Iowa Girl, 11, Suspended for Having Empty Shotgun Shells
Over the past few years, we have reported on numerous, outrageous cases of "zero-tolerance" enforcement defying logic and rational thought. There seems to be no shortage of this kind of miscarriage of not only justice, but of common sense. So here we go again: This week's "Outrage" comes to us from Des Moines, Iowa, where a school recently suspended an 11-year-old girl for bringing a handful of empty shotgun shells to school.
During a family trip to a ranch in South Dakota, the blank rounds were fired as part of a show, and the sixth-grade student gathered the harmless, empty shells as souvenirs. Once again, these were harmless, empty shell casings from fired, blank rounds!
"I didn't think they were going to hurt anyone," the girl correctly said. "I wanted to show them to my science teacher because he's into stuff like this."
The girl didn't have a chance to show her souvenirs to her teacher, but she showed them to some friends, and was subsequently suspended.
Randy Gordon, the school's principal, said the harmless shells were considered ammunition even though they were empty, and were therefore against school policy. The school's policy specifically bans "live ammunition or bullets" but does not address blanks, or empty shells or casings.
The girl's mother must now fight to have the offense removed from her daughter's record.
Classifying an empty shell from a blank as "ammunition" and punishing a young girl for possessing a harmless souvenir. By any standard, that's outrageous.
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I know this is an old thread, but I stumbled across it and would like to share a first person account of an instance that may be worse than this one. In 2005, my kindergartener was sent to the principals' office and I recieved a phone call threatening expulsion if he again brought a one inch plastic sword from an action figure he had.
I know he's doomed to be a serial killer , but at least wait until he commits the crime .
I don't follow anyone, because those that appear to be on the same path usually end up just getting in my way.
Calling "bong- water " an illegal drug!
The problem here is absolutism officially endorsed as "Zero Tolerance". The school administrators are given an "authority figure" in the form of an all-encompassing policy. Humans are naturally inclined to follow an powerful authority "head" if they view the authority as "correct" or "intelligent" and will take the easy road of "following the rules" instead of thinking for themselves and using "reason" to arrive at philosophically sound conclusions.
Excuse me if I can't remember the names for citation but there was an experiment about 50 years ago where they got subjects to shock others based solely on the authority of the examiner. The results were appalling. They found that people would fail to think about their own actions and the consequences toward others as long as they thought that the authority figure was correct.
The correlation here is that since the "zero tolerance" policy was so zero tolerance-y, the administrators inherrently "lazy" brain didn't bother to challenge the rules because the brain inteprets the problem as "already solved", in other words they didn't think of the correct response to the situation because the "correct response" was already given to them by "the policy".
THAT is why this happened, and that is the "scientific" reasoning behind opposing these, quite literally, "brain dead" (or rather, dead brained) style policies. A psychologist will tell you that this result was not "fringe" but "inevitable"
Two things-
Bong water is nasty.
The study was the Milgram experiment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
tired of explaining my stance on these things over and over again, so I'll just say this is stupid and be done with it.
I have to ask though, what made her think empty shells would be remotely interesting to anyone?
Maybe the fact that she's 11! The same reason you probably watched the "Transformers" cartoons or other equally juvenile programming at that age, but wouldn't consider doing it now.
This zero tolerance garbage has gone way too far, just like political correctness. What she had amounted to some plastic casings. They are no more dangerous than plastic film canisters. And not nearly as dangerous as the #2 pencils she is required to have to take the stupid standardized tests that have become the measure of a student's success.