By Mark Chesnut
When a 13-year-old Missouri boy working on a home art project arranged soda cans into what resembled a gun, his mother was likely proud of his creativity. But when the boy posted a picture of the project on social media, things went downhill quickly.
To create the art, the boy glued Dr. Pepper cans end to end. He glued one on top to resemble a scope, and two on the bottom—one where the handguard would be, the other where a magazine would hang down. The Snapchat post was made outside of school hours, off school grounds and did not mention any school or students.
Some parents who saw the post, however, couldn’t leave well enough alone. They reported the post to the officials with the Mountain View-Birch Tree R-III School District, which immediately suspended the young artist for three days and marked the boy’s record with a “cyberbullying” offense, even though the superintendent said school officials had found “no credible evidence of any danger.”
Shortly afterward, the boy’s mother filed a lawsuit, led by Goldwater Institute attorneys, against the school district, claiming the school had violated the boy’s (called “W.G.” in the lawsuit) First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
“W.G. was not holding the can art in his arms nor was he displaying it in any manner that suggested the can art could potentially be used to endanger any person, and the photo contained no threatening language or anything that would suggest harm to anyone or anything,” the lawsuit stated. “Although the School District quickly became aware that the Plaintiff had not threatened anyone, the School District decided that they must punish W.G.
“W.G. brings this lawsuit to ensure that schools may not punish a student for sharing non-threatening creative expression with other students outside of school hours, even if others mistakenly believed that the student’s creative expression could be construed as a threat.”
As the lawsuit explained, the U.S. Supreme Court has set a standard on First Amendment speech that was not followed in the case of the soda can artwork and subsequent social media posting.
“The U.S. Supreme Court has recently made clear that the First Amendment bans the government from punishing speakers based on an objective standard that considers only how observers might construe something a speaker said,” the lawsuit stated. “Instead, the Supreme Court concluded that at a bare minimum the First Amendment imposes a ‘recklessness’ requirement under which the government must prove that a speaker made ‘a deliberate decision to endanger another;’ in other words, the applicable standard requires the government to prove that ‘a speaker is aware that others could regard his statements as threatening violence and delivers them anyway.’”
Ultimately, the lawsuit asked the court to find the suspension unconstitutional, bar the school from taking further action against the boy over the incident, award the plaintiff attorney fees and award him “reasonable fees and expenses.”
As for the school district, officials there took the easy way out when requested to talk about the matter.
“The School District is aware of the lawsuit that was recently filed,” Superintendent Lana Tharp said in a released statement. “Unfortunately, because the lawsuit involves a student, we are significantly limited in what we are legally permitted to share publicly. For now, we can only say that we have legal counsel, who will present our side of the story and defend against these allegations.”
Poor “W.G.” – if only he had used the pop cans to assemble a stick figure with interchangeable and rearrangeable sex organs, the school would have found a way to award his creativity with an art scholarship and early admission to MSU as a reward.
Alas, he was instead caught coloring outside of the lines, and swiftly dealt with by Official Policy.
Poor “W.G.”
“Superintendent Lana Tharp”. Prepare to lose this lawsuit.
yup. Can’t believe they went this far. This is no different that the pop tart gun. No one can reasonably interpret this as an expression of an intent to harm, any more than the object created could cause harm. This is merely an attempt to erase any expression of “gun culture.” If he had played cops and robbers and made submachineguns from legos and said “brrrrrt” , as I did as a child, he certainly would have been expelled and referred for mental health evaluation and treatment, and his parents reported to CPS.
Don’t forget the student would get red-flagged, and any lawfully-owned, securely-stored firearms owned by the parents would be gleefully confiscated by the local steppers-in-blue.
For many many years, school history books accurately showed real firearms as those carried by pioneers, colonial minutemen, civil war and subsequent war soldiers. Thanks to Marxist curriculum planners, school board members and the left lunging educational enterprise, firearms have been vilified. It is past time to pushback HARD against these activities that seek to deny and undermine the rights protected by the 2nd Amendment. When school levies are up for implementation or renewal anti-2A
programs and policies should be highlighted to defeat the levies. Money talks, it is the only thing understood by those who seek to use the educational enterprise to shape society to their Marxist visions.
Feeble describes this type of person and the school district, hopefully “W. G.” will sue the district into oblivion. So, the school district has stuck their nose where it does not belong and in so doing is stifling a creative young mind. This isn’t teaching rather it is dictating and pushing an agenda that has no business in a teaching environment. A gun magazine would really send them over the edge. Good luck with the law suit and show no mercy and don’t cut them any slack.
Would also say fuck all the Karenesk snitches that made it the school board’s business to mishandle.
We need to get rid of the school administrators. If you aren’t teaching you have no business being part of the school budget.
well,they need somebody with nothing to do to dream up shit like this,don’t they?
YES! Totally agree!
Embarrassing!!!!!!! Especially in Missouri on the edge of the Ozarks.
How is it cyberbullying without a victim? This is a looser for the school district.
DO I need to warn my elementary & middle school 4-H participants not to post pictures of their targets?
It’s a risk anywhere, somehow we haven’t had this problem with the high school trap teams here in upstate NY but at this point just waiting and have the law firm ready.
Show us where the pop cans hurt you🙄. Besides diabetes😀
Where did he post it? Was it even on a school web page? Regardless, the hateful little fascists who did this need to make this right.
Well the kid is about to win his college tuition in advance at least.
The school officials and the Karen involved should be forced to fill out their own ID-10-T forms, and have them publicly posted…
RE: “For now, we can only say that we have legal counsel, who will present our side of the story and defend against these allegations.”
What the school is trying to say is…we are up sht creek without a paddle.
Pop Tarts and Dr. Pepper go good together.
Sugar them little heathens up and send them to the monkey bars.
Missouri has some of the most lenient gun laws and some of the worst FUDDS I’ve ever met.
One guy told me the .308 was illegal to hunt deer with in Missouri because it was a military round and then went on to expound on how well the 30-06 does on deer. ???
After explaining to him 30-06 was a military round WW1-2 -Korea his reply, “Anything holding 30rnd’s is a junk gun and AR’s are only good for killing school kids.”
Yes he votes Democrat
FUDD lore. Always consistently inconsistent. For fudds, not only is their brain removed, or subjected to repeated frontal orbital lobotomies, but heads are jammed neck deep up their behinds.
Sounds like the guy who always tries to convince me that P90’s and PS90’s are 100% plastic thus and only good for taking over airplanes.
I mean, dude, at least try to convince me that it’s porcelain, made in Germany and costs more than I make in a month.
I’m about 50 miles SW of Mountain View, and its very surprising it happened that far south.
Tick Tock Tick Tock Tick Tock.
A well regulated website.
I’m not sure why anyone would find this surprising unless they haven’t been paying much attention since the late 1990’s.
Schools going way-the-fuck overboard and punishing on out of school items posted on the web has been going on for ~25 years. IME, most of that has involved 1A violations and a decided lack of any sort of actual bad behavior.
Heck, I, rather distinctly, remember when you could get a week of in-school suspension or 10 days out-of-school suspension for making a GeoCities page questioning school policy in a reasonable, polite and adult manner and suggesting that engagement with the school board was the answer.
Free speech in schools died in favor of “safety” in 1998, when schools went buck wild, so far as I can tell.
If you want to be slightly hyperbolic, it was the K-12 version of 9/11 for air travel, only worse because no one GAF about the kids until pretty recently and groups like F.I.R.E. (Freedom for Individual Rights and Expression) didn’t exist at the level they do now. You weren’t going to have someone on the news talking about it they way you do with some of the more egregious TSA abuses.
Zero tolerance equals zero intelligence.
They suspended him for Dr. Pepper soda cans, seriously?
Good thing the boy didn’t post photos of (for example) his grandpa the U.S. Marine in his USMC military uniform holding an M16, or he’d be expelled for sure!
Geesh. In my day (wow, that makes me sound old), my classmates and I doodled in our school notebooks drawing Vietnam War battle scenes with tanks, helicopters, jet fighters, and stick figures firing machine guns. Today, my entire class would have been expelled for those harmless doodles.
I’ve an old wooden school chair/desk here that has carvings of (reading it now) Heather is a Sexy Beast, Boring, V, Mona with an arrow line through it, SNAF, a box, anarchy sign, star in a circle, SI A, Tyler Sux, and some other indiscernible markings.
Oh my gawd, this is what happens when knives enter rural schools.
No gun pictures though, probably because all those doing the carvings had rifles of their own at home, or, guns just wasn’t a major school big deal.
I keep preaching but nobody seems to be listening, there’s something wrong when a bullied kid grabs a gun and takes it to a school to berserk.
It’s not the guns and the problem will continue as long as we blame inanimate objects for the actions of others.
Peer groups and teachers pretending and promoting everyone is privileged may be the precursor?
It ALL started with Participation Trophies.
I’ve an old wooden school chair/desk here that has carvings of (reading it now) Heather is a Sexy Beast, Boring, V, Mona with an arrow line through it, SNAF, a box, anarchy sign, star in a circle, SI A, Tyler Sux, and some other indiscernible markings.
Oh my gawd, this is what happens when knives enter rural schools.
No gun pictures though, probably because all those doing the carvings had rifles of their own at home, or, guns just wasn’t a major school big deal.
I keep preaching but nobody seems to be listening, there’s something wrong when a bullied kid grabs a gun and takes it to a school to berserk.
It’s not the guns and the problem will continue as long as we blame inanimate objects for the actions of others.
Peer groups and teachers pretending and promoting everyone is privileged may be the precursor?
Has someone put something in the drinking water that causes people to do these kinds of things?
I’ve been told that water plants cannot take the drugs out of the water that have been pissed down the toilet.
I think it’s all the radio/microwaves blasting through our brains.
Fluoride for lower iq, various SSRI metabolites excreted through urine and not filtered out in water treatment for interesting and random side effects, estrogen from birth control introduced by the same vector that reduces emotional and impulse control in men probably other stuff as well but compare the long term city dwellers to the rubes out in the sticks on well water and you can see some patterns.
I’ve been told that water plants cannot take the drugs out of the water that have been pissed down the toilet.
I think it’s all the radio/microwaves blasting through our brains.
First one absolutely second one probably but that may be more random unless we are getting into the various patents and studies related to electromagnetic methods of physiological/emotional manipulation.
looks like a saguaro cactus to me
i’d like to have a conversation with someone that defends the school’s position. i just for the life of me can’t understand that broken mentality at all, but don’t really associate with people of that broken mindset, so just have to wonder at the abundance of stupidity that can fit within a single sack of skin… ?
If Andy Warhol did this it would sell for a million bucks!