This is one such story.
Alexa Gonzalez, an outgoing 12-year-old who likes to dance and draw, expected a lecture or maybe detention for her doodles earlier this month. Instead, the principal of the Junior High School in Forest Hills, New York, called police, and the seventh-grader was taken across the street to the police precinct.
Alexa's hands were cuffed behind her back, and tears gushed as she was escorted from school in front of teachers and - the worst audience of all for a preadolescent girl - her classmates.
"They put the handcuffs on me, and I couldn't believe it," Alexa recalled. "I didn't want them to see me being handcuffed, thinking I'm a bad person."
Still it's a slippery slope from just scribbling on a desk to going tonto in the canteen with an AK-47, amirite? Alexa, it's obviously for your own good that you're humiliated in front of your classmates and be so traumatised you then spend the next three days "throwing up". America has to make sure its children are safe and don't live in fear!
After all, according to this prize plonker, Zero Tolerance is A Good Thing:
Kenneth Trump, a security expert who founded the National School Safety and Security Services consulting firm, said focusing on security is essential to the safety of other students. He said zero tolerance policies can work if "common sense is applied."
Two things spring to mind. Firstly, there's some weird double think going on if you can honestly combine 'common sense' and 'zero tolerance'in the same sentence. One suggests moderation and nuance, whilst the other signifies extremity and a simple minded black-and-white morality.
Secondly, there's something pretty dodgy about having a URL, as Ken Trump does, like http://www.schoolshootingexpert.com/ - hardly reassuring, is it? It presumes the worst case scenario and suggests you should too. So does having a company named: "National School Safety and Security Services" which offers "school security and emergency preparedness training". And it's not meant to be reassuring, because here we have the commodification of panic, where our darkest fears are sold back to us. Worse, like most products, we are not just being sold the solution but also the problem - we are being convinced to be afraid.
And yet school shootings and other such events make the news precisely because they are so rare, and so newsworthy. The mistake we make with the news and which the news lets us make is to assume the unusual is in fact everyday or ever-more likely. But it's not - you are very unlikely to die in a school shooting in the US, at least if the Center for Disease Control is to be believed. Meanwhile, in the UK, 40% of road deaths are in the 15-25 group (who only have about 12.5% of all driving licences issued). Back in the US, drivers in the 15-24 age bracket consitutute only 14% of the population but account for 30% of all injuries amongst male drivers - in 2008 alone, this amounted to the deaths of 3500 young people, compared to 323 deaths from school shootings between 1992-1997.
One death is always one too many, but where is the outrage for all those who die young and in an RTA? The ugly truth is that while school shootings are exciting, rare and - from a journalistic perspective - 'sexy', deaths in traffic accidents are mundane, everyday, and of little interest (except for those directly effected.) Perverse but true - not all dead teenagers are equal. Such irrationality leads the debate and in doing so distorts our view of it.
This brings us back to Zero Tolerance, which seeks to apply extreme responses to extreme events to the everyday and the typical. It should go without saying that this is absurd, but since when has reason ever counted in debates like this?
The real question we should be having is whether schools are the healthiest environments for children to grow up in, whether leaving our young in a state of perpetual in loco parentis really helps much, or whether a 19th century model of top-down, hierachical learning really is the best way for children to learn. But that's another blogpost, another rant, another day.
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