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Photo: Bridget Coila/Creative Commons
The Daily Signal
Police Arrest
Student for Shooting a Fictional Dinosaur
Jordan Richardson
August 22, 2014
Dinosaurs may be extinct, but absurdity in public schools isn’t.
Alex Stone is a 16 year-old student in Summerville High School in South
Carolina. On the first day of class, his teacher asked the students to
write a few sentences about themselves and then follow up with a
statement in the form of a Facebook status. Alex decided to use this
opportunity to make a joke, and wrote “I killed my neighbor’s pet
dinosaur.” For the status part, he said he wrote: “I bought the gun to
take care of the business.”
The teacher, seeing the words “gun” and “take care of business”
immediately notified the police to investigate the death of the
fictional dinosaur and see if the teen boy had indeed carried a weapon
into school.
The police searched Alex’s locker and belongings, but did not discover
any evidence that he brought a weapon into school. Apparently, the
high-powered weapons needed to kill imaginary dinosaurs do not easily
fit in school lockers.
Alex’s mother, Karen Gray, pointed out the irrationality of the
incident: “I mean first of all we don’t have dinosaurs anymore. Second
of all, he’s not even old enough to buy a gun.”
The Summerville police arrested him anyway and justified it by saying
that he acted “irate” when they confronted him about the comment he
wrote. According to Capt. Jon Rogers of the Summerville police, “[t]he
charges do not stem from anything involving a dinosaur or writing
assignment, but the student’s conduct.” Interesting. The police have
added a First Amendment violation to whatever claims Alex already had.
As a result of the arrest, Alex was suspended from school for the rest
of week.
David Aylor, the attorney representing Alex, argues the arrest was
“completely absurd,” and is “perfect example of ‘political correctness’
that has exceeded the boundaries of common sense.” Alex and his
attorney are seeking to overturn the suspension and seek all
appropriate legal remedies as a result of this arrest.
This is not the first time a school has suspended a student for playing
with pretend weapons.
Nathan Entingh, a ten-year-old boy from Columbus, Ohio, was suspended
for three days for pointing his fingers in the shape of a gun. In
Baltimore, Md., Josh Welch, a seven year-old student, was suspended for
two days after nibbling his strawberry-filled pastry into a gun-like
shape, then saying “bang, bang.”
These types of stories make for sensational headlines but there is a
very real problem underlying the heavy-handed approach to zero
tolerance in schools. Time and again, the response to student
“misbehavior” in class has been to involve the police and make arrests,
no matter how absurd the charges are. Kids misbehave, especially
teenagers, but a student who wrote about killing a fictional creature
should not have a criminal record because of it.
The current charges against Alex Stone highlight the reflexive response
to treat every incident in school as a criminal behavior. More
information may come to light about the circumstances regarding Alex’s
arrest, but the police should not have arrested him simply for being
irate that a police officer was giving him a hard time about a creative
writing assignment. Unless his words and conduct amounted to a true
threat, this incident could have been handled by contacting Alex’s
parents without unnecessarily involving the police. And it should have.
For his part, Alex has reflected on what happened during the first day
of school, stating, “I regret it because they put it on my record, but
I don’t see the harm in it. I think there might have been a better way
of putting it, but I think me writing like that, it shouldn’t matter
unless I put it out towards a person.”
Maybe next time the kids in Summerville High School should stick to
writing about Barney the Dinosaur instead of Jurassic Park. Anything
less is apparently probable cause for arrest.
Read this and other articles with links at The Daily Signal
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