Girl Arrested After Cutting Food With Knife

[funke_munke]

Has anyone ever been stabbed with a plastic fork? Those things hurt!


And I'm with staffsMike, regardless of any fears in place, couldn't they have just talked to her parents (after all the knife would no doubt have belonged to them). Theres no need to scare the beejesus out of her. I doubt it very much that there was any bad intent here, after all she was actually using it to cut her food. It's not as if you could pull out an AK-47 and claim you like your food peppered with shells.

[Pyrii]

Americans doing what they do best, going over the top.

[badass]

Being charged with a felony does seem like an overreaction, but being charged is one thing, being convicted is entirely another. And, of course, all we have is brief news reports and it's not unknown for there to prove to be more to it than there first appears.

Even being charged is a massive over reaction. As said earlier in this thread, a firm telling off (and telling the kid why they cant do this) and informing the parents is the way to go. Not arresting and scaring the living out of a 10 year old.

I took a swiss army knife to school with me every day from the age of 11. Good thing it was a far less hysterical age.

If you got caught with that, you should also have been told off. There is no reason to have one in school.
I remember a bunch of scummy kids threatening me with one to rob me when I was that age in school.

[Rishi]

Classic "Shank" incident averted

[Saracen]

Even being charged is a massive over reaction. As said earlier in this thread, a firm telling off (and telling the kid why they cant do this) and informing the parents is the way to go. Not arresting and scaring the living out of a 10 year old.

Erm, yes, probably. As I said (and you quoted) "Being charged with a felony does seem like an overreaction, ...."

But also, that is an overreaction in your opinion ..... and mine, and pretty much every else who's read that story. The point I was making is ..... we weren't there. Unless you have all the facts, or you assume that newspaper and/or TV reports are both entirely accurate as well as complete and fully representative, then how can you second-guess the people that were there.

Also, if as reported, this is a felony, then by definition it's a serious offence. If the school ignored it and didn't report it, and something seriously nasty happened, then parents would be screaming about the school's incompetence. How would you feel if another kid at your child's school attacked your kid with a knife, and it later turned out that the school had known about the knife and not acted, or that the police had been called and not acted. If the school report it, and it's a felony, do the police have any option but to take action? Do they have discretion to not arrest someone committing a felony? And if they do, and something goes wrong, people will be screaming about police incompetence.

I said right away that it was an overreaction, or at least appeared to be which is as far as we can go, in my view, when relying on media reports, but if so, then perhaps our disgust at the way this law was enforced ought to be directed as those that created the law, not those that enforced it. Perhaps a little more care ought to have been exercised in framing the limits to the law, possibly in that there's a minimum age limit or perhaps in that it requires more than mere possession for it to be a felony. But the danger then is that if such a law requires more than possession on school premises, such as some kind of threatening behaviour, the implication is that schools will have far less authority to actually stop students just carrying knives. And by the time it gets to the threatening stage, you may have no more than moments before it gets to the "using" stage.

I'm not suggesting this 10-year old would have used it on someone (though you never know, and being 10 doesn't totally exclude that possibility), but that kids that might use a knife on someone will be able to carry one at whim and nobody can do much about it, right up until the time they threaten someone with it, or hurt someone with it.

So, what it comes down to is that a child young carried a knife onto school premises illegally and it was dealt with. The issue is not that it was dealt with, but how it was dealt with. Given that the act of knife-carrying is taken VERY seriously in US schools (and with good reason), did the school have much choice, and did the police have much choice? Is anyone here familiar enough with the US legal system to know? And, of course, are the reports we've all been reacting to complete and representative of what actually happened, or are they a bit, well, sensationalised? Has anything been omitted .... like had this child be warned before? If so, how often?

You may well be right, and a firm telling-off etc may well have been the way to go, and would certainly seem more reasonable and appropriate given what the circumstances appear to have been. But the authorities were there and we weren't.

[Whalefish]

It's only legal to cut your food with an AK47 in American schools, apparently.

[usxhe190]

interesting to see all the weird and interesting stories

[MadduckUK]

It's only legal to cut your food with an AK47 in American schools, apparently.

M16 you commie

[Fraz]

M16 you commie

Tea: all over monitor.