This whole thing is starting to get way out of hand. I know a vietnam veteran that pointed out to me that everything is a weapon.
And he meant it very literally, a rock or a club seem obvious candidates, but a pencil, a or a piece of electrical wire are less obvious.
My kid sister knocked a guy out when she was 5 with a battery powered dog (he was harassing me and she figured enough is enough, it seems that when you don't have a bigger brother a little sister will do just fine).
What much more important than to continue to redefine 'weapon' is to educate kids to get all this violence under control.
>> "is to educate kids to get all this violence under control."
I'd replace 'kids' with 'society' there. You can't really go around the world waging war with countries, bombing the hell out of them, and then act surprised when kids copy.
Also specifically America really needs to get rid of so much war/military/gun ownership etc and become a bit more grown up as a nation IMHO. Maybe spend some of those billions on health care?
He's correctly pointed out that zero tolerance is a sort of promiscuous security method, that applies itself to situations where it should not in order, the idea goes, that it applies itself to /all/ situations where it should. It's a policy that says philosophically: we're okay coming down hard on innocent parties, because that means we won't miss any guilty parties.
Fine, but it's really difficult to study. We can make a list of all the kids who were caught up unfairly, but how can we make a list of those who were saved?
I'm not saying I agree with zero tolerance at all -- what I'm saying is that it's going to be really difficult to kill it, because we can't easily "prove" that it's doing more harm than good, and it'd require cajones for any politician to stick his neck out.
Still it's a valid question, even if we can't really answer it: we know that kids get swept up unfairly, but does the policy do more harm than good overall?
It's a complaint about politics, more over it's a complaint about policies that were developed by schools with parental approval to 'protect' their children.
In the UK when the government deployed a nation wide 'zero tolerance' bullying policy, there was widespread condemnation that it would lead to children being wrongfully expelled from school. So the real question is: why did it take so long for Americans to realise 'zero tolerance' policies usually cause more problems than they help to solve?
And he meant it very literally, a rock or a club seem obvious candidates, but a pencil, a or a piece of electrical wire are less obvious.
My kid sister knocked a guy out when she was 5 with a battery powered dog (he was harassing me and she figured enough is enough, it seems that when you don't have a bigger brother a little sister will do just fine).
What much more important than to continue to redefine 'weapon' is to educate kids to get all this violence under control.