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12-Year-Old Sikh Boy Arrested In Texas After Bringing a Power Bag To School (salon.com)
AaronW writes: A 12-year-old Sikh boy in Dallas, Texas was accused by another student of bringing a bomb to school. Apparently he had a powerbag; a backpack with a built-in phone charger. Rather than send him to the principal's office or ask for an explanation, the teacher instead called the police, who promptly arrested him and threw him into a juvenile detention center for three days. The school promptly suspended Armaan, and the police released him after three days but required that he wear an ankle bracelet.
Verifiable details are scant, for this case — probably because the whole thing seems to revolve around some 12-year-old kids talking to each other. Armaan's story is that another student said his bag looked like it had a bomb in it, and that he would report it. Believing it to be a joke, Armaan laughed. The police say he "admitted" to joking about a bomb, and they insist their actions were justified. A school district spokesman says the family was notified, but the parents say they had to dial 911 to find somebody who could tell them where their son was being held.
That's pretty sick.
Take them for all the money that can be had. False arrest charges would be nice too.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I think it was who said that one failed terrorist attack and we all have to take our shoes off before boarding a plane but 31 shootings later still no new gun laws. This country has it's priorities completely backwards :(...
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The basic problem is that mundanes see any home-made electronic device as a bomb. This is the terminal point of anti-intellectual bias in society, if you can make something, it's assumed that you're out to make something harmful.
Bruce Perens.
This is a horrible miscarriage of justice. If we're to accept this story on face value, the failures and stupidity at every level of government is distressingly palpable. How absurd is it that no one at the school or police department performed even the most minimal investigation much less inform the parents. Isn't it outright illegal for police to talk to children to interrogate them without the parents having the option to be present?
Soon we'll hear accusations that the student's father's sister's cousin's former room mate was also unverifiably be accused of making bomb threats.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Dear America,
Please get a grip on yourselves.
Signed,
The Rest of the World.
Sadly when dealing with law enforcement you can't make jokes. It is a related issue to the whole "zero tolerance" mindset that has besieged school policy. Being reasonable is no longer a reasonable expectation.
A normal human can be expected to crack a joke when confronted with a bizarre situation, such as a teacher asking a seemingly insane question as to whether your clock, or backpack is a bomb. Using humor to diffuse a tense situation is one of those social skills we pick up as a way to survive being crammed into overcrowded schools with a bunch of numb skull peers. But normal human behavior will get you tazed, pepper sprayed, arrested, or even shot these days.
Similarly we have a lot of cases of folks freezing up while being barked at by armed cops and being shot for not dropping the "weapon" (real or imagined). Normal human behavior for sure, but you die as a result. Trying shield yourself from a rain of blows? To a cop that can be seen as "resisting arrest" and justify a further rain of blows, a choke hold, or a tazing. Using body language like gesticulating with your arms and hands as you try to talk things out with some meat head pointing a gun at you? To a cop that is "acting erratically", maybe even causing him to "fear for his life". Not answering questions per your Miranda rights? "Acting un-cooperatively."
Someone should start a non profit... to manufacture and distribute stickers:
This item is not
a f*cking bomb
Seriously.
For me, the most disturbing thing is that there are (many apparently) teachers out there who call the cops on young children. Racism has always been there, but as far as I remember for anything less than knife-wielding 17 year old gangster students, it would be a school affair, dealt between teachers, parents, principle. Nowadays, they just call the cops on kids...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
This was in Arlington, not Dallas. This is like confusing Islip with New York City, Oakland with San Francisco, Yokohoama with Tokyo, or Luton with London.
It's looking more and more like a certain Sunni extremist group has already obtained one of their primary objectives: polarizing the United States against anyone of middle-eastern origin. I know this is at this point a 'Planet Texas' problem, but the problem is growing everywhere: people are already primed to be afraid of anyone who looks like they might conceivably be Muslim, and you give them any half-assed reason for a knee-jerk reaction, and you have what happened in this news story. One has to wonder how long it'll be, before someone (a cop, most likely) 'shoots and asks questions later', and some kid or other innocent dies just because they looked (or were in fact) Muslim -- and they weren't doing a damned thing wrong or even planned to do a damned thing wrong. After that, it'll likely be an avalanche. Something has to be done to stop this chain of events, now, before it gets to that point, but I'll be damned if I know what we need to do. Other than kick Trump out of the whole campaign process, and furthermore duct-tape him to a chair and stuff a sock in his mouth; that guy is doing at least as much damage to the whole situation as so-called Islamic State assholes are.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
At various times, I brought to school a phone-tapping device, a gas mask, and various incomprehensible-to-the-layman scientific devices.
Obviously I would not have fit in with kids like you. But that is no sin.
Bruce Perens.
ageist, sexist, and Islamophobia in 5 words. well played, sir.
The odds are much higher that you will use that weapon against your own family than that you will ever use it in any way that actually protects them from harm.
My dad was a reserve and was called up for both World War II and Korea. He killed people in Germany, and had a Purple Heart and a panel of decorations. He brought home a Luger which he'd taken off of some German. He destroyed the firing pin, because he knew that his family would be safer without an operating weapon in the home.
Guns are pretty reliable. Your brain isn't. Everybody has a crazy day in their life. Everyone.
So, I figure that not having guns all around us is better for our freedom overall.
Bruce Perens.
A friend in my highschool about 10 years ago was put under house arrest for 6 months because he brought a plastic laser pointer that looked like a really tiny revolver. Someone freaked and instead of getting detention or something, he was arrested for a toy.
Whether it be xenophobes, islamaphobes, or hoplophobes, you have nuts of all type out there willing to persecute people they think they are afraid of.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
http://sikhism.about.com/od/To...
they are a respectable warrior culture with fairly high integrity.
they are not engaged in a jihad against Western culture.
Dangit folks, learn your turban: Sikh's tie their turban's so that there's an inverted V at the forehead. and if one had to belong to a religious sect then being Sikh is in the top three (they're much nicer to females than your average Baptist). I'd sooner share a lunch with a Sikh than nearly any 'follower of Abraham' (for the curry, if naught else)
The gun is only dangerous when it's in your hand. So, we could actually do without gun laws if we eliminated people instead :-)
Bruce Perens.
It is proven that drownings happen a LOT more in houses that have swimming pools, so we need to ban them for the public good.
Sorry, but what I MIGHT do is not a good reason to restrict my rights.
If you do the math, the average male "member" is about 30 time more likely to commit sexual assault than the average gun is to commit murder. Do we need to castrate everybody based on what a tiny minority might do?
You wish to punish the 99.004% of honest gun owners based on the action of the 0.006%? Yes, those are real numbers.
Homicide is down by 50% since 1992. We are now twice as safe! We should do something to reverse this horrible trend!
Given that the gun genie is already out of the bottle, how do you propose to get the criminals to give up their guns? You think that only disarming the honest people makes you safer?
Australia got STRICT gun laws in 1996.
Australia 1995: guns were used in 18.38% of homicides.
Australia 2012: guns were used in 17.5% of homicides.
http://www.aic.gov.au/dataTool...
Yea, destroying THOUSANDS of guns resulted in less than 1% change. Plus, things are still not all rosy in Australia: http://thenewdaily.com.au/news...
If you choose to give up your freedoms, go ahead. But don't tell me how to live. That is all that I ask. I won't tell you what to do, and you don't tell me what to do.
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homocide in the Home. They say 2.7 to 1. That's just the first I found with a Google search. And the fatal school shootings list is really obscenely frequent now.
Pardon me for getting exasperated, but I shouldn't really have to tell you to read the news! This stuff is right in front of you.
Bruce Perens.
Um, wouldn't "them" in this case be the local government which means the local community, i.e. people who are paying taxes in that town? Best case the police department is insured and the insurance company would pay any settlement and then just jack up insurance rates on the rest of their customers to make the money back. Yeah, good idea.
I really hate this type of reply.
It attempts to sway the reader into thinking that responsibility and/or justice will be expensive. It tries to dissuade the reader from commonsense actions which would tend to prevent future transgressions.
Don't fine the company - they'll only jack up their prices and it's the customers who would pay. Don't sue the government, they'll just jack up the taxes and the people will pay.
This might cost the taxpayers in one or two instances, but it would have a chilling effect on other abuses in other districts. It's an overall gain for the taxpayers everywhere.
We don't have to sit outraged and powerless while these sorts of abuses happen. One or two groups of taxpayers can take the hit and we will all benefit. They will benefit later when we take the hit for other types of abuse.
Let's work together to stop this nonsense.
Including, saying that commonsense punishments are futile.
The odds are much higher that you will use that weapon against your own family than that you will ever use it in any way that actually protects them from harm.
Nice way to include suicides (which are two-thirds of all "gun deaths") in your assertion. The people who trot out that canard consider someone who kills himself to have used the gun "on his family." By that measure, owning a car is crazy because it hugely increases the odds of you and/or your family dying in it.
Your anecdote about your dad suggests that he was a lucid, brave person. Was he really worried that he was going to decide to kill his family? Was he actually worried that only a WWII pistol would have the power to make him want to kill his family, but long, deadly knives in the kitchen wouldn't have that magical power over his decision making process? If, as you say, everyone has a crazy day, then why aren't the dozens of things lying around the house that could be used to quickly kill someone on your list of things that should be disabled?
So, I figure that not having guns all around us is better for our freedom overall.
So, you would have even MORE freedom if knives were taken away, right? And pipes and baseball bats? More people are killed every year with club-like objects (bats, pipes, etc) than with all rifles and shotguns combined (and that INCLUDES suicides using those guns). So surely you'd be in favor of even more extra-big helpings of freedom by taking away those objects, right? Right? No?
Guns are pretty reliable. Your brain isn't.
I think the unreliable brain, here, is in your skull. You're completely mangling any sort of proportion in your observations, citing anecdotes that mysteriously leave out options like owning a simple gun safe (for your dad's war relic ... or explaining why a safe wouldn't stop him from using the gun to kill his family, but a kitchen drawer would stop him from using a knife to murder, as happens thousands of times every year).
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
what is becoming of America. The regular almost daily parade of articles like this, and listening to the likes of Trump makes me imagine what 1930s Germany must have been like.
Profoundly glad as a Canadian that it does not seem to be that highly contagious.
You're (deliberately, of course) confusing "guns" with what I actually said: rifles and shotguns.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I get this comment a lot. For the record, I would like to have the respect of my wife and kid. It's always been inherent in working for causes that I'd hear "I used to think you were cool and you've completely lost my respect". For some reason these people think I would be in some way bothered by their opinion, but it just comes with working for causes. I don't mind breaking some eggs. In fact, I like pissing people off for a good cause.
You harm my freedom by helping to put firearms in the hands of people who use them against innocent civilians. You are confident that you will never be one of those people, but the historical record is that lots of vets have ended up being the shooter in that sort of situation.
I'll keep working on the cause without your support.
Bruce Perens.