Kids, weapons, school, crazy art

In My Humble Opinion
1

My very sweet, smart-as-hell, all-around-nice-kid 12-y-o showed me some drawings he’d done on a sheet of loose leaf notebook paper. My first reaction was, “Whoa! He is really learning something from the art class he’s taking this semester!” (His drawing skills, to date, have been really poor – poor enough to affect his grade on geography assignments, etc.)

My son also LOVES anime, which led to my second reaction (“Oh, shit!”), because all of these lovely drawing were of weapons. There was a part of a weapon he had labeled “bomb.”

What I told my son was, “We live in strange times. I just want to caution you against drawing these kind of things at school. Draw them at home all you want. But someone at school might look at these and assume you are a ready to go off the deep end.”

My husband was absolutely furious. “There shouldn’t be any concern AT ALL about these drawings! Why, when I was in high school…” My husband graduated from high school in 1963. He carried a pocket knife to school every day. I agree that there SHOULDN’T be any concern about the drawings. But I think it’s somewhere between naive and reckless to adopt a posture of righteous indignation.

What’s your opinion? Was I out of line to tell my son keep his weapon drawings at home?

2

For what it’s worth, I’d have said the same thing. For the record, I don’t have kids and I am a little paranoid about public school overreactions, having seen the effects of “zero-tolerance” when my cutsie-pie do-gooder cheerleader of a sister was suddenly and absurdly the target of such a policy.

3

No. If you wish to ensure that your child will continue to attend that school, make sure he has nothing that resembles a weapon, not even a drawing. Try to make sure that the child never says anything provocative. In fact, tell him/her to sit down, shut up, and do as they are told at all costs. That’s the only way to be sure.

For the record, I had the same reaction as your husband. But these are weird times. You can’t even fight back if you’re getting beat down, and even then you might get suspended for being in a fight, even if you were the punching bag. We’re teaching kids to be helpless, and for some reason everybody’s OK with that. But I digress.

4

We have many conversations with my son about the imagery in his art - which often features guns, knives, people burning at the stake, sometimes tentacled creatures emerging from the toilet to grab screaming people (I SWEAR, we have never read him Lovecraft). He has a lovely floorplan for the house he intends to build when he grows up, complete with a “Torture Room” and sharks in the moat. His spelling tests have a cartoon of a girl and boy on them, when they come home they have horns, tails and pitchforks. I know the teachers have seen it - as as of yet (he’s a nine year old third grader) they seem to be tolerant of it. But we tell him the same thing “it probably isn’t a good idea to draw people shooting people at school.” We also tell them that at school they can’t yell “Holy Crap” no matter how funny their parents think it is (we HAVE let them watch too much Strongbad).

5

Preach it.

6

My son has already had that very experience, I’m sad to say. He wasn’t suspended, but he came away from a session with the guidance counselor feeling partially responsible for having been beaten up by some kids who didn’t like one of his friends.

I disabused him of that notion, to put it mildly.

7

I think you were right to at least broach the topic with your son – perhaps you could have asked him why he thought other people might have a problem with the drawings.

In high school, I wrote several stories for class that had the narrator climbing atop a school and picking off people with a rifle (I think I’d recently read about the U of Texas shootings). I still marvel over how no one batted an eyelid over those. They must have hated the school as much as I did.

8

In a word, yes. For two totally opposite reasons.

  1. You have guaranteed that one day down the line he will bring these to school just because you think it’s not a good idea. The fact that he knows he’ll have his father’s backing completely seals it.

and conversely…

  1. His father is right. It’s ridiculous that a cartoon (anime-styled) picture of a bomb would do more than evoke a few chuckles of “those kids and their anime.” School administrators may be complete idiots when it comes to everything involving violence in schools, but the only way a kid can be caught with drawings like this is if he gives them some other reason to look through his belongings.

A buddy of mine went through high school with enough porn in his backpack to make Hugh Hefner blush. And he was never once even suspected of anything because he was a good kid who no one had any problems with.

9

Unless he lives under a rock, he’s well aware of the over-reactive nature of the modern educational system in which five year-old kids who hug other five year-old kids are guilty of sexual harassment and the drawing of a soldier with a rifle by elementary school students results in expulsion.

He would have to have his head shoved very, very far up his ass to not think that other people, particularly at his school, would have a problem with those drawings. I’d say it’s a sign of his being well in touch with the world that he knows the kind of flying off the handle that a drawing of an anime character with a weapon would cause. He seems to have quite a firm grip on reality.

Also, I agree with Doors.

10

Shoe on the other foot, if your child came home and told you a kid at school was drawing weapons and such all the time, would you be worried for your child’s safety or would you shrug it off?

I don’t think I’ve ever taught in a school where there was a knee-jerk reaction to these things, but I don’t remember the issue arising often. Of course people will be concerned. My guess is they would bring the kid in for a talk, determine whether he had any plans etc., and go from there.

11

Because random events are exactly that, random, how would it behoove me to be concerned about something like that? I can’t live my life in fear of the unknown. So no, it wouldn’t concern me. If someone snaps and kills my son, it would end my world. There is no question in my mind about that. Nevertheless, how can someone predict that something as mundane as a drawing, something that I did when I was in school, would result in the death of my child?

I can’t be scared about that. I have to trust that the people that I have entrusted to take care of my son will do exactly that.

That said, I do think that they do go overboard. I admit that when I was in high school I was prone to emotional swings. How many times did I say to myself “God, would I love to tear that kid limb from limb”? Countless times. But I didn’t. Part of the reason why is because I was able to channel that rage into something else. Dodgeball, for instance. I used to aim at the heads of my persecutors. I did. When I popped them, it felt good. But then it was over. I used to play football during gym class. It was touch-in-name-only, we used to lay people out. It felt good. And so the rage passed.

Nowadays, there is no such outlet. What was once relatively harmless becomes violent, precisely because there is no outlet. Schools forbid so much that it builds up, and people go plain loco.

I cannot, and I will not, let that concern rule my life. I am teaching my son the skills he needs to survive. If he starts a fight, well, he’s in deep trouble with me. But if he’s fighting back and he gets suspended, the only thing that I will ask him is if he won. If he didn’t, he’ll learn how. But my son is not going to be a defenseless victim. I can go about my life knowing that whatever happens, Aaron will do the right thing and he will not be a victim. He will go down swinging if needs be, just like I did when I was in school.

If someone wants to draw a gun, let them. If someone brings a gun to school, that’s a different matter. Let’s have our school administrators keep their eye on what is important, instead of the petty stuff.

My apologies for the long post. I just needed to get that off my chest.

12

:dubious:

13

Would you prefer that I lied? Confession is good for the soul. I’m 32 years old now, that is a long time ago. You can raise your eyebrow all you want to, but it was, and continues to be, a part of who I am, and knowing that has made me a better person.

14

I used to get told things like that when I was a kid (of the form “we have no problem with this, but other people probably do; it’s unfair, and we think so too, but when you’re under their authority it would be prudent to go along with it”) and I by and large accepted this, understood the distinction, and grew up relatively undamaged.

15

I’m just surprised at people who are using the “when I was in high school” thing as an example. Unless you RECENTLY graduated, the world is a different place now.

You might remind your husband that he graduated 45 years ago. Comparing his experience with your son’s seems pretty silly.

It’s unfortunate that a drawing like that even makes us think twice, but there you have it. The majority of kids who draw such things wouldn’t be violent toward their classmates, but in many school shootings there were written “clues” that many parents felt the schools should have recognized. It hardly seems fair to blame them for trying to err on the side of caution when so much is at stake.

I don’t think you were wrong to suggest that to your son, as long as it sparked a discussion with him about the subject . That way you could both discuss why there could be so many interpretations.

16

I’d prefer that people find outlets for anger that don’t involve hurting others. That’s what I’d prefer.

17

Proof that the world is getting strange- I agree completely with Airman Doors.

Back in school, WAY after the 1960s, my classmates and I drew all manner of disasters. Machine guns, bomber jets, ripped-up bodies. The worse the better. We even showed our finest works to our teachers, who politely pretended we had any drawing skills.

In HS, I always had a pocket knife, and used it freely. It’s a TOOL, fer cryin’ out loud! Carried it on planes too.

Fisticuffs weren’t super-common, but the cheering audience would break them up before anything too drastic happened. If a trip to the school nurse was required, the offending party would be suspended for a week.

Recently, a kid in a neighboring district brought a CO2 pistol to school to show his friends. Now I agree, that is too much, and needs some serious action. But they kicked him out of school for two years. It’ll be 8th grade before he sees his chums again. After two years in a “reform school” setting, being treated like a monster. Sounds like a nice method for setting a career criminal on his way.

Word on not obsessing about randomness, Doors. Your Aaron is a lucky boy.

18

Well, duh! No one had any problems with him because he probably spent most of the day in a boys room stall!

19

Me too. But what you don’t realize is that what I did was a way of getting even in a moderately passive way. In retrospect, it was absolutely petty. I acknowledge that. I cannot and will not deny that. But I didn’t shoot up a school like Eric Harris and Dylan Kliebold. That thought never entered my mind. Why? Because I had an outlet.

The flip side was that I got hit just as hard. In fact, one guy broke my collarbone playing football, intentionally. Battles were fought on the field, not with guns in the library. The guy who did it, we had a fight later, I got two Saturday detentions for it. But I earned his respect because I didn’t back down. That was how it was done back then, not so long ago.

Nowadays, what is there? Talk to the principal? That’s no solution.

20

But it’s not. At least not really. There is a small percentage of insane teachers/adminstrators who get really worried about even the smallest things like drawings of a gun.

But there are also plenty of them who realize this is not the boogeyman the “world” has made it out to be. As someone else in the thread said, do you know how common it is for boys to be drawing things like these? If kids were commonly being thrown out of school for drawing weapons or corpses or death you’d hear about these expulsions and suspensions twice a day every day.