And I’ve been consistently saying that they already had plenty of reason to suspect he might be a threat even without knowing that.
True, but in this case it would be neither. It would be removing a potential risk until it could be better assessed.
It would be astoundingly irresponsible if school officials had not asked about a gun in the house. I can only speculate on what the response was, but I note that the parents are lying scum who are presently in jail where they belong.
For this specific student, maybe you don’t worry about “rewarding” his behavior. But in the event (which had to be considered far more likely, in the administrators’ views) that he didn’t shoot up the school, they’d be facing dozens of students, in the following weeks, making similar drawings.
Now, obviously, if you know or strongly suspect that the kid is about to shoot up the school, then you suspend them anyway, and deal with the fallout of that decision. But they didn’t have that level of knowledge.
Dunno how things work in Michigan, but around here, suspension is just the start of it. The kid is then mandatorily placed into a mental health facility for some number of days (3, I think), minimum. Weekends and holidays don’t count.
That is indeed how things should work, and pretty much how they work around here, though the followup to the suspension may depend on specific circumstances. Another thing schools can do here is send a student home if there is reason to believe he’s a threat, and call the police who will visit the home to check things out. The police are not mental health experts but it can be a good first step in identifying a threat. And this is despite the fact that school shootings here are virtually unknown, and access to guns is strictly controlled. The idea is to keep it that way.
Drawing disturbing things and googling “ammunition sales” isn’t enough to trigger that. We don’t know what, if anything, the school knew about beyond that.
It’s entirely possible that the school screwed this up, and badly. But it’s also possible that they were reasonably prudent and their actions were sensible given the evidence. I’m pretty sure our counselor does 3-4 violence risk assessments a year because of reports. Usually the concern is more the risk of suicide than anything. We’ve never, afaik, searched bags for weapons at that point.
They are searched (sorta) when kids come in the building. As well as they can be sorted when you have 2500 kids coming in through 3 doors in a 30 minute period. If this school searches bags at the door, that’s another potential place they screwed up.
A few years ago, one kid here wrote some fanfiction (American Horror Story, I think) and plugged his schoolmates into the story as victims. Unfortunately, he set part of the story at the high school, and that was enough to trigger it. Permanently suspended then taken from his house in handcuffs and locked up in a mental health facility for about ten days. Dunno what happened after that except that he was allowed to graduate with his class.
I bet there is a threshold for that. When they say “if there is a reason”, it can’t be just a hunch, and I bet it’s more than a disturbing picture. A picture is a reason to investigate whether a kid is threat. Part of that investigation would be talking to the parents. If they lied, it would be hard to push that further.
And honestly, a world where all it took was a teacher or principal’s feeling that a kid might be a threat would be deeply problematic.
I will point out that that’s 1) significantly more violent that what we has been described here and 2) you don’t know if that’s all there was to it.
I know that the transcripts included refused to cut his hair and not showing proper respect to administrators as aggravating factors.
I’ve heard stories of kids suspended for making a “finger gun”.
I’m not suggesting it should be based on a “hunch” or “feeling”, but rather, on specific words or actions, even if it’s 99% likely that it wasn’t meant seriously. Much like the consequences of jokes about bombs or hijackings in airports or on airplanes.
I’m not familiar with all the details and it’s been a long time since I had anything to do with schools, but my impression is that the threshold is pretty low – anything that seems even remotely threatening is taken very seriously in just this way. And the police are happy to be involved because they’d much rather deal with a thousand calls that turn out to be nothing than to have to deal with a major senseless tragedy involving the deaths of children.
And I don’t know what rights you think are being violated by continuing to pursue the matter if the parents lied and the school authorities suspect they are lying. I would consider lying parents to be a red flag that one is dealing with dysfunctional parenting and a dysfunctional family and that this could be a really bad situation.
Involuntary commitment for a violent drawing?
In my experience in the schools today, just a picture and looking up ammunition on his phone would not be enough for immediate removal. It would absolutely trigger action: parent interview, psych evaluation. But not “clear and present danger that needs to be removed from campus ASAP”. The investigation might well turn up things that would escalate things.
I’m sure that they didn’t absolutely trust the parents, and the “get him evaluated within 48 hours” suggested they didn’t consider the matter resolved. They just thought they had days, not minutes, to deal with it.
I’ll believe that you folks are serious about wanting to protect the children when you start speaking up about the number of children that are sacrificed to the cult of swimming pools. Will you contact your legislators about stricter pool control?
Thanks for reminding me of that one. I originally had, as the typical defense of the pro-gun sector:
blaming bad parenting (due to liberal-caused deterioration of society and lack of respect for Authority)
blaming mental health issues
blaming insufficiently severe penalties (such as applying the death penalty two or three times)
simply stating that "nothing is going to change the way of life that has always been the Greatness of America™
But yes, that’s another good one: “Many other things kill children, too”.
Yes, but in other countries, guns don’t.
Sorry. No more digression on this from me.
They do in Yemen! Check mate, librul!
Michigan should pass a law mandating registration of handguns.
They should pass a law making it illegal to give a minor a handgun,
They should pass a law making it illegal for a minor to possess a handgun,
They should make it illegal for a minor to carry a handgun, openly or concealed.
They should pass a law making it illegal for a student to possess a handgun on school property.
They should make it illegal to kill someone in cold blood.
There are all sorts of laws they could pass that would prevent something like this from happening.
Right?
They will blame "mental health issues but refuse to fund actually helping anyone.
Going back to the issue of the school’s accountability, public school typically have 1 counselor per every 400-600 students. They do everything from enrolling new students to writing college recommendations to coordinating testing to setting up parent conferences to dealing with CPS and social services . . .the list is insane, and because so much of it has legal implications, everything has to be documented, which is it’s own time burden. And in many schools, they have no one to escalate things to. No school psychologist, or one shared with another 4 or 5 schools, who comes by once a week.
Counselors are often horrible, because it’s not a job a sane person stays in. You can’t be good at it without working 60 hours a week. And it’s incredibly stressful. Suicide, abuse all comes across your desk, not to mention all the less dramatic but also depressing stories.
For 50 years, schools have been subjected to mission creep, being asked to take on the role of community social services hub. But the organization we have to support that role hasn’t adapted. The school counselor role desperately needs to be reinvented from the ground up, probably split into 3 or 4 separate roles, and we need 2-3x as many people in each school over that cluster of responsibilities.
In this specific case, you make a fair point. But there have been many a school shooting perpetrated by lawful gun owners with legally owned weapons.
In this case, you seem to think it beyond the pale that the parents bought a 15 year old a handgun. But in Michigan, as in many places, parents buying a 15 year old a hunting rifle would be normal and, in many circles, wholesome. Maybe even patriotic.
And we’ve heard time and again than an ar-15 is a perfectly normal hunting rifle.
With the difference between this kid shooting up his school with a handgun and an ar-15, it seems like there’s a fine technical line between “egregious parental misstep” and “normal rural gun ownership”. And that line is, what, that the weapon he used wasn’t as powerful as it could have been?
It’s clearly not the gun laws in this specific case that were lacking, as to your point. But what is glaringly obvious here is how fucked our gun culture is, how easy is it for people to fall into this normalization and celebration of guns being literally everywhere to the extent that they don’t see the issue with giving a 15 year old a stupid handgun.
Perhaps holding the adults responsible in this case may persuade adults across the country to respect the law.