CDR: Zero Tolerance Gun Grabbing Glee! (and where is the ACLU?)

[Anonymous]

[the following snipped from the current Liberator Online www.self-gov.org]

Paper Guns Cause Real Trouble

While waiting for school buses, a friend taught Virginia seventh grader
Bruce Cruz how to make a "gun" out of paper.

It's easy -- the kind of school-room origami that kids have done for ages.
You just fold two pieces of paper about six times. The "gun" can just as
easily be shaped like a boat or a plane.

At home, Bruce showed a family member his new trick, making one "gun" out
of white school notebook paper. He tossed both into his backpack and
forgot about them.

In school, the two "guns" fell out of his backpack while Bruce was taking
out a book. A teacher seized them.
 
The teacher said nothing. But in the second period, a security guard
removed Bruce from class and marched him to the principal's office.

School policy prohibits students from possessing "an instrument or device
that resembles or looks like a pistol, revolver or any type of weapon..."

Apparently, that's true even if the object in question is made out of
*paper.*

Bruce was suspended for 10 days. After protest from Bruce's mother, the
suspension was dropped to "only" two days. His mom is trying to get the
suspension cleared from his permanent record -- or if that's not possible,
to at least have the record include a precise description of the kind of
"gun" involved.

What's next -- kids expelled for carrying *pictures* of guns?

	(Source: Newport Daily Press /Sierra Times / November 11, 2000)

---

Student Expelled for Casting Spell

Still more evidence -- as if it were needed -- that the government school
system is getting ever loonier:

The ACLU is defending 15-year-old Broken Arrow, Oklahoma high school
student Brandi Blackbear. Blackbear says she was suspended for 15 days
last December by school officials who accused her of being a witch and
casting a magic spell that caused a teacher to become ill.

According to the ACLU, Blackbear was called to the principal's office
after the teacher became sick and had to be hospitalized. Blackbear, then
a ninth-grader, was questioned about her interest in Wicca, a pagan
religion. Officials had learned she had checked out a book from the school
library that contained a section on Wicca.

According to the lawsuit, after questioning her, officials told Blackbear
"that she was an immediate threat to the school" and suspended her for "a
disruption of the education process."

Blackbear -- who says she's not a witch and does not practice the Wicca
religion -- also says school officials told her that a five-pointed star
with a circle she had drawn on her hand was an occult symbol and that she
couldn't display it. Thus the ACLU lawsuit also accuses school officials
of trying to suppress expression of, or interest in, the Wicca religion.
 
The ACLU also argues the school violated the girl's civil rights by
seizing her personal notebooks containing horror stories she had written.
All in all, the lawsuit claims violations of the First, Fourth, Fifth,
Ninth and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution as well as breaches of
the Civil Rights Act.

"I, for one, would like to see the so-called evidence this school has that
a 15-year-old girl made a grown man sick by casting a magic spell," said
Joann Bell, executive director of the ACLU's Oklahoma chapter. She added
that Blackbear had been tormented by the charges and resulting publicity.

An attorney for the school district said it would "defend itself
vigorously."

	(Sources: Associated Press story, October 21, 2000)

   * * *

A Despotism Over Mind and Body...

 "A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be
  exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that
  which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a
  monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in
  proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism
  over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body."

   -- John Stuart Mill, 1859