A lot of stuff at airport is security theater that doesn’t make us safer. Just because unnecessary and unhelpful things are done at the airport, doesn’t mean we need to freak out at every other place as well.
Right, it doesn’t look like a normal clock from the shelf. If I saw it abandoned on a table in the cafeteria, I’m not sure I’d know what it was. I’d probably assume it was an electronic experiment from a class that was forgotten, but I could understand someone freaking out.
But this wasn’t abandoned somewhere, or taped under something, or left in an abandoned slightly open backpack. He wasn’t trying to freak out people by saying it was a bomb, or throwing it back and forth to friends pretending it was a bomb. If it had been any of those cases, I could understand freaking out, and the kid getting in trouble. But it wasn’t any of those cases.
This isn’t like a kid bringing a loaded gun to school to impress his friends or freak out people. This is like a kid hand carving a small statue of a tree, and the kid brings it to school to show off to his friends and art teacher about how good he’s gotten at carving, but it looks vaguely gun-shaped, and a teacher thinks it could be mistaken for a gun, and the kid getting in trouble for threatening people with a gun. Maybe we don’t have the full story, but it’s really hard for me to imagine context that would make the school’s actions make sense.
i read a quote from his father that something to the point of him (the son) wanting to make himself known to the world. He certainly did. Maybe it was a really good publicity stunt.
As I said elsewhere, if he can manipulate people with this much precision and ingenuity, he’s a master strategist the likes of which the world hasn’t seen in centuries. I mean, as a publicity stunt, it relied on an unbroken series of unjustified freak-outs.
Far likelier, of course, is that racists and Islamophobes got caught with their bigotries showing, and that other folks who don’t want to admit that racism and Islamophobia are prevalent are searching for an alternative narrative in which the gawky nerdy teenager is somehow the Macchiavellian bad guy here.
Well, no, but if you open the bag, pick it up, look at it, and say “oh my god I just picked up a bomb and I’m holding it right now, I need to carry it through the crowd to the police”? Be prepared for a little well-deserved ridicule.
Generally speaking, a bomb needs an explosive. Without explosives, a bomb isn’t much good. Explosives don’t look like circuit boards - they look like pipes, or sticks of dynamite, or a container of some sort.
OK, he brought it to school in a container. Now it wasn’t your average bomb making container mind you, like the cooking utensil used in the Boston Marathon. Or the shoe bomb used on an airliner. How about the printer bomb plot?
The thing about bombs is that there isn’t a way to identify them. A homemade anything with a timer and wires sticking out of it falls under the “if you see something suspicious say something” scenario that could save many lives.
The slogan isn’t “if you see something suspicious say something unless it’s politically incorrect to do so”.
We’d be having the same conversation if a ME kid left his backpack full of potato chips on a sidewalk and was arrested.
Oh give it a rest. They brought the device to the principal’s office and sat with it until the police arrived, who then transported it in their car to the police station. Nobody called the bomb squad, evacuated the school, destroyed the package, or were called away on urgent business somewhere with fewer bombs. Everyone just sort of sat around and berated the brown kid with a bog-standard electronics project.
Yes. And in those cases, the errors were twofold:
-A stupid rule was set up to penalize any deliberate depiction of a weapon; and
-Administrators foolishly followed the stupid rule.
THIS CASE IS DIFFERENT. Ahmed was not deliberately depicting a weapon. And nobody thought he was (at least, not by the time the handcuffs came out). And he hadn’t broken any rules.
