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9th-Grader May Face Charges After Homemade Clock Mistaken For Bomb
New submitter bengoerz writes: 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed was led away from MacArthur High School in handcuffs and faces possible charges after teachers, school administrators, and police in Irving, Texas mistook his homemade clock for a bomb. The device — a circuit board, power supply, and digital display wired together inside a pencil box — was confiscated by a teacher after the alarm sounded in class. Despite telling everyone who would listen that his device was just a clock, Ahmed was confronted by four police officers, suspended for three days, and threatened with expulsion unless he made a written statement, before eventually being transported to a juvenile detention center to meet his parents.
On one hand I wanted to commend you on your sarcasm but, I'm afraid you may be both dead serious and right. There's a lot of islamophobic stupidity in this country at the moment and it runs deep in all government institutions especially involving police or defense.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
This would have been me in 1976. Obviously, it wasn't quite that easy to make a clock back then. But, I was building things all of the time. The knowledge I gained has served me well my entire life. This is the kind of thing we should be encouraging. Tinkerers have helped to make this country what it is. To profile a kid like this into the criminal category is just beyond sad. I hope it doesn't discourage him from exploring his interests down the road. He needs to find a local Maker group. The school and police need to get a clue.
The issue is that the police and school don't know whether to believe him. After all, if it had been meant to be a hoax bomb and he got caught, this is exactly what you'd expect him to claim. So they have the unenviable task of figuring out whether this kid really did just bring a clock as he claims, or if he meant to use it as a hoax and got caught early. And for that matter whether they need to be concerned with copycats intent on causing a ruckus (as juveniles are so want to do).
Unfortunately he'll have learned the hard way that this wasn't a good idea. You have to take into consideration all of the dumb things other people can do, and this is at the top of the list of possibilities. His engineering teacher was smart to tell him to keep it put away. Shame that the alarm is what screwed him.
On the plus side this gives him a reputation with the students as a rebel. As a 9th grader coming into a new high school, that's not a bad reputation to start with. Especially at that age, the rebels tend to be popular with the guys and the gals. So he may yet come out ahead...
Well, take the device and check whether it's a bomb if you are so paranoid.
Also - note to others - if you make a bomb, do not make it look like a bomb. Or just keep it in your backpack etc. Contrary to what movies show, a bomb does not have to beep, have blinking lights, a countdown display and it actually can be hidden in a box or a backpack or some other object.
I have thought about it. My conclusion is that if you have to check twice before carrying something harmless around with you then the terrorists have won.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
It isn't fear of terrorism that causes this sort of reaction. At least, not directly. I don't think the police or teachers were necessarily worrying themselves that they might get blown up. Rather, it was a fear that - if the clock was a bomb used in a terror attack - THEY WOULD GET BLAMED for not doing something about it earlier. It's the same reason our politicians are so willing to pass the most obscenely unjust laws to chase down criminals: the penalty for not passing the law is disproportionately greater than passing it. If even one crime could have been prevented by the non-existent law (or had the clock been a bomb), far more blame is assigned to the people-of-authority who MIGHT have done something about the crime than to the actual criminal performing the act itself. It's no wonder people over-react in these situations. They aren't worried about being attacked by terrorists; they are worried about being attacked by us.
So if I take a motherboard inside a box to my school for a science project, you are saying everyone should insta-suspect I am carrying a bomb, even though I'm a pure-bred caucasian and my name is John Smith? In the school's defense, there's only one thing you can say: 'MURICA. When you live in the US and your name is Ahmed Mohamed, you have better chances of not being mistaken by a terrorist if you changed your name to Nero Bombmaker.
The ironic thing is that the vast majority of terror attacks on US soil-particularly bombings-have been perpetrated by "pure-bred caucasian John Smiths". McVeigh, Roof, Columbine, Aurora CO, 1996 Olympics, Unabomber, etc. Incidents such as these dwarf the number of incidents perpetrated by Muslims.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Hear, hear!! I wish I had mod points for this.
Let's not also forget sports...the Title "9" rules haven't so much promoted women sports as it has helped kill many sports for men outside of football.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
In an ideal world, a Muslim should be able to walk into a mall in Tel Aviv with a giant box marked "Allah Akbar!!! Death to Israel!" with a giant countdown timer on it and shop in peace, unmolested. But here in the real world, when a Muslim kid shows up in a crowded place carrying a box with some sort of timer on it--yes people get nervous. You can't just bury your head in the sand and pretend that we live in an ideal world, nice as it would be if we did.
You make a judgement call, and the teachers here erred on the side of caution. Imagine if this kid was a terrorist and it actually was a bomb, and they had done nothing. I bet you would be the first first person screaming "A muslim kid who no one knows shows up to school carrying a box with a timer on it and NO ONE SAYS ANYTHING??"
I'm sorry for this kid. I know he didn't ask to be born into a religion known in its modern incarnation for bombings and terrorism. Sucks for him, no doubt. But that's just the way it is.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I will tell you want he should do next!
1) Make a list of exactly what it takes to make a clock like this
2) Talk to his friends, who talk to their friends, etc. and spread the list
3) Have as many of the high school students show up at a location on a Saturday and all build clocks
4) Have all of these students show up at school on Monday with their clocks
5) Have all the kids en-mass show their teachers the clocks they made right as school is starting. Make sure they all know, it is a clock.
6) Wait for the administration and police to react.
Problem solved. they can't suspend that many kids at once. The Police can't handle that many kids at once. If they don't respond the exact same way as they did to the first clock, then the lawsuits will fly! They can't respond to that many clocks being brought to school in the same manner so the police and school then have to say, yeah, it isn't that big a deal or they have to let their true crazy shine!
I think you maybe even get as many of the parents as you can to show up at school drop off with clocks as well!
These are school teachers, not bomb experts. All they know is that it was a box with some sort of digital timer on it. You think they were going to perform a full forensic analysis of it before they called the cops?
This is the excuse used nowadays to park your brain in the closet and let someone else do the thinking for you. It's quite unfortunate and it actually has arisen due to the exuberance of American lawyers and American court systems in seeking or handing out multimillion dollar jackpots to people. Can you tell a person is dead? I mean - are you a doctor? Are you an EMT? His head is on the other side of the fucking freeway, but ARE YOU QUALIFIED TO SAY HE WAS DEAD?
So seriously the kid could have had a cardboard box that beeped, and your argument would apply. Or are you trying to say that a LCD is either a necessary component of a bomb, or predictive for the presence of a bomb? He could have just said "I made something and it's in my backpack" and of course the entire backpack COULD contain an explosive device. Who are you to say? You're not bomb experts.
Seriously people you have turned into a nation of cuckolds and cowards.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Thanks to the US education establishment, there's a millionaire made every day... usually via lawsuits. I'd say this young man won't need to worry about college debt.
Yeah.
Brown skin, muslimish-sounding name, Texas... My own first thought was: "Well, at least they didn't just summarily shoot him."
Imagine all the people...