Kid suspended from school for sketching gun

[Lasse]

MESA, Arizona — Officials at an Arizona school suspended a 13-year-old boy for sketching what looked like a gun, saying the action posed a threat to his classmates.

The boy's parents said the drawing was a harmless doodle and school officials overreacted.

"The school made him feel like he committed a crime. They are doing more damage than good," said the boy's mother, Paula Mosteller.

The drawing did not show blood, bullets, injuries or target any human, the parents said. And the East Valley Tribune reported that the boy said he did not intend for the picture to be a threat.

Administrators of Payne Junior High in nearby Chandler suspended the boy on Monday for five days but later reduced it to three days.

The boy's father, Ben Mosteller, said that when he went to the school to discuss his son's punishment, school officials mentioned the seriousness of the issue and talked about the 1999 massacre at Colorado's Columbine High School, where two teenagers shot and killed 12 students, a teacher and themselves. Mosteller said he was offended by the reference.

Chandler district spokesman Terry Locke said the crude sketch was "absolutely considered a threat," and that threatening words or pictures are punishable.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,294145,00.html

I'm not even going to comment on this. I don't care if it's fox news, I saw it on another forum and can't be arsed finding it elsewhere.

[Puke]

I wonder if it would be a threat if the kid doodled a cannon or a bow and arrow?

[Bald Eagle]

... or a Public School Teacher pink slip.

[Puke]

... or a Public School Teacher pink slip.

Pretty sad stuff.

[kola]

I bet it would have been ok if he drew a US soldier holding an american flag in one hand and a gun in the other while two iraqis lie next to him with blood pouring from their skulls. He would have gotten an A.

Kola

[CNHT]

Welcome to your friendly United Nations controlled public schools.

[error]

The HTML option is turned off here. Maybe someone could turn it back on?

[CNHT]

You mean you can't see the photo?

Here is the link..

http://www.iansa.org/images/front-page/un-gun-sculpture-IANSA.jpg

[Spencer]

Don't they know how dangerous it is to fire a gun that's been vandalized like that?  It'll just blow-up in their faces.

[Recumbent ReCycler]

Welcome to your friendly United Nations controlled public schools.

Anyone know what that twisted revolver statue is made of?  I think it would be cool if someone were to cut the barrel behind the knot to make it look like a snubbie.

[J’raxis 270145]

It's plain old bronze.

http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2006/note6019.doc.htm

[Fragilityh14]

I remember in school it was always this huge thing in art where everyone wanted to draw bloods and guns, and teachers often wouldn't let us. However, it was never a matter of suspending people for it.

In highschool I went to an alt-school and there was someone who was there for telling a friend about a dream he had where someone brought a gun to school and him and the friend he was telling this to neutralized said person with ninja moves or something fucking ridiculous like that.

while the parents of kids my age used to have rifles mounted in their trucks in the school parking lot or check them in with the principal at the beggining of the day if they went hunting in the morning (I think the thing was you were supposed to give them to whomever to keep in a safe during the day then could get the gun back at the end of the day).

[CNHT]

My husband brought his rifle to school all the time...Don't know where he kept it...but it was for the rifle club after school.

[lildog]

If I were in school today and did the same things I did back in school I'm convinced I'd be locked up as having mental issues.

I still have one of my high school projects.  For art class we had to write a short story with narrations then bind it as a hard covered book.  I wrote "The Killer Ninja".  It was a story about a Rock Star who after his shows would turn into a killer ninja and go around chopping people up.  I had some pictures in there of people being cut in two with swords, throwing stars etc.  Then at the end he was gunned down by the hero.

I also did a lot of drawings of Freddy Kruger and Jason.

But then again, all the bad guys in my stories used swords or knives so maybe I would have been ok since it wasn't a gun (with the exception being the hero who took out the ninja).