Apparently, the cops do have better things to do. so many clues here show that it was just a story written by the student.
Thank goodness for the “zero tolerance’ gun policy of Summerville High School in North Carolina. They narrowly averted a potential school shooting by having a student arrested for writing about killing a pet dinosaur with a gun in a class assignment.
NBC 12 reports that 16-year old Alex Stone was arrested yesterday and had his locker and backpacked searched, all because of a piece of fiction he wrote in school.
Students were asked to write a Facebook-like status including biographical lines about themselves.
“I killed my neighbor’s pet dinosaur, and, then, in the next status I said I bought the gun to take care of the business,” Stone said.
The teacher saw the word “gun” and the line “take care of business” and flipped out notifying school administrators. Stone was asked about what he wrote to which he replied it was a joke. Not laughing, the school contacted police and the teenager was arrested.
In this day of anti-gun hysteria it’s not surprising that the school would totally overact about this, but doesn’t it seem odd that police would actually arrest a kid for something this petty? Is it against the law to write about killing dinosaurs? Sure, I could see the EPA coming down on the kid if he was threatening an animal on the endangered species list, but dinosaurs are extinct.
Apparently, the cops had to stretch the law to justify the arrest:
Summerville police officials say Stone was disruptive and was told that he was being detained for disturbing schools. Stone was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.
And then we get this hilarious account of the actual arrest:
Summerville police officials say Stone’s bookbag and locker were searched on Tuesday, and a gun was not found.
Was there really an expectation of finding a firearm because the kid wrote about killing a pet dinosaur?
Stone has said that teachers and cops have taken his writing completely out of context, but his mother pointed out the lunacy of this incident best by saying, “I could understand if they made him re-write it because he did have “gun” in it. But a pet dinosaur? I mean first of all, we don’t have dinosaurs anymore. Second of all, he’s not even old enough to buy a gun.”
Stone also makes an astute observation by noting that nothing in his writing could be considered a threat to an actual person.
Just when you think our educational system can get any stupider, something like this pops up. This teenager not only has a black mark on his permanent record, but also a police record for essentially writing the word “gun.” I fail to see how purging a common word from the dictionary is going to make our students safer.
The school and police didn’t stop an eminent threat. They didn’t thwart a deadly plot. All they did was arrest and suspend a kid for completing a class assignment.
