Students Suspended For Legal Activities Away From School

                Two New Jersey high school students were suspended for five days after they posted pictures on Snap-chat of legal firearms being used at a private gun range. The pictures had the benign caption, “fun day at the range.” According to the Lacey Township High School handbook, students can be suspended for up to one year if they are “reported to be in possession of a weapon of any type, for any reason or purpose, whether on or off school grounds.”

                That’s as asinine, impracticable…and chilling…as it gets. So, the school--or school district-- believes it has the power to arbitrarily overrule the Constitution of the United States and randomly take away its student’s rights? This has nothing whatsoever to do with the school or its grounds, and it still thinks it can reach into people’s private homes and lives and dictate what is and is not “allowed?!”

                The junior high school I attended once tried to tell me—and my father—that he “couldn’t” take me out of school for a half-day to attend the local major-league baseball team’s home opener one spring. That did not end well for anyone employed or attached to said school. In general, in a government versus family contest, the family must prevail, or the society is doomed.

                Will schools soon suspend students for posting pictures of themselves in cars, or engaged with other implements that kill more people each year than firearms do? Will kids be kicked out of school for hunting, wielding a baseball bat, bass fishing, attending a Charlie Daniels concert, or eating at Chick-fi-la? Don’t laugh. None of these are any more outrageous examples of tyranny than the recent action of Lacey Township High School.

                If a school believes it can regulate completely legal activities occurring outside of its grounds, based purely on its own particular likes and dislikes, then it can tell kids—and by extension their families and friends—what they can eat, watch, do, and who they can meet, date, sleep with…or vote for.

                Wake up, people! Do not go gentle into that good night, where freedom dies and wrong is right.

                Rage, rage, against the dying of the light!