The moral of the story is "ejumakayshun is bad, mm kay, dont think, vote often, and vote early. DONT THINK!" Seriously, dont try anything unsanctioned or free thinking, big business doesnt like thinkers.
Don't put up with stuff like this at school, but parents giving kids as young as 5 guns is fine. Yes, that makes perfect sense.
When I first read the story, I saw it as complete over-reaction and that she shouldn't have any punishment at all, and I still partially do. However, the last line changed my mind a little. She mixed aluminum foil and toilet cleaner, otherwise known as a Drano bomb. This is a very common way to make something that makes a small explosion, only slightly less common that dry ice and water in a bottle. I don't think she was just innocently mixing chemicals to see what they would do. Here's what I think actually happened. She's a bright, good, usually very obedient girl who rarely gets into trouble. She heard about Drano bombs and was curious about it. Because she's still a child and her frontal lobe is not yet fully developed, she makes dumb choices at times and decided to try it out. Now at this point, charging her with a crime is a complete over-reaction and will do more harm than good. She knows what she did was wrong, and since she's the type who doesn't normally get into trouble, she won't do it again. Give her a day or two in detention and maybe show her some pictures of people missing hands from making Drano bombs to be sure she understands that what she did was wrong and leave it at that. Prosecute her and send her to jail and you not only use court time and state resources unnecessarily but you also risk turning a normally good girl into something else and possibly making her a life-long criminal.
Why arent they putting her in accelerated science program so she can find these things out in a supervised controlled situation? Probably because there isn't a gifted program for sciences or math or art or language in her district, they are increasingly the victims of budget cuts and we wonder why American students are falling behind. We are doing this to ourselves.
While I agree with you that this is both a total overreaction to what should have been solely a school disciplinary matter and that the child in the other case getting access to a gun is gross negligence, you act as if the two incidents are somehow directly connected with each other and not the product of a country of 314 million people in 50 often very different states with varying attitudes and laws. It's ridiculous, but it's not hypocritical, because one thing has nothing to do with the other.
Maybe if someone at that school had a gun, that female wouldn't have been doing science. Does that cover the entire conservative reaction? A cousin of mine and his friend made a REAL bomb in their backyard - never detonated it - charged as juveniles and got a stern talking to. That sounds far more reasonable, for a good kid who just wants to do an experiment.
Ah, she's Black. No wonder. Wouldn't want a Black girl to have an interest in Science. That would be too much like the 21st Century. I signed the petition.
Signed. This is stupid beyond reason. How many of us that had Chem-Class know of or had minor accidents in the class? It happens. Don't want accidents in a Chem-Class, don'thave Chem-Class.
^No... I really don't think that's relevant. She's 16 years old, how would that make any difference whatsoever? Signed the petition.
She was intelligent, independent, curious, and failed to respect authority... Of course the system would take her down with zero tolerance policy. She is the exact opposit that the school system is designed to produce or what the government wants to deal with.
Given the same circumstances? What her name was or wasn't wouldn't change my opinion. She wasn't mixing up pipe bombs in her garage or setting out to deliberately damage the school or hurt people. She had a stupid accident in chem-class that made a little smoke. Shit happens. I suspect she's not the first chem-student that had something like this happen in this school.
^By that definition, the guys in my high school chemistry class were terrorists. And their blooper happened at a science fair. Smoke everywhere, our DARE officer on duty... the fire department was called....
Buh? Her religion/ethnicity/gender doesn't matter to me. She's an obviously intelligent student, who doesn't cause trouble, who either made an honest mistake or had an accident in a chemistry class. No one died, no one was harmed, nothing was damaged, there was a poof and some smoke, and she's getting treated like she murdered 3 children. It is wrong for her to be treated this way.
I got an email from change.org (who hosted that petition a bunch of us signed) telling me that charges against Kiera have been dropped. This is confirmed by a quick Google search. Looks like she also scored a NASA scholarship, so sometimes there is a little justice in the world.