A 13-Year-Old With Autism Got Arrested After His Backpack Sparked Fear. Only His Stuffed Bunny Was Inside.
A 13-Year-Old With Autism Got Arrested After His Backpack Sparked Fear. Only His Stuffed Bunny Was Inside.
Disability rights advocates said kids like Ty should not be getting arrested under Tennesseeâs school threats law. And they tried to push for a broader exception for kids with other kinds of disabilities. It didnât work.
You're viewing a single thread.
-
âweâre trying to stop the people who should know better from doing this, and if they do it, they should have more than a slap on the wrist.â
They're 13 years old ffs, they can't be expected to not say stupid things.
âI donât know whose level of trauma is going to be the greatest: the kids in the classroom wondering if thereâs an active shooter roaming their halls or a kid that didnât know better and says something like that and gets arrested,
Or the trauma of the kids who saw a classmate arrested for having a bunny plushie in his bag.
In the first six weeks of the school year, 18 kids were arrested for making threats of mass violence.
Sweet Jesus! What the fuck are you doing Tennessee?? This is madness!
-
Better not say you're going to beat everyone at the sack race in P.E. class, Billy. That's a threat of mass violence.
I remember going to a daycare center where not only were toy guns not allowed to be brought, not even for action figures, you couldn't pick up a stick and use it as a gun and they would even put you in time out for a finger gun.
This is far stupider than that.
-
teaching respect for firearms at a young age is not stupid in the hellscape of a nation you live in.
-
If you think thats how you do that: you are incredibly wrong
-
It's certainly an aspect to impress on children that, despite what Mommy And Daddy TV taught you, guns are not things good kids play with.
-
And as I said the method in the comment you replied to is not how you do that
-
-
-
-
-
We have threat assessments at our elementary school but we go through MANY channels before police are involved. Like, is the threat credible? Is anyone fearful? Does the child have the means? Is there motive? Someone making a comment that says âbecause theyâll blow upâ would be a freaking conversation about school appropriate language not arrest and suspensions, for ANYBODY but especially kids with documented disabilities.
-
Reporting it makes sense. Investigating if the threat was credible makes sense. If it is credible, a felony then makes sense. But if it isn't, a fine or misdemeanor is enough. Because I do agree that there should be some consequences to discourage how casually death threats and the like are thrown out these days.
But the idea that no tolerance rules that turn kids having outbursts (disability or not) into felons makes anyone safer is laughable. Making troubled kids unnecessarily lives harder is more likely to create more danger than prevent it.
-
Oh, basically the moment I've learned that many school shooters are autistic and I'm likely autistic, I started joking on that subject.
I mean, it (still) feels funny. Not that autistic people are braver (often seems the opposite), we just fear different things than NT generally. So what NT people (especially kids, especially in an environment prone to bullying) fear is not what we fear.
-