Ravenwood - 02/11/05 06:45 AM
Wendy McElroy wants to know how we got to the point where children are routinely handcuffed and charged with felonies over trivial matters like butter knives and crayon drawings.
Two boys, aged 9 and 10, were charged with second-degree felonies and taken away in handcuffs by the police because they drew stick figures depicting violence against a third student.Ms. McElroy notes that these are not aberrations and are happening with an increasing frequency. What's more, officials and police are defending their slapping the cuffs on 8 and 9 year old children.There was no act of violence, no weaponry. According to news reports, the arrested children had no prior history of threatening the student depicted in the drawing. The parents were not advised or consulted. The school's immediate response was to call the police and level charges "of making a written threat to kill or harm another person." [...]
Gabrielle was suspended from school due to a butter knife packed in her lunch. Because of braces, Gabrielle needed the knife- a legal item - to cut an apple. No violence nor threat occurred.
[Her father Derek Hoggett] explained, "She was given the harshest punishment for a first offense even though school officials admitted in a letter ... that she was a student with exemplary behavior and high academic standing."
Gabrielle's school district has reportedly investigated "2,149 criminal incidents, issued 779 citations and made 108 arrests" in the past several months.
The catalyst for much of this nonsense was the Columbine shootings in 1999, and as McElroy points out, their fear of a repeat shooting is reasonable. But their response to that fear is not. Stretching the definition of 'weapon' to inlude plastic knives and crayon drawings is not going to prevent another shooting.
Category: Fall of Western Civilization
Comments (3) top link me
Columbine has helped to prop-up as well as increase the number and idiocy level of such zero-t policies (t standing for thought, not tolerance). The seeds that have produced this crop of utterly inflexible edicts were planted long ago.
Back in the 1980's, a friend from my school years became a teacher in an affluent public school system. Even at that time, there were policies being put into place "to remove any discussion, discretion or appeal" regarding rules of conduct on school property. After these policies were implemented, he (my friend) observed, over time, that the level of discussion on many topics degraded to a thoughtless regurgitation of dogma. He called it "systematic reprogramming of thinking individuals into a collective, Pavlovian mass of compliant followers."
I have never heard it put in a more sobering light than that.
Posted by: Steve Scudder at February 11, 2005 7:58 AMIt's safer to bust children than real criminals. Which laws would you expect law enforcement employees to enforce? The easiest and the highest profile, of course.
Posted by: Brian J. at February 11, 2005 9:06 AMThe obvious result of this, and justly so, will be the contempt of the law by the children handcuff and the children who observe it when nothing happens to them. Children, and everyone remembers from their own childhood, are smarther than portrayed and they know what a joke it is.
The result will be more crime.
The other factor about Columbine is not getting reported, and it is obviously why.
The police were notified about the danger of Harris and Kelbot(?) well before they murdered, twice but THE POLICE DID ABSOLUTELY NOTHING both times.
Harris and Kelbot(?) were murderers who deserve no sympathy and who fortunately committed suicide and saved the county a lot of money, nevertheless, it was also a glaring failure on the part of government who, on all levels, city, county, state and federal, promise to make people safer if the people give up more of the money and freedom.
What they promise is impossible, but the media won't point that out for the obvious reason is that they believe the more government the better because the "average American" is an idiot.
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