Because, obviously, if other kids saw that gangsta pose, who knows what sort of terrible violence might break out at the school.
The school board has voted to ban a photo of a student from the senior section of his high school yearbook because he is posed with a shotgun.
But Tuesday’s unanimous vote also backed a compromise: Blake Douglass can have the photo published in a “community sports” section, and a new photo ? without the gun but featuring other elements of skeet and trap shooting ? can appear in the seniors’ section of the Londonderry [New Hampshire] High School yearbook.
The compromise wasn’t good enough for Douglass, who wanted his senior photo in traditional sportsman’s pose, wearing an oxford shirt, navy vest and holding the shotgun over his shoulder.
“I don’t see anything wrong with the picture,” Douglass, 17 said at the hearing. “I just want my senior picture in the yearbook.”
I’m not a gun enthusiast, but the following things kinda bug me about this.
- Presumably skeet/trap shooting is a legal activity in the area in question. In other words, no crime is being committed in the photo.
- There appear to be no restrictions, aside from legal ones, on what can be shown in a student photo. The school board’s policies state, “We encourage the use of school sponsored publications to express students’ points of view. They shall be free from all policy restrictions outside the normal rules for responsible journalism.” It’s not clear how showing a kid in hunting garb with a open-breech shotgun is “irresponsible.” That some folk think it is “inappropriate” doesn’t seem to be a worthwhile restriction.
- The photo itself is not so inherently horrific (or “inappropriate”) that they school board wasn’t willing to let it appear elsewhere in the yearbook.
I mean, what is the school board trying to protect folks from here? What’s the compelling interest?
According to this story, the teacher and yearbook advisor suggested that the picture was inappropriate due to the school’s zero-tolerance policy on violence, drugs and alcohol.” Since none of those aspects is present in the photo (is trap shooting inherently and overtly violent?), that seems a bit lame. The principal, too, weighed in, saying, “I just felt that the picture with the skeet shooting rifle was something that should not be in a yearbook, and it would be something that would create controversy.” Ah, well if that’s how you feel, that makes it all right. A shame it created controversy anyway.
The superintendent has also commented. “Taking into consideration all the things that have happened with school violence, it’s not appropriate even though skeet shooting is a fine hobby.” And, doubtless because of all the tragic auto accidents that have taken the lives of so many teens, no kids will be allowed to pose with their cars, even though driving them is, of course, another “fine hobby.”
And, again, that the school board was willing to let the photo run elsewhere in the yearbook, and to let the kid pose in the regalia of his “fine hobby” sans gun, indicates to me that they see the flaw in the argument and are looking for a butt-covering face-saving way out.
If nothing else, another reason why high schools should return to the standard mug shot type of senior photo. It would certainly avoid “controversy.”
*grin*
Yeah, but lets see if someone from Columbine could get away with posing with a gun.
It would be interesting to see what happened — which might be influenced by what actual policies the HS and district might have on the subject.
Huh. Realize it’s been over five years since the Columbine HS attack?
Political Correctness gone overboard again. Not only can’t we SPEAK in ways that might offend the hyper-sensitive, but we can’t SHOW PHOTOS that might offend the hyper-sensitive.
You probably didn’t see it Dave, but my senior photo in the Metate was one of those old-time photos where a studio puts you in old-fashioned clothes and sits you down in an old-fashioned setting before taking your picture and printing it in sepia tones to make it look old. One of the props in my picture was a rifle. Another was a six-shooter. I wonder what the hyper-sensitive school staff would say about that sort of senior photo.
Doubtless you’d either be sent off to the reeducation camps for the Politically Insensitive, or hauled off by the Dept of Homeland Security for being an Impending Menace. Not much difference between the two, if you ask me.
*Runs and hides behind the couch* I think the school is right. If I was the principle I wouldn’t have let that be in the yearbook either. I am from a hunting family and well guns have their place but not in a school yearbook. It just isn’t appropriate call me a prude (it won’t be the first or last time) but I don’t think there is anything wrong with it. If it was a picture of a kid flipping off another kid do you have to publish that because of first amendment rights?
A point well taken on the First Amendment (though I suspect that’s covered in other areas). I still maintain that their willingness to run the picture elsewhere in the book, their evidently open invitation to let folks run pictures showing their interests, and the non-aggressive posture involved in the photo itself seriously weakens the school board’s position here.
(And the day I see you running and hiding behind the couch …)
I don’t think the obscene gesture case is a good analogy to the picture above. Obscene gestures are universally understood insults to other people. They are, after all, obscene. There is nothing obscene or insulting about the photo above, or at least nothing that is universally accepted to be obscene or insulting.
I also don’t think the first amendment applies. The first amendment guarantees the right to freedom of speech, but it doesn’t guarantee the right to speak freely in a particular forum. So long as the student pictured above has other places he can publish his photo, I don’t think his first amendment rights are being violated by being prevented from putting a particular photo in the school yearbook.
Dave’s quotation of the school board’s policy suggests that the photo violates the standards of ‘responsible journalism.’ Dave’s summary of the later news story suggests that a zero-tolerance policy on violence, drugs, and sex was involved. It seems that the violence part of that policy must be what’s intended. I don’t think those two policies are consistent. Responsible journalists would report on violent crime, but zero-tolerance on violence prohibits such reporting.
What’s more, if showing a gun in a photograph is a violation of the zero-tolerance policy on violence, it seems that printing a photograph of anything that can be used as a weapon should also be a violation. Thus, students on the baseball team should not be allowed to use photos contaning images of baseball bats, track team members should not be allowed to use photos of themselves with javelins, and no one should be allowed to use a photograph of themselves with a sharpened pencil since they can be used to stab people (and perhaps since they can be used to attack someone in a written essay).
Unless the school and district are deeming guns to be inherently violent (and conflating a very broad category of “violence” into the more narrow “malevolent violence against people”).