how strict their guns laws are. But they fail to look at statistics of other countries where guns are just as available, if not more so, than the US and still have similar levels of "gun violence" (ominous voice) as the countries with the strictest gun laws on the planet. What is the secret in those countries? Anyone? Studies show that there is a direct link to how drugs are policed in a country and the amount of "gun violence" (ominous voice) they have. The countries with similar access to guns as the US, but with much lower levels of "gun violence" (ominous voice) treat drug offenses like jay-walking. They treat it as a medical issue, not a criminal one. Of course, since that doesn't fit either the anti-drug, or anti-gun narratives, no one ever talks about that...
What's frustrating is that we can't have an adult conversation about doing away with these puritanical prohibitions that have failed this country and contributed to bankrupting this country.. These issues have extremists that cover their ears and go "YAYAYAYAYA" whenever you try to talk truth to stupid.
Gun-control and anti-gun-control groups each have their own, child-like extremists, that are just as annoying.
Gun-Control-nuts live in a fantasy w
While it's true that there is a massive crackdown on weapons, most of the more crappy PC laws are ignored by both the cops and the citizens. :)
In some ways, it's more like the old fashioned village policing. If you are a nasty bastard, they will stick you away for breaking a lot of bullshit laws, but if you are a decent person you almost never come in contact with the cops, even if you are technically breaking some law.
As for the supposed increase in violence, I think it's just a media beat up. I haven't noticed any change, and they never give statistics, it's always just a story about a specific incident.
Most cops here are decent blokes, obviously you always get some nazis in uniform, but judging by youtube videos of cops in the USA, nothing like the arseholes you get.
By the way, Australia now is really different to what it was like in the seventies. Massive immigration from all over the world mean that there are a lot of areas that have a predominately imported culture. Immigrants tend to cluster. Nothing that is dangerous to visit, (we don't put up with that "stay out of here it belongs to (insert group) crap") but great for a visit for an authentic (anywhere in the world) meal.
ps. Sydney is probably still the most violent city in Oz. Move to Melbourne, Brisbane or Hobart, depending on your preferred climate
Let's, take people already on the edges of society and push them even further away...
yes, that's a good way to ensure they become happy, productive members of society.
Oh, look, he was also interested in electronics, we could a) teach him to become and engineer, helping to ensure our future prosperity and competitiveness in the world, or b) lock him in prison!
That's what he gets for trying to think for himself, instead of being a docile working drone like everyone else.
Most boys draw guns, and anyone with a freestanding house has "bomb making components" at home.
Hell, in engineering class, we talked about building catapults and railguns. Rumour had it that we lost roof access because a previous class had built a catapult and took pot shots at the arts building, (not fine arts, we love those guys, humanities).
captcha: handgun
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.
There's a vast difference between Tom and Jerry + Pong, and say.... The Expendables movie franchise + Call of Duty.
The imagery in the kids heads today are not even close to comparable to 30 years ago. Especially considering most kids age 16 right now grew up in a time of war. As long as that kid has been forming rational thoughts, the US Military, at the request of it's wealthy white government, has been killing brown people with drones in multiple wars that the public does not support.
Culture IS the problem.
12 hours before Sandy Hook, would you have entertained anyone saying "Ban assault weapons, and bring the TSA into schools!"
Of course not... your reaction is what's known as "knee-jerk" and since there's no one left alive to blame this tragedy on, you've jumped onto the first bandwagon to come along: Guns.
You're very transparent.
And for the record:
I don't own a gun.
I don't intend to own a gun.
I was shot once in a drive-by about a decade ago.
I support the second amendment and do not support limitations on it.
There's too many unlawful guns out there to stop legitimate people from getting them to defend themselves.
It's reasonably safe to assume that if he was arrested for "chemicals that could be used to make an explosive" it was more than Coke and mentos. But thanks for the hyperbole.
...in the form of a song (to the tune of "Deck the Halls"):
Douse the halls with gasoline
fa la la la la, la la la la
Strike a match and watch it gleam
fa la la la la, la la la la
Watch the school burn down to ashes
fa la la la la, la la la la
Aren't you glad you played with matches?
I'm so glad I finished school before all this paranoid bullshit started. In my day, that parody aroused smiles, not suspicions.
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?
So we're going to be locking up potential STEM candidates and EVERY SINGLE TEENAGE BOY apparently, and also the girls the guys have super intense secret crushes on who are into science and weaponry.
At 18 years old I was charged with "carrying concealed explosive material" after one halloween night when we were pulled over with dry ice in the trunk and a couple 20 oz pop bottles in the front of the car. Try getting a job with that on your record.
Has the country gone insane?
There are lots of places to go actually. It sounds like you haven't traveled enough (recently) to know that. Would it make you feel a little better to know that much of the rest of the world is not paranoid and afraid like we are here in the US?
No strip searches or sexual violations to get on airplanes. No one arrested for drawing something or saying something. No roadblocks on the roads. I'm not sure I could 'prove' that most of the other countries I have traveled in and lived in really are freer, but they certainly feel that way living there day to day.
I've lived in various countries in Asia and Latin America (don't want to name them out of paranoia), including a couple of communist ones and with the exception of one communist country I felt freer and less afraid of the police and government than I feel living here in the US. Living in the US can feel a lot like living inside of a large prison, but there are many places in the world that do not feel that way. Even in that one communist country where I certainly did not feel free, the police at least were not angry or violent and not typically thuggish like the police are here in the US. Police in most other countries are just normal guys doing a job. They don't hate you or see you as their enemy. They aren't out to prove how they are bad motherfuckers by kicking your ass for looking at them the wrong way. In countries that I've lived in outside the US it seemed like the government for the most part left you alone. At least that's how it felt. Knowing this, I actually do want to leave the US forever. Unfortunately I was born here and don't have citizenship anywhere else. It takes more effort living as an expat on a tourist visa. It gets tiring after a while. Although there is nowhere that is perfect I have found a few places where I could long term non-tourist visas. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I'll be able to make a break for the exit while I still can.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Rutger Hauer, Blade Runner
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Crap like this has been going on for at least ten years. There have been stories nearly every month about some kid getting in trouble for drawing guns, bringing a toy soldier holding a toy gun to school, pointing a gun-shaped chicken nugget at a fellow classmate, having an ax in the trunk of a car, having a butter knife under the seat of a car, pointing a finger and saying 'bang', and having an accidental explosion in chem lab.
Educators, unfortunately, are not the brightest among us. Add to that the fact that schools have insane zero-tolerance policies because of teachers' and administrators' inability to use common sense, and it's no wonder stupid stuff goes on all the time.
The kid in this story may very well be guilty. There's not enough information available to tell. But if he's innocent, he and his family should sue anybody involved. Yes, you can sue individual law enforcement officers if they violate your civil rights.
Better not draw any attention to myself!
I don't have any kids, but if I did, the last thing I would be worried about each day is them going to school and being the victim of one of these freak-occurrence events where some nutjob stomps into a school and unloads a couple guns on the students and teachers. Statistically, I'd be far more worried about teachers, coaches, scout leaders, and religious authorities sexually molesting them.
About 300 people (not just students) have been killed in school shootings in the last thirty years, in this country. Something like one per million or one per three million odds of being killed in a school shooting (source: http://www.teenviolencestatistics.com/content/school-shootings.html ).
About 4 to 10 percent of all children have been molested or sexually abused in some way by teachers.
(source: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2012/02/is_sexual_abuse_in_schools_very_common_.html )
What video games, weapons, television shows, movies, books, or society influences are to blame for these teachers sexually molesting children on such a mass scale? Where's the investigation into that? Where's the rational concern and moral outrage over that compared to the irrational concern that your child might be the freak statistic that is killed in a shooting? How the lizard-brain might initially fear the school shooting far more, how does it reach the point of discussion and legislation on a society-wide level without the common sense acknowledgement that 1:10 or 1:20 is far fucking greater than 1:1000000 to 1:3000000?
We don't know what has been found. At least in Holland around this time of year the police arrest lots of people for explosives, illegal fireworks and even worse, those that make their own. Just a few weeks ago a guy blew up his roof, with his kids sleeping nearby. Luckily he only put himself in hospital but it can't be denied that there are always some idiots playing with stuff they shouldn't.
And no liberatarians, this is NOT bottle rocket style experimentation, you don't blow up your roof and get 3rd degree burns with bottle rockets. Not even the slightly bigger amateur rockets and ANY sensible rocket amateur KNOWS not to do the bigger stuff inside your house just as any real racer knows not to do it on the public roads and any real hunter doesn't go after deer with an assault rifle.
So what did they find? House hold chemicals or a kid who didn't know the difference between experimenting and going insane. His lawyer will pretend he only kept a ton of explosives for fun and the prosecution will claim a firecracker is a gateway explosive to terrorism.
So far the reactions are full of what people want to believe and empty of any actual facts.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
For fact-checking you'll need to refer to The Daily Mail or The Sun.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
But not a registry on guns.
For the purposes of a well regulated militia, you have to have a list of all the militia members and the guns they own.
In the Wild West, the heyday of six shooters and freedom, most towns had laws against carrying a weapon around, as they had to be deposited for storage upon your arrival.
The famous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral would never have happened if everyone had been following the law.
It's easy to defend gun rights when you pick and choose your history.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
You guys are a bunch of nutters. Sorry.
Your society is fucked up beyond repair.
It beggars belief how stupid a whole country can be.
Put a glas sphere over your country to contain the insanity. The sane world would pay for it.
Come back when you managed to grow up, got rid of the NRA Taliban, got rid of the Wild West mentality and the 2nd amendment.
'Merica is more insane and paranoid than North Korea. I'm serious.
Now all we need is some sulfur.
And isopropyl alcohol is a precursor of sarin. Granted, the *other* precursor is rather hard to get.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
I'll accept "bounds on weaponry" the exact same instant that we get "bounds on law enforcement weaponry". Until then, if they can have it, I want to be able to have it. Fortunately, the founders of this country saw things more clearly than people who seem to think the Constitution can be changed just because people say it should be. There's a process for that--and getting rid of the Second Amendment would never survive that process.
At the beginning of this country, people, what law enforcement there was, and the military all had similar weapons. That's how it was all through history as technology advanced, at least in non-police states. What's happened of course is that technology has improved and the military and the police run arounds saying "Mine! You can't have any!". Such an attitude has been accepted for some reason, and that's most unfortunate because it's corresponded with a rise of abject stupidity in policymaking and of course state-encouraged worship of the military and the police.
Now, I do wish the founders had chosen different words, but it would have been hard to imaging the twisting that goes on today and the total lack of historical context we look at things in. For instance, conservatives will often rail about the lack of a "right to privacy" in the Constitution, particularly when they want to control what two people do in the bedroom. That's stupid on two fronts: first, the Constitution itself says that it does not spell out all rights, nor does it have to. The second is that, back then, if you told somebody you wanted some privacy it meant you needed to use the bathroom. They would have felt awfully silly putting that in the Constitution. We have the same problem with "well regulated militia" because "regulated" did not mean "strangled to death with policies and procedures" as it does now. It meant well trained, well provisioned, well equipped, etc. "Militia" was pretty much everybody who could reasonably be expected to fight if need be, and not the National Guard as history teachers like to lie about in school these days. The term "well regulated militia" therefore absolutely does NOT mean a group of "professionals" can bear arms and regular people can't. Therefore the only proper gun control, Constitutionally speaking, would be requirements for proper training in the correct use of weapons. Period.
The Bill of Rights was a bit of a compromise. Some people felt it necessary to explicitly prohibit abuses that had been done to them. Go check, the things the Bill of Rights prohibits are things the British did to the Colonists. It wasn't an imagining of everything wrong government could possibly do, though if they'd had the TSA or did "administrative searches" back then we'd all be a lot more free now because they would have prohibited those too. Check a little further and you'll find that none of the Amendments use language to the effect of "the people have the right to..." but instead they prohibit government from infringing on the natural rights that all people have. Even people who are staunch defenders of things like the First Amendment often get this backwards, and it's dangerous reasoning to believe that rights are granted by a piece of paper. Governments are created on pieces of paper, and pieces of paper spell out what they can and cannot do, but people have natural rights regardless. So there was also a belief that spelling out rights was not necessary.
Given the assaults our government has historically made on just about every amendment there is, the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Tenth in particular, one could conclude the first group might have had a point. The second group felt, also correctly as history shows, that if you set about listing any rights at all, then people are going to take the lack of X in the Constitution as a permit for government to outlaw or control X. Unfortunately, history also proves that both groups were right. Control freaks simply cannot be trusted nor eradicated, it seems. The Tenth Amendment was the com
Is there a test to discover whether your political leaders have good motives regardless of their competence. Is there a test to discover if your political leaders are self-serving psychopaths who consider ordinary citizens as no better than slaves.
The 'Burn the Witch' test is as good as any. When a horrible event occurs that profoundly disrupts the sense of security of ordinary people, how do the politicos act?
-Do you get massive implementation of security theatre, disrupting the lives of ordinary people, implying that THEY are the problem.
-Do you get actions designed to disarm the ordinary citizen, controlled by an unaccountable violent class of armed thug police armed with military weapons?
-Do you get 'Burn the Witch' actions by the authorities, where anyone who can be sold to the masses as an 'oddball' or a 'freak' or 'too clever' or 'too curious' or 'freethinking', is arrested for actions that are clearly NOT criminal, but can be sold to the masses as a 'new' type of meta-criminality by witch-finders?
Look at this case. The corrupt police and prosecutors already had protocols in place to describe household items as bomb-making equipment for the times when they wanted to take out a Muslim or radical 'troublemaker' who hadn't had the decency to actually break the law. Look to the UK. Proving INTENT is no longer needed when it comes to prosecuting Muslims who possess any form of military training material. In the UK a Muslim who owns a university level text on explosive chemistry is automatically guilty of a serious offense if he/she is a target of the state. There is no defense against "owning materials that may be of use to a terrorist" in the UK. Abuses in the UK courts are only currently limited by what they think the UK public will tolerate.
This kid owns materials that "may be of use in constructing an explosive device". Luckily, you Yanks still usually (unless it is a Muslim that Israel has instructed your slave president to take out) require proving 'intent' in court. The system will bash him and smash him, but so long as he confesses to nothing during his mistreatment, he is likely to avoid prosecution.
Things are getting really bad all over. There was a case, a week or so back, of a Spanish politician and his secretary given two years in prison for posting a funny, satirical flash animation that allowed the user to cause the demise of a cartoon character naked woman in various amusing ways. The Internet has massively grown the ways in which your enemies can label you as a witch.
It all boils down to the same thing. We have the right to burn you alive because of what you think. In one of those disfunctioning African States recently, the woman cabinet member who had the position of enforcing 'political correctness' and Women's Rights was convicted for genocide, after she personally chose woman belonging to other tribes to be rounded up and subject to rape, torture and murder.
What I don't get about you Americans is why you think the monsters you elect to rule you will only go so far, and no further. Why you think the 'witch-burning' will always petter out. Your sick nation is now the 'Salusa Secundus' depicted in the novel Dune. It exists only to serve an ever growing war-machine. Creativity is now outsourced to tame nations that specialise in technology and manufacturing, so you can focus on producing the perfect armies, and the perfect loyal, amoral, braindead grunts to serve in those armies.
The Mooninites in Boston. The police absolutely wigged out about those little LED displays. It was funny.
new law, you are only allowed to draw rainbows and unicorns now. wait a min, just rainbows - that unicorn can be used as a weapon
If you don't mind snow you could move to Canada.
It's a documented reality: http://www.thewaronkids.com/
"The War on Kids is a documentary on Public Education in America. While several documentaries on schools have come out since The War on Kids, these films tend to be either propaganda for charter schools or look at symptoms without any appreciation or understanding of underlying issues. To be a great documentary, it is essential to do the necessary work and dig deeper to uncover the heart of the problems observed. The numerous failures and pathologies associated with school are predominantly due to it autocratic structure. Because no one wants to voluntarily relinquish power, this fundamental problem is never addressed or even recognized."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
From now on
Seriously, WTF. He was drawing "weapons" in his notebook.
Was he plotting out detailed plans for causing mass destruction? No?
Maybe he drew a detailed blueprint for an atomic bomb? Or maybe just an IDE? No?
TFA doesn't say. Another article quotes his mom saying that he drew a glove shooting fire. A glove... shooting magical fire... WTF?
Ok maybe it was this one. Maybe he was planning to build his own? That would have been aweso... err I mean criminal!
But wait, since the staff called the police then there must be some threat that he poses, right? Let's search his house just to be safe. Oh look! We found scary-looking exposed electronic parts!
Oh, and some "chemicals" that could be mixed together to make an explosive!
Let's throw the book at him! Great job here, boys. Let's grab a round and celebrate.
https://www.xkcd.com/5/
Coming to a school near you. This is not punny!
I've got 20 ten pound bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer in my shed, I also have about 20 gallons of nitromethane usually used for my son's gokart racing.
The blasting caps added to that and I could bring down a federal building like Timothy McVeigh, but it'd be too expensive to waste atm since by themself it's fertilizer and engine fuel.
I also have DMSO, and anything you mix into DMSO after dried is absorbed into the skin, they sell DMSO online and is used in veterinary medicine for horses and such to deliver medicine via skin. You could cause a panic mailing DMSO laced letters :) but DMSO by itself is harmless and has many uses.
Want to ban sugar? Sugar+Salt Peter mixed 50/50 in 1 soda can, can fill a city block with thick white smoke.
just seems they want to ban knowledge more and more.
Next thing you'll hear is you will have to be government licensed and have a permit from the state to take chemistry classes in school.
"People don't like believing that cops will lie in court and falsely accuse people of stuff and are just bad/evil in general. So they don't believe it."
A book about that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistakes_Were_Made_(But_Not_by_Me)
"Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) is a non-fiction book by social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, first published in 2007. It deals with cognitive dissonance, self-serving bias and other cognitive biases, using these psychological theories to illustrate how the perpetrators of hurtful acts justify and rationalize their behavior. It describes a positive feedback loop of action and self-deception by which slight differences between people's attitudes become polarised."
There is a whole chapter on how good cops go bad one small step at a time.
That said, I'd expect a solid majority of police officers are trying to do the best job they can under difficult circumstances. The police are on the front lines of the fact that the USA is a very broken and disintegrating society in many ways, very much in need of a good dose of self-renewal.
As I comment here about John Gardner's 1971 book "Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society": ... Only the blind and complacent could fail to recognize the great tasks of renewal facing us -- in government, in education, ..."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
===
From John Gardner's 1971 book:
"As I was browsing in a university bookstore recently, I heard an apple-cheeked girl say to her companion, "The truth is that our society and everything in it is in a state of decay." I studied her carefully and I must report that she did not seem even slightly decayed. But what of the society as a whole? Decay is hardly the word for what is happening to us. We are witnessing changes so profound and far-reaching that the mind can hardly grasp all the implications.
John Gardner goes on to say that every generation faces the problem of renewing itself to meet new challenges emerging from the very success of the old ways of doing things. And he suggests that social values are not some drying up old reservoir, but rather a reservoir of variable capacity that must be recharged anew in every generation. Democracy -- use it or lose it. Free speech on the internet -- use it or lose it. Social capital -- use it or lose it?
===
Some of Gardner's book:
http://books.google.com/books/about/Self_Renewal.html?id=U5hXpnwUmW4C
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The same day as the Newton tragedy, in China, a psycopath killed 20 children with a knife.
Wrong example to choose, since all the children survived the attack, at least initially.
This is no different than the salem witch trials, or finding of witch's throughout the middle ages. People go crazy when something goes wrong and they have to find somebody to blame, sadly it is a teenager who legally has done no wrong. The problem is freedom needs to be defended when people loose their heads. Yeah, the situation is waaay sad, but it happened and you can't go back in time and reverse what happened. Same thing with sept 11... we ended up with the TSA are we better off?
That is how stupid USA is getting... they probably have found orange juice and toothpaste. In China, at the same day that the USA incident occurred, a guy has killed 22 kids with a knife and they are not thinking to forbid the knife.
I'm 17, there are pictures of guns in my notebooks, and i have a bunch of explosive chemicals at my house. I AM NOT A PSYCHOPATH! Game maker: yes (guns = concept art), like playing with rockets/gunpowder: yes, but not a killer. All i can say is thank goodness i live far away from America...
LaPierre attacked video games and movies, but did not call for an investigation of them. I'm more concerned about his calls for a "national database" of the mentally ill, which sounds rather authoritarian.
Step 1: National database of mentally ill.
Step 2: No rights for anyone who is on the list.
Step 3: Everyone gets put on the list.
Fortunately I can pick and choose and be for what the NRA wants for guns, but against what they want (if restrictions are indeed what they want) for speech. And since the NRA spends the lions share of its lobbying money on gun-related stuff and not speech-related stuff, that's still a big plus for the NRA.
Just FYI. Movie and game ratings are self-regulation by their respective industries, enforced through the cooperation of publishers, retailers, theaters, etc.. They are not law (although they were adopted by the industry under threat of governmental regulation.) Refer to the California law which sought to penalize retailers for selling violent games to minors that was struck down on Constitutional grounds.
The likelihood of even sensible gun regulation being passed, perhaps more effort should be devoted to pushing the gun industry to voluntarily include all those safety features they'd developed for years but never implemented.
I am pretty sure possession of a weapon is not a crime. Otherwise they'd better haul me off to jail. . . me and everyone else.
...was not drawing himself a permit too!
And everyone likes to forget the first 4 words of the 2nd Amendment: A *Well Regulated* Militia
thats all i need to say
http://www.everydaynodaysoff.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/ATF-shoestring-machine-gun-2004.jpg
Did you know that there are ARMED security guards in banks?
In SOME banks, sure. But not in ALL banks.
few schools have armed security guards or at least a dedicated teacher or a principle who has a weapon in the office
That is because it would not solve the problem. One teacher with a pea shooter would not have been useful against someone with an AR15, they would have likely been shot before they even had time to raise their weapon.
Another strange thing is that school doors apparently are not always locked during school hours, anybody can just waltz in... with guns... who knew.
Wow, you really don't read the news, do you? The shooter in Connecticut shot the glass in. The doors were locked but that didn't stop him because he didn't open the door.
Hydrogen Peroxide and steel wool. Check.
Ammonia cleaners and HCl-based cleaners. Check.
Diesel fuel and ammonia-based fertilizer. Check.
Batteries and steel wool. Check.
Two cell phones (one is a timer, one to call with). Check.
Supply of natural gas and microwave oven with a kitchen-timer mode. Check.
Diet Coke and Mentos. Sorry, only regular Coke in stock today.
Baked beans. Chec... oh wait, that's a different kind of explosion.
OK, I don't have all of these right now but the point is I could get enough of any of these to make in-the-sink-sized explosions and maybe start a small fire if I wasn't careful.
*waits patiently for knock on the door*
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Probably that whole "shall not be infringed" thing
as the AC said you forgot the whole "Well Regulated" part.
Linux is only free if your time has no value. Windows is only free if you threaten to use Linux.
Perhaps he was an aspiring video game designer? As a child I drew all sorts of weaponry, from mohawk sporting bazooka mounted tank-treaded VW bugs, to interstellar death rays. I even drew them on index cards with stats on the back about how much damage they could take and deal, sometimes I even drew out scenarios across tens of sheets of taped together notebook paper telling of immense galactic battles of good vs they-only-think-we're-evil. Why, that death-ray harvested the power of suns, destroying whole solar systems just as fuel, and had more "fire power" than ten thousand SDF-1s!
Hell, they didn't even need to look for chemicals that MIGHT blow things up, Gramps and I used real dynamite to remove stumps from the fields! It was fun, but I'd have rather been writing my little scripts involving the end of time, the obliteration of all life in the futile struggle for energy resources near The Heat Death of the Universe!
Makes sense if you think about it: If violent video-games are the problem, then just nab the game creators before they poison the minds of others with their entertainment. With advances in neurological research we're already able to decode some thoughts into words with brain scans. We could simply screen people during home-room classes, Have them sit in a FMRI and analyze what they're thinking! We could end crimes while they're still just thoughts! Oh, wait: Who will then make the graphics for all the violent crime TV shows and Movies? Aha! Another perfectly good application for outsourcing!
Never keeping pop rocks and soda at home at the same time again
I didn't say the selection would be broad nor easy. Costa Rica? Could be ugly as the globe warms up. Maybe Canada or Scandinavia, and wait for the thaw? Netherlands? I unhappily agree about Australia... unhappily because at one time I had a notion of emigrating there. John "Mini-Me-Bush" Howard and many other things have changed my mind. The one AWESOME thing they're doing that makes me proud is how they're buying back the Internet infrastructure for public ownership as they build out their own next-gen network, but that's not compensation enough for all the other stupidity. You'd think they'd have been learning from the American examples-not-to-follow, but instead they've been largely mimicking all our stupidities.
(Apologies to the Aussie rank and file. None of it's your doing directly, even though it's still your responsibility and you elected/appointed/promoted the twits whose direct doing it is.)
I'd better hand myself in now then. The flour in my kitchen can make quite a bang and as for the cans of deodrent and butane I have not to mention the other howsehold substances I have I should expect MI5 or MI6 to introduce me to the nice CIA people. Anyone who has studied chemistry at school knows that under the right conditions a can of soup can be made to explode.
Their answers are as farcical as the tax cut fundamentalists whose solution to every economic problem is more tax cuts. Their answer to gun violence is always more guns.
I drew and painted (in art classes) a lot of ants in schools. Good thing I get in trouble for having them. ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
But what if he had army recruiting material. or soldier of fortune, or guns and ammo, or any of a number of items an average teenage boy might have
Wow This story read as if it were a joke . . . Something from a science fiction novel. I am truly sorry USA folks. Now its your children they are after. . . Its a terrible time to be an American.
I prefer to avoid discussions about guns (pro or con) these days because it is such an emotional issue. But I can point out that your statement is a truism. Clanton and the McLaury brothers were rustlers. They had a habit of not following the law and that's why the Earps were pursuing them. It is true that had Clanton and the McLaurys been following the law, the gunfight would not have happened. But, then, if they'd been following the law, they would not have been pursued. (Of course, the Earps were deputy U.S. Marshals and thus one should expect them to bear arms.)
One may as well say that (P1) if people followed all laws, and (P2) there are laws against carrying guns, then (C) murders with guns would not occur. It is a truism. If premise one is in fact the case then it implies the conclusion, since murder is also illegal. The second premise is immaterial. If everyone followed laws, then they wouldn't commit murder.
It is not easy to defend or to attack gun rights if you at all take the matter seriously and address it honestly. Since the first premise above (P1) is simply untrue, it becomes a genuine political, legislative, and even moral problem. When we recognize that simply legislating against something (like murder, or smoking marijuana, or anything else good, bad, or indifferent) does not make it stop, we take only the first step closer to understanding the problem. We have to follow this recognition with a series of questions before we can even begin to craft policy to address the problem. Any further gun restrictions should consider these questions: do we place undue burden on those who follow the law?; do we have a means of ensuring that those who follow the law are protected?; how will the law address the quantity of guns already present?; will enforcement of this law require the infringement of other rights or liberties? (e.g. an outright ban and confiscation of guns, something almost no gun contract advocates are calling for, would require an absolute police state to enforce with any effect at all; even so, the question is equally necessary for any new law); will enforcement of this law create other harms greater than that which it seeks to mitigate (cf. marijuana laws)?
Most of the same questions can (and should) be applied to the kinds of gun law liberalization (in the old sense of the word) efforts advocated by the likes of the NRA. One must also weigh such suggestions as the arming of teachers or placing armed guards in schools against other potential harms this could cause (e.g. greater risk of accident or making children--who should be raised as free men and women--accustomed to living and working in fortress-like-institutions under armed guard).
Anyone who tells you that the answer to this problem is easy is either deluded or lying. In either case, that one will certainly not craft wise policy. For the liar, on the one hand, has his own agenda and cares little for the concerns of others (whether they be for safety or liberty). But the deluded, on the other hand, if both more common and worse. Whether he wishes to take all the guns away from those who are obeying laws or to put armed guards in schools and ban violent movies, he fails to recognize this constant fact of human experience: people will continue to break the laws and to do evil things to one another. In one case, it will be that no one who keeps the laws has a gun, but the one who breaks them kills the defenseless. In the other, it will be that a man with a badge in a school does something terrible, or maybe just negligent, and innocents will still die. Anyone who says that the answer to this is problem is easy is wrong.
Gee's does someone want to tell the police that drawing a weapon doesn't actually mean to sit down and "draw a weapon" but to remove it from your holster. . . and its doesn't constitute "a threat" when a kid sits down and draws one.
Where instead of witches we have shooters, and bombers.
Where shall we erect the gallows?
" A *Well Regulated* Militia"
The meaning of that phase has changed over the last two centuries. It doesn't mean what you think it means. Let's not forget the context either.
"Well Regulated" meant "functional" two centuries ago. Also there's the context, you can have a "well regulated" disfunctional militia and the free state will still fall. As has been proven by history numerous times. A functional "unregulated" militia can still protect a free state. You know, the unregulated militia we had during the revolutionary war among others. "A well regulated militia, necessary for a free state" is stating an example of why this prohibition is needed. The key statement is "the right to bear arms shall not be infringed." Which is a blanket statement of what government cannot do making all gun control law illegal. Believe or not individual people in the 1700s and 1800s could manufacture and own cannons and other heavy weapons of the times.
In my opinion any future amendments contesting previous amendments without repeal of former amendments renders the document invalid. It's probably long since time for a constitutional convention or another civil war.
Has completely lost its mind.
When is the next train out?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
No crime; false arrest, mental anguish... Free scholarship!
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
In Australia isopropyl alcohol is relatively difficult to obtain (and expensive at those few outlets) because it can be used in drug manufacture.
Taking a pistol to an automatic rifle fight isn't going to even the odds by much if anything. Action movies are there for entertainment and don't have a lot to do with real life.
If you're not hysterically paranoid, you're not sane.
The worst I saw of that was on 9/11 with CNN showing a whole lot of "Palestinians" partying when they heard the towers fell. It was outdoors but the lighting was wrong for the time (full night in the stock footage but it should have been around noon to late afternoon if it was really in the mid-east that day) and most of them were wearing t-shirts with the Brazilian flag on them. It was stock footage of fans taken after Brazil won a match in the 1998 Soccer World Cup.
I was loading real nukes onto real aircraft. I must be a terrorist. You better lock me up forever.
Everyone has "bomb making chemicals" in their home of they have anything other than empty cabinets.
Hell, I have enough microcontrollers to make a hundred bomb timers. I even have a magnetic sensor that could be used as an anti vehical sensor for a mine. It's called "A coil of copper wire."
Next up is that anyone with a computer will be considered to have computer virus making materials.
kind of did it.
"You are only young once, but you can be immature forever." -www.animemusicvideos.org
http://www.myfoxphilly.com/story/20385390/fi
He drew a glove with flames on it.
From what I've read elsewhere, he was an honors student, a scout and he played on a Christian basketball team.
What profile does that fit?
I think you are reading stuff written by the gun lobby. If you look up real reports, you'll see that rates of violent crime were gradually rising from 1996 to 2006, but have been falling since. (I think the gun ban was put in force in 1996; I couldn't find earlier statistics).
Definitions of crimes vary, but assault in Australia at a rate of about 8 per thousand corresponds more or less to simple and aggravated assault in the US, which is at a rate of about 22 simple and 5 aggravated per thousand. Homicide in Australia is at a rate of 1.2 per 100 thousand; in the US, it is about 4.8 per 100 thousand.
For their own reasons, the gun advocates have been making up lots of reports about how crime rates in other countries are higher than in the US. They mostly just aren't true.
And where do you move to that's so much better?
Chemicals and Electronic parts that when mixed together can create an explosion? Gee... lets see, 90% of geeks have an Arduino and some Vinegar and baking soda in their homes. Hell, the police could call a light bulb and electronic part. Or what about your cell-phone? A knee-jerk reaction to a kid drawing pictures of what appeared to be a gun? I'd hate to see what happens to the kid who draws a picture of the latest Halo video game.
Canada, Scandinavia, whatever...
Just give it time -so that they can import more of the 3rd world and then start playing up the slavery/post-colonial shtick.
Then your county will have a "gun problem".
As a kid toilet cleaner and aluminum foil in a bottle was an instant hit after a certain MacGyver episode.
The brief article doesn't say if a warrant was issues. Did the police just bully the mom into opening up the door and letting them search?
I guess being a video game designer is out of the question for this kid then??
Once the cops have arrested and locked up every kid with an interest in guns or other weaponry, the military isn't going to have anyone to sign up... Actually, neither will the police!
I wouldn't be surprised if 95% of today's police didn't become cops because they wanted to play with and use guns in some way. As kids themselves, they probably drew pictures of them, collected them, played with toy guns, etc. Just a bunch of hypocrites.
WTF? A quick google quickly proves you are completely wrong... I assume you are a member of the NRA?
Homicide rate per 100,000 - 2010: United States 4.2, Australia 1.0
Australia is a much safer country then the United States... by far.
COGNITIVE DISSONANCE
Safer from people maybe, but homicide figures don't count the spiders, snakes, drop bears, crocodiles, and sharks. Also you have to eat vegemite or we kick you out again.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
Did the school ever actually figure it out? Or did they just get hand smacked with no real lesson learned?
according to macgyver you can make a bomb with a paper clip and a stick of chewing gum.
I was really hoping that this had finally broken the NRA, and that they were going to disband or at least accept some gun controls. That it wasn't all trolling and that they weren't going to come out guns blazing and crazier than ever.
I was hoping for way, way too much.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
There are plenty of ways of making explosives from household chemicals. Things like detergent and acetone are probably found in every house. Palestinians use that in creative ways http://www.waronline.org/en/terror/suicide.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogmtAQlp9HI
And also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8RulhBVzbk
So, if there is an answer to your question, it is because the school kid was already in a form of prison, and then he broke the written or unwritten prison rules, and he is now being further punished. What was the original crime that landed him in a day-prison called "school" though? Just being young? For alternatives, see: http://www.educationrevolution.org/
As New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto wrote: ...
http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there.
Schools got the way they were at the start of the twentieth century as part of a vast, intensely engineered social revolution in which all major institutions were overhauled to work together in harmonious managerial efficiency.
That said, I liked your insightful and ironic point. As another poster replied, you made probably the best comment here.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"The student in this case didn't exactly make the best of decisions: With tensions high, it would probably be better to not be drawing guns or give any potential "danger indicators" to school officials, etc."
For adults, your point might make sense. but kids may process information like the tragedy in CT by role-playing through it. That is described in a book called "The War Play Dilemma" by by Diane E. Levin and Nancy Carlsson-Paige, which I review here: ..."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html
"The "dilemma" is about a fundamental conflict parents face when dealing with war play. On the one hand, most parents want children to grow and develop by working through developmental issues (like learning to deal with conflict, learning self-control, and learning respect for themselves and others through play, including play involving conflicts as hands-on-learning). On the other hand, most parents want to convey social values related to their beliefs about violence and war as ways to solve social conflicts. The authors clearly do not say all war play is bad, and they also point out that even a cracker can be turned into a gun with one bite. The authors say there are no easy general answers to this dilemma in all situations, but provide a range of options.
People who draw may often draw what is on their mind. With 24X7 news coverage of the tragedy, how could guns not be on the minds of a lot of kids?
Beyond all the other insightful comments people have made here, this NJ situation shows the fundamental lack of understanding that is so prevalent in so many schools about how children really learn and grow.
Better information on how kids learn:
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0fg73WnLWQ
http://www.holtgws.com/howchildrenlearn.html
http://www.alfiekohn.org/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids.html
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue.htm
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
This is a crime? He had weapons in his house, and this is something worthy of charging him with something? You better arrest every gun owner and pawn shop owner and knife owner (that is just about everyone - how many of us have a buitcher knife in the kitchen) or every single lead pipe owner or every single wrench owner in the US! All of those items could be potentially dangerous, and could be used as a weapon! Let's charge everyone in the US with posession of a weapon!
What s stupid charge! If you want to charge him with something, at least charge him with something that has a chance of standing up. The case should be thrown out for the absurdity of the charge.
While I may not know the whole story, I find it concerning that "posession of a weapon" is a reasonable charge.
From: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/1d.htm ...
====
Now come back to the present while I demonstrate that the identical trust placed in ordinary people two hundred years ago still survives where it suits managers of our economy to allow it. Consider the art of driving, which I learned at the age of eleven. Without everybody behind the wheel, our sort of economy would be impossible, so everybody is there, IQ notwithstanding. With less than thirty hours of combined training and experience, a hundred million people are allowed access to vehicular weapons more lethal than pistols or rifles. Turned loose without a teacher, so to speak. Why does our government make such presumptions of competence, placing nearly unqualified trust in drivers, while it maintains such a tight grip on near-monopoly state schooling?
An analogy will illustrate just how radical this trust really is. What if I proposed that we hand three sticks of dynamite and a detonator to anyone who asked for them. All an applicant would need is money to pay for the explosives. You'd have to be an idiot to agree with my plan -- at least based on the assumptions you picked up in school about human nature and human competence.
And yet gasoline, a spectacularly mischievous explosive, dangerously unstable and with the intriguing characteristic as an assault weapon that it can flow under locked doors and saturate bulletproof clothing, is available to anyone with a container. Five gallons of gasoline have the destructive power of a stick of dynamite.3 The average tank holds fifteen gallons, yet no background check is necessary for dispenser or dispensee. As long as gasoline is freely available, gun control is beside the point. Push on. Why do we allow access to a portable substance capable of incinerating houses, torching crowded theaters, or even turning skyscrapers into infernos? We haven't even considered the battering ram aspect of cars -- why are novice operators allowed to command a ton of metal capable of hurtling through school crossings at up to two miles a minute? Why do we give the power of life and death this way to everyone?
It should strike you at once that our unstated official assumptions about human nature are dead wrong. Nearly all people are competent and responsible; universal motoring proves that. The efficiency of motor vehicles as terrorist instruments would have written a tragic record long ago if people were inclined to terrorism. But almost all auto mishaps are accidents, and while there are seemingly a lot of those, the actual fraction of mishaps, when held up against the stupendous number of possibilities for mishap, is quite small. I know it's difficult to accept this because the spectre of global terrorism is a favorite cover story of governments, but the truth is substantially different from the tale the public is sold.
====
More on the kid and what he was found with:
http://www.myfoxphilly.com/story/20385390/fi .. "
""He really cares about people," she said. "He's kind, he's loving, he's brilliant...I think this is fear because of what just happened in Connecticut." The mother of the high school junior asked us not to identify her or her son. He may be sitting in a juvenile detention center, but she says he's a fine young man who volunteers to help senior citizens and was once a Boy Scout. She says his passion for collecting old stuff, taking it apart and rebuilding things lead to this arrest.
http://forums.macresource.com/read.php?2,1482541,1482565
"The evening news reported that what was taken from the home included cleaning fluids and flour, steel wool and a cell phone."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Drawing weapons? Just be seen in the school library reading Jane's Weapons Weekly and the word gets out. Among others, this is how I dealt with bullying. Some of the many activities were:
~ Drawing art quality copies of mushroom clouds from nuke tests. No one blinked an eye. IVY MIKE was my favorite
~ Taking College Chemistry early in high school
~ Using aluminum cans from electrolytic capacitors as rocket motor casings
~ Melting lead pipes using spray paint cans as blow torches to make paper weights that look like these.
~ Making napalm from foamed polystyrene and charcoal lighter fluid
~ Buying from the pharmacist Purepac® potassium nitrate (the pale green, black and white "Nestle Quik" style containers) to make gunpower saying that "my dog was constipated"
~ Using a Lionel train transformer, twelve gauge copper wire and carbon anodes from D-cell batteries to make a nanoscale electric arc furnace.
~ Making zip guns from hardwood floor grooves, two-by-fours and strong rubber bands.
~ Generally making stuck-up snotty, snarky overachievers uncomfortable about their achievements. The federal government does a better job doing that nowadays.
After all, these were the Reagan years. Upon graduation, white males were expected to join the military. Minority males were expected to either fill the prisons or go to college. Females were still expected to get married, have children and die of Toxic Shock Syndrome two months before menopause.
By the above reckoning, I must have been the healthiest boy around.
"Oh, look, he was also interested in electronics, we could a) teach him to become and engineer, helping to ensure our future prosperity and competitiveness in the world, or b) lock him in prison!"
AC, your point is another application of the idea in my sig which I have not thought about before. Thanks for pointing it out so clearly. From one assumption of human nature, this kid has the potential to be a productive member of our society on an upward spiral. With another assumption about human nature, this kid is set on the course of becoming a drain on our society in a downward spiral.
And the further we all go down the downward spiral, the harder it gets to find the resources to help children grow well into productive members of society (whether good public libraries, or healthy nutrition, or good chemistry sets). So then, as our society decays further, the more and more likely we are to assume the worst, and then we get the worst.
Echoing another of your points, when I was in High School, I found out the Junior Engineering and Technical Society (JETS) club had been disbanded a couple years earlier because the students had been working towards purchasing enough materials to build a big rocket (because it could in theory have hit an airplane). So, it became a "Computer Club" probably because that seemed "safer". So, I got support to learn about computers but not about how to make rockets. About a decade ago, I talked with someone at NASA who said they had a very difficult time hiring anyone these days to be an actual "rocket scientist" because kids have not experience anymore with rocketry and explosives. Is it any surprise NASA has a hard time "getting it up" these days and could not design a good successor to the Space Shuttle despite so much time and money? So, because of that 1970s fear, probably duplicated across the USA, we all remain imprisoned on planet Earth rather than being able to move into the "High Frontier" and reach for the stars. Meanwhile, we have to worry about "The Singularity" and Terminator-like military AIs getting out of control. And we also have to worry about robots taking most of the jobs (without an adequate economic policy like a basic income to distribute what robots can produce, see Marshall Brain's book "Manna") in part because we are still locked in a scarcity-assuming economics from lack of access to space resources like solar energy and asteroidal ore.
Around the globe, the USA is unfortunately busy creating terrorists like by killing women and children as "collateral damage" against suspected militants (intentionally or not). In the same way, out of the same emotion of fear, it looks like the USA is certainly working hard to take a potential engineer as this student was and turn him against society.
Some people might strongly disagree with going much further with that analogy though:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100195201/comparing-obamas-drone-attacks-in-pakistan-to-the-shooting-at-sandy-hook-is-the-most-infantile-kind-of-anti-imperialism/
US president Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." I might not go that far, but it is a good thing to think about. Related: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t.html?_r=0
"But the satire was rooted in a statistical fact: in the ranks of captured and confessed terrorists, engineers and engineering students are significantly overrepresented."
With about two million US citizens in prison (10X what if probably should be) and several times that on probation, with about half for non-violent drug offenses and/or for being a minority, it would be easy to argue this self-fulfilling prophecy has been operating for decades. It is just now expanding further and
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Why don't they arrest Quentin Tarantino, Michael Bay, etc.? Their images of weapons are much more realistic.
Slashdot has some very bright and intelligent readers who make some very interesting and insightful comments.....
And some real idiots....
hey retard .. we have a registry for guns ... go own one .. then talk
They would have to eliminate all chemistry classes to start and purge the labs. When I was a kid virtually every chemistry set included things necessary to make some pretty powerful ...er...reactions.
and banning one gun because it looks like another that is something quite different is ludicrous
When I was in middle school (late 90s) I drew a cartoon in my math class. The student hands the teacher his homework saying "here is my homework ma'am." She was like "thank you sweetie" then he says "here is your death ma'am" then shoots her.
This teacher was an absolute bitch whom I couldn't stand. I didnt like her so that's why I got a laugh out of drawing the cartoon.
Unfortunately she happened to see it and was pretty pissed off. She took me to the vice principal who gave me a week in "alternative school."
Needless to say I didn't go on to shoot my teacher or anything like that.
Imagine if I was a kid in the same situation today. Would I be in Gitmo?
All this sensational report indicates is that the people of Egg Head Harbor are stupid and frightened. Big deal, there are plenty of towns like that in the USA. If they were smart they would have chosen a better name.
Heavy is the head that wears the tinfoil hat.
...yet. As far as you know
And a police-state presence in every school. And a registry tracking all people treated for mental disorders. But not a registry on guns.
The NRA announcement was a brilliant political move. For a week straight after the shootings, the U.S. media was pushing their pet gun control agenda, screaming loudly with their irrational fear based nonsense. NRA waited a week for the emotion to calm down and a bit of rationalization to return to people's minds....and then came out of nowhere with their own ludicrous proposal, exactly equal and opposite to the ludicrous gun control proposals. In doing so they effectively confused and split everyone everyone in 100 different directions.
We'll see how this plays into the gun control "debate" as next year rolls in, but it appears to have struck a serious slow to the gun control nuts agenda. Then again, the fucking fascists are determined to take our guns one way or another. Meanwhile there are lines around the block to get into gun shows.
captcha: bullseye
When cops act like assholes.
Whatever happened to the one overt act or probable cause? I would be more worried about a kid that didnt draw stuff in their school notebooks that could be taken out of context.
That teacher just destroyed a persons life.
I wonder what would happen if the teacher saw a student drawing a sex pose.
That teacher is a good example of what is wrong with america. Over-sensitive morons.
They even get offended when you try to educate them. They get offended by everything and decides to destroy it for everyone else.
For example get offended by a tradition that can look racial, make them remove it and in the process destroys it for the children which it was made for.
Children do not care what skin color or clothes they have. They just want to have fun.
Somebody should send that teacher an example of a real threat but instead of an explosive bomb it should be a smoke and smell bomb. Of course record it and upload it.
I went to one other place on earth twice, 50 years ago.
Therefore, everywhere else on earth is shit.
Seriously, you sound like a crazy old man that should be locked up. Honestly. You probably want to re-evaluate your life or something.
The more I think about it, the more I realize the problem is that this stuff is sensationalized. And there's a real consequence. Not because it's stirred everyone up. Not because the press is simply trying to make a story out of nothing. But instead...this kids life is going to be screwed up. Think about it. If the school / cops did this & didn't tell the press, and the kid didn't tell the press...no fuss no muss. So...if the kid was really dangerous...they would have caught him before a horrific event. Now the story is reported. The cops have to trump something up. And the kid, who's name I guess will be reported before long, will be a googleable one for all his remaining days.
The teachers I know would lose their firearm within a week, and the ones who wouldn't aren't actually fit to be teachers or wouldn't carry one to begin with (including the marine).
The armed security guards I've known make Barney Fife look like fucking rocket scientist, seriously bunch of morons. And if you think the police and TSA are bad, just imagine how these idiots would behave. And yes, that includes the active duty infantry soldiers who were moonlighting.
If you want a secure school, just hire one ex Gurkha with is his khukuri for the school. Barney Fife, the absent minded professor, or Dirty Harry wannabe isn't going to do anything but cause more problems.
Disarmament? There's plenty of gangs with guns in Australia.