Drawings of Weapons Led To New Jersey Student's Arrest 630
First time accepted submitter gannebraemorr writes with this news, snipped from a CBS News report out of New Jersey:"'The Superintendent of the Greater Egg Harbor Regional High School District said around 2 pm Tuesday, a 16 year old student demonstrated behavior that caused concern. A teacher noticed drawings of what appeared to be weapons in his notebook. School officials made the decision to contact authorities. Police removed the 16-year-old boy from Cedar Creek High School in Galloway Township Tuesday afternoon after school officials became concerned about his behavior. The student was taken to the Galloway Township Police Department. Police then searched the boy's home on the 300 block of East Spencer Lane and found several electronic parts and several types of chemicals that when mixed together, could cause an explosion, police say. The unidentified teen was charged with possession of a weapon an [sic] explosive device and the juvenile was placed in Harbor Fields.' If 'chemicals that when mixed together, could cause an explosion' is a crime, I'm pretty sure everyone's cleaning cabinets are evidence just waiting to be found. Bottle of Coke and Mentos... BRB, someone knocking at the door."
New Idea for a Slashdot Poll (Score:5, Interesting)
In which of the following ways would you have been arrested if your child-self had gone to school today:
1) possession of a chemistry set;
2) possession of a pocket knife;
3) terroristic threatening ("Man, I'm gonna kill you at Mortal Kombat tonight.");
4) all of the above
Arrested for drawings and household chemicals? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure glad they weren't this paranoid when I was a kid. I remember sketching various nuclear weapon designs and discussing them with my physics teacher after class. I suppose it was OK because I didn't have a supply of fissionable material.
Phew... (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine what they'd have found in my room back in the '80s... Chemicals of all sorts, the more boom the more fun after all... electronic components disassembled from old broken unrepairable stuff and sorted into categories, ready to be assembled in new things. This including 'scary' stuff like CTV line transformers etc. Half-repaired electronics. A charged tractor battery under the bed with some carbon rods (from old batteries) to be used in carbon arc light experiments. A functional pulse jet engine, scarily-looking, cobbled together with moped parts to be auto-starting. An air gun. An electric guitar made from more moped parts and some pay phone speakers for pick-ups. Need I go on?
And to think that I've never even had so much as a speeding ticket...
Of course I lived in the Netherlands, and it was 30 years ago...
Re:They better arrest me then. (Score:3, Interesting)
When I was 8 I was planning tunnel boring machines to covertly plant nuclear bombs under cities.
So now kids can't even draw a comic with a weapon in it. No wonder the nut jobs use well known gun free locations as their killing grounds.
Loved a recent interview with a Texas school principal where all the school staff that qualified were carrying concealed, had electronic locks on the doors, and plenty of security cameras. Even bullying was down.
Re:I have got fuel and amonium nitrate (Score:3, Interesting)
*Sounds* like what happened is that the police realized that they just raided the home of an innocent kid based on nothing much. That makes the police be/look bad. In those situations the police are very motivated to find something, anything, that will justify their actions. They don't want headlines like "Minor traumatized at police station. 10-man police raid trample kid's home with assault rifles, tear off head of long-loved teddy bear. Find nothing", even if that's exactly what happened. The police certainly don't want to be sued for acting wrongly - even if they did act wrongly.
To avoid bad publicity and lawsuits, a broken Wii controller and a bottle of shampoo next to a tube of toothpaste becomes "electronic parts" and "potentially explosive chemicals" - I'm sure if you manage to separate the components of shampoo and toothpaste or really most any two modern products with lots of ingredients there's SOME way to make some kind of an explosion. The really sad part of such cases is that on top of the uncalled-for assault on the poor person being victimized by the police, that person now ALSO has to deal with spurious charges. The costs of that can be heavy. It is expensive to defend yourself in court and the police may have actually managed to hit you with some legally-valid offense out of the 20 things they charged you with - like resisting arrest because you walked into one policeman when the other one told you to step back.
Or they could actually be on to something, but the way the story describes it it sounds like a case of the common cop: "Authorities say that students and teachers at the school were never in any danger nor were any threats made." It sounds like the student being investigated was and still is in danger. I bet he won't be drawing anything for a while.
Re:No harm done (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:DRAWINGS ARE NOT 'BEHAVIOR'. PERIOD. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm 62, and the direction this country is going makes me absolutely sick to my stomach, but if you were to leave for another country, where would it be? As bad as America is getting, its still FAR better than 99.99% of the rest of the world. Take Australia for example.. I visited there twice back in the 70s, once on US Army RnR from Vietnam and once on temporary duty with my Army unit, for a total of just over 2 weeks. I was so taken with the people, the VAST open spaces, and the opportunity, I came very close to emigrating there. When I was there I read the papers (Sydney) and saw virtually no violent crime during both visits. But now, I read that violent crime is WAY up, since the Australian people have, essentially, been disarmed, like Britain. Not to mention, all of the Orwellian stuff that the current Australian (and UK) governments are constantly trying to shove down the peoples throat... TL;DR; I have NO idea where you could go that's any better than the USA..
Re:No harm done (Score:5, Interesting)
I think we had better close down all the schools in farming districts where people have large amounts of potassium chlorate and also have sugar in their kitchen...
Re:No harm done (Score:4, Interesting)
These worries come in waves. A school I went to in the 1970s had a relatively large stock of sodium and the word came down from on high that it had to be disposed of due to potential danger. The principal crumbled it up and poured it all over an anthill full of fairly nasty biting ants, then the next day after they had dragged it underground he turned on the sprinkler. It was interesting to watch even from a long distance, even though it didn't all go up at once. Someone doing that today would probably lose their job even if all precautions were taken (the principal not only knew a bit of chemistry but had spent some time in the military and had respect for things that go bang).