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Guns don’t kill people. Pictures of guns kill pictures of people.
UPDATE: The picture above is the drawing the kid made. Obviously, it’s the smiley faces on the barrel that did him in.
The whole having a real gun debate is still raging here. But the issue of imaginary guns hasn’t been touched. If, in the hopes of preventing another Columbine, this is the most effective response schools can come up with, we’re screwed.
Ariz. school suspends boy for sketching gun
School officials suspended a 13-year-old boy for sketching what looked like a gun, saying the action posed a threat to his classmates.
The boy’s parents said the drawing was a harmless doodle and school officials overreacted.
“The school made him feel like he committed a crime. They are doing more damage than good,” said the boy’s mother, Paula Mosteller.
The drawing did not show blood, bullets, injuries or target any human, the parents said. And the East Valley Tribune reported that the boy said he didn’t intend for the picture to be a threat.
Administrators of Payne Junior High in nearby Chandler suspended the boy on Monday for five days but later reduced it to three days.
The boy’s father, Ben Mosteller, said that when he went to the school to discuss his son’s punishment, school officials mentioned the seriousness of the issue and talked about the massacre at Colorado’s Columbine High School, where two teenagers shot and killed 12 students, a teacher and themselves in 1999. Mosteller said he was offended by the reference.
Chandler district spokesman Terry Locke said the crude sketch was “absolutely considered a threat,” and that threatening words or pictures are punishable.
#55, Sometimes the sarcasm is obvious. Especially when used with so many adjectives. Another time might be when it is contrary to a confessed stance.
Moran v Moron. There is a war protest picture focused on one man holding a sign. The sign says “Get A BRAIN ! MORANS”. Since that picture appeared some DU contributers have started spelling it MORAN with MORANI as the plural. The general meaning is the same except for being done through the anonymity of the internet.
You may find the picture here.
http://tinyurl.com/34qfl
>>If you wanted two, you could add literate.
Heh. Heh heh. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Nothing like an over-inflated sense of self-worth to make you feel good about yourself, is there, AFLAC? Quack! Quack!
>>It’s always easy to assume that religious people get things wrong.
And as usual, you would have made an ASS out of U (although not ME, as I don’t agree with you).
#49 – I guess that puts you in the minority of Atheists here on DU
Because we are not a monolithic group, or mindless adherents to a dogma, or even remotely involved in anything that even approaches the definition of a religion, I am unable to speak for all atheists… …but I judge others on their actions, not their beliefs, but I am not stupid enough to believe that their beliefs do not inform their actions.
If fundamentalist Christians don’t want to feel like I’m judging them then they should sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up because I am not going to tolerate creationism in a classroom, restrictions on stem cell research, the overturning of Roe V. Wade, or any attempt to suppress our free and open culture with their dream of imposing religious tyranny.
#55 – Oh, it’s spelled Moron.
Not here it isn’t… Maybe Hopper will post the graphic so you’ll understand why.
#58 – and somehow the last 3 or 4 lines or my entry magically disappeared.
I’ve noticed a glitch where any selected text is erased when you sumbit, and text sometimes gets selected if you clicked outside the text box then moved the pointer past a swatch of text… I don’t know if its a Firefox thing or something about the site… But I always make sure to click in the text box now to clear any selections. Anyone else know why that is happening?
That’s no gun, it’s a badly drawn house .
Looks to me more like gun freaks see guns everywhere just as feminists see penises on every cylinder.
>>Because we are not a monolithic group, or mindless adherents to
>>a dogma, or even remotely involved in anything that even
>>approaches the definition of a religion
Gee, I guess that means I’m not religious either. Who knew?
>>I am not going to tolerate creationism in a classroom, restrictions
>>on stem cell research, the overturning of Roe V. Wade, or any
>>attempt to suppress our free and open culture with their dream
>>of imposing religious tyranny.
Gosh and golly, OFTLO. Neither am I. I guess I’ve bagged the “religion” thing. Now what do I have to do to become “literate”, like you??
#65 – Gosh and golly, OFTLO. Neither am I. I guess I’ve bagged the “religion” thing. Now what do I have to do to become “literate”, like you??
Since you appear to have mastered spelling and grammar, I’d suggest practice using words according to their actual definitions and not according to fabricated ones.
And no… Based on almost everything you’ve written outside the topic we keep arguing about, I’d say you are not religious. You simply believe in a god while I don’t.
The Princeton WordNet offers these two apt definitions of religious:
# having or showing belief in and reverence for a deity; “a religious man”; “religious attitude”
# extremely scrupulous and conscientious; “religious in observing the rules of health”
It actually offers four, but other others simply talk about the word as an adjective to modify artifacts and such.
You might have those qualities, but as you’ve never pushed faith on others that I can see, I don’t consider you religious. And your biggest beef with me is actually that I lazily use the broad “Christian” when I mean “Brow-Beating Fundamentalist Hypocrites Hell-Bent on Forcing Me To Submit To Their Christ-fucking Taliban-esque Morality.”
I can see where you are coming from, but you have to understand that I can’t type all those words out every time some God-fearing son of a bitch wants to assert the Lord’s authority on me. Further, taking into consideration the fact that I believe that the Bible-Thumper’s “God” is a myth at best, and now the essential political battle between freedom and the Right Wing Conservative Church is all energy that could be better used on matters that have a real impact, like heath care or tax reform or education.
The Church is a blockade to human progress and faith in God is the lynch-pin of that blockage. So by extension, guys like Dawkins, and to a far far far lessor degree, me, are trying to open the eyes of the faithful because if we don’t, these religious nutbags will eventually bring on the downfall of us all. The mistranslated and misinterpreted Bible predicts it, and these apocalyptic cretins want to to make the prophesy self-fulfilling.
>>The Church is a blockade to human progress and faith in God
>>is the lynch-pin of that blockage.
Well, OFTLO, I agree with most of what you say other than that. You’ve never been to my church, so how would you know how it stands vis-a-vis human progress. We don’t proselytize, we don’t browbead, and I have yet to meet a “Brow-Beating Fundamentalist Hypocrite Hell-Bent on Forcing Me To Submit To Their Christ-fucking Taliban-esque Morality” on Sundays when I attend service. We do stuff like hook up with Habitat for Humanity, and build affordable housing for the homeless. Christ-fuckers, Taliban, Atheists, Agnostics, Hindu, “tribal religion” or “no religion”; makes no difference. You’re eligible for a house, if you don’t have one.
In spite of the bad name that the “Brow-Beating Fundamentalist Hypocrites Hell-Bent on Forcing You To Submit To Their Christ-fucking Taliban-esque Morality” and the Pope may have given churches and belief in God, we’re not all bad.
Oh, one more thing, since you’re a fan of Princeton WordNet, it also offers this definition:
atheist (someone who denies the existence of god)
Note that it’s not someone who “doesn’t know”, “doesn’t care”, or denies that such a thing can ever be known. It’s someone who denies (based on their belief with respect to God) that there IS a God. Not that he or she has any proof. It’s a blind faith sort of thing. Just like Southern Baptism, Islam, or Scientology.
>>that there IS a God
Woops. Key typo there. I mean “that their IS NO God”.
Lo siento muchissimo.
#67 – we’re not all bad.
88% of us are theists, and so many of my friends are too. Therefore, I know you aren’t all bad. Especially the Universal Unitarians, who I like a whole lot. Hell, my girlfriend is not just Jewish, but she’s going for a doctorate in Hebrew Studies and Comparative Religion and will one day be whatever the head administrator at a Synagogue is called.
I’m not anti-theist. I never have been. Just because 88% of the population has made a slight miscalculation about the nature of the universe is no reason to hate them 🙂
But there is a good 30% at least who are just begging for my wrath…
I really hope you are gonna stop flipping out, because I have always liked you, and my ONLY beef is about language and the meaning of words… not religion at all.
And Habitat For Humanity rocks!
#68 – atheist (someone who denies the existence of god)
Note that it’s not someone who “doesn’t know”, “doesn’t care”, or denies that such a thing can ever be known. It’s someone who denies (based on their belief with respect to God) that there IS a God. Not that he or she has any proof. It’s a blind faith sort of thing. Just like Southern Baptism, Islam, or Scientology.
Not at all. “a” is a prefix that means without. Theist is a word that means either God or religion depending on who is translating, but I think it probably means God. Therefore it means without God or without religion.
And yes, as an English word, it means one who denies the existence of God, but it implies nothing about why nor does it make any reference to evidence, faith, the degree of denial or anything.
Even so, you can’t make atheism a religion until atheists adopt a deity, a church, some sort of holy text, a creation myth, a canon, and all that stuff. We are simply not a religion.
We could be a movement or a group or any number of other things, and as there are small groups of atheists who form something like a club you can ascribe any number of words to us to describe that relationship… But we fail the religion test hands down, if only because we are no more a religion than Saturn owners are a family.
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and sounds like a duck, then it’s a duck. We look, walk, and sound like an otter.
Personally, I have NO faith about my belief and my belief is based on objective analysis of the evidence, and religion is the evidence. I have never said the idea of a god is impossible (though I say it is highly unlikely and I do not believe it at all), but all religions are bullshit because they are all man-made by primitive superstitious people and none of them have consistent internal logic…
…and the topping on the pie… Christianity is a carbon copy of dozens of other religions, traceable to Egypt, with a messiah, a virgin birth, 12 disciples (zodiac symbols) and a father (the Sun)…
You guys practice a religion older than Paganism, but you’ve just changed all the names. It’s just sun worship. Primitive, fearful, simplistic sun-worship.
And the fundamentalist factions are a death cult. It’s all about self denial and self abuse and the glory of death and ascension into this mythical God’s Kingdom, which defies all possible logic.
Do I have proof that you are wrong? No. Do I have evidence. Yes. Libraries full of it. We simply are not a religion.
I practically grew up in a machine shop, and had made my own forge by the time I was in middle school. I had the principal’s permission to bring swords I had made to school, as I was giving the Latin class a presentation (once a year for 3 years) on the swords typical for various cultures during the time of Rome. The Latin teacher even bought my gladius after my last presentation, so she could show it to other students after I graduated.
I drew all sorts of crazy stuff (guns, sci-fi, horror, comic book stuff) throughout school, kids bought copies of my version of Eddie from Iron Maiden. I even did all sorts of dangerous science experiments (some things never change, eh?) and made my own explosives (I lived in the country, they didn’t care what you did as long as it didn’t hurt anyone or anyone’s property, and didn’t wake them up.). At no time did I threaten or hurt anyone with any of that stuff.
Keep in mind, I was massively bullied and harassed all throughout elementary school. The school did absolutely nothing. It stopped in middle school because I stopped waiting for the school to do something, and just fought back (verbally and physically) when necessary. No weapons, no firearms, just my wits and the occasional physical self-defense. I was apparently raised better than to “pull a columbine.”
I think schools should do something when there’s a clear threat (when a student threatens to “pull a columbine”, something should be done…at least mandatory counseling)…but overreacting is just counter-productive. Unfortunately, it’s MUCH easier to CYA with “zero-tolerance” than to critically judge on a case-by-case basis. Intellectually lazy.
>>You guys practice a religion older than Paganism, but you’ve
>>just changed all the names. It’s just sun worship. Primitive,
>>fearful, simplistic sun-worship.
Strike the “fearful”, and you’ll get no argument from me. I’m actually a big fan of Wicca and Paganism. In spite of what the Pope might have us believe, I think there’s a common thread to all religions (at least the good part of them, not those “Brow-Beating Fundamentalist Hypocrites Hell-Bent on Forcing Me To Submit To Their Christ-fucking Taliban-esque Morality.” motherfuckers), that transcends Jesus, Allah, God, and even the almighty Purple Leprechaun. Who really knows if it’s Jesus, Allah, or the almighty Purple Leprechaun? You find something that you can believe in (and that hopefully doesn’t make you “fearful”), and you run with it. That’s what I’m doing, and I wish you well in your endeavors. Although I’ve never found Jews to be particularly tolerant of the non-Chosen People, when it comes to following rules and regulations. Does your gf let you make a ham & cheese sandwich, or must you keep a Kosher kitchen? Can you eat the flesh of the cloven-hooved beast? Damn, I love bacon! Foul shellfish? Or is she as much of a live-and-let-liver as I am?
#72 – Well, she’s Reformed, and from my observation, just a little more reformed than most 🙂
I’m from Chicago, and I found there that the Jews run a wide gamut just like Christians, from ultra-conservative to very liberal and lax on the rules… and even among the Hasidic I found that some of them are very tolerant of “outsiders” while others are not.
But while she performs a lot of the rituals, she’s not a JAP and not particularly strict… and prefers sausage on her pizza.
#70 “atheist (someone who denies the existence of god)”
Tossing my two cents in how people get the idea that atheists have a ‘religion’ of sorts is how they are defined. The defining phase “denies the existence of God’ and another phrase “practising atheist” implies an active activity on the part of the atheist to deny God because God exists and denial therefore is required.
Some (but not all) atheists I know are completely apathetic about God. God or a belief in a God has no more influence in their life than a moth farting in China. Active denial doesn’t enter into it at all and when asked about God it’s a generally polite shrug of the shoulders and a “who knows huh?”. This is not active at all – ‘denying’ or ‘practising’ cannot be applied.
Like people previously messed up in life somehow become equally messed up in God that ‘saved them’ atheists can do the same. I have met some active atheists who are on a mission to ‘prove’ there is no God and when you die (fart sound) that’s it! This an active activity of ‘denying’ and ‘practising’ and gets labelled as such.
😉
Cheers
If anyone wants to email these morons, here ya go:
Principal: martin.karen@chandler.k12.az.us
Asst. Superintendent: randall.marilou@chandler.k12.az.us
Did anyone else notice that this “gun” has someone standing on it and it has windows? lol Oh yea, then theres the tree in front. It’s a damn building!