West Virginia teen arrested for wearing NRA shirt to school

Status
Not open for further replies.
West Virginia teen

I'm not seeing any connection/similarity to Trevon Martin and a kid wearing a T-Shirt? Did I miss something in all the posts I just read? Has there been actual evidence released documenting that the neighborhood watch guy deliberatly provoked the altercation that led to one man stopping another from busting his head open on the concrete sidewalk?
 
I think Metal god's point was that the cases are similar in that we don't know exactly what happened in either.

That said, discussion of the Zimmerman case is off-topic.
 
Has there been actual evidence released
Click to expand...
Nope, still waiting on the trial.

He was only drawing a correlation between a narrow aspect of the two incidents. Maybe a weak one at that. No biggie.
 
West Virginia teen arrested for wearing NRA shirt to school
Click to expand...

You know, the article cited in the OP doesn't even claim this. He was not arrested for wearing a NRA shirt. The NRA shirt was salient to the problem, but was not the reason for the arrest. Holy cow.
 
The article reports that young Mr. Marcum was arrested for "disrupting an educational process and obstructing an officer" by refusing to remove the T-shirt. It seems to me that in this context, wearing a T-shirt, as opposed to refusing to remove it, is a distinction without a difference. The only educational process that he seems to have disrupted was the one that involved school officials' insisting that he should do as he was told, regardless of whether he was breaking any rules in the first place.
 
Anything that disrupts classes is not allowed. It never has been, but the standards of what disrupts classes has changed over the years. When I was a student a pocket knife, or even a shotgun in a truck in the parking lot would not have raised an eyebrow. But back in the 60's and 70's a lot of kids were suspended for long hair and short skirts. That shirt would have gotten me suspended in 1974 too. Not because of the message, but because it had no collar.

This kid was suspended because he knowing challenged a school rule to draw attention to his beliefs. He was arrested for disorderly conduct because he refused to follow the police officers instructions. This is not a gun rights argument. The same thing would have happened if he were wearing a pro life shirt, gay pride shirt, a PETA shirt, or anything that would have caused controversy at school.

And it is not a 1st amendment issue. He has the right to express his 1st amendment rights all he wants. He can write it in a book, a newspaper editorial, he can go on TV or radio. He can even wear his shirt and carry a sign on the side of the road. But he doesn't have the right to walk into the street and block traffic to force his opinions on me. Nor does his 1st amendment rights allow him to disrupt others right to an education.

You go to school to learn. I'm all for gun rights, but people like this don't help us.
 
Jmr, this was not long hair or short skirt, this was not animal rights or gay pride. This was about a t-shirt that supported our constitutional rights which does make it different. This is what they are supposed to be teaching not ignoring and finding disruptive to have mentioned. That makes it unalterably different right there. This is a part of our constitution not a political movement or new hair style. To lump those things together belittles our system of government.

Aside from that can you seriously say if this had been a National Press Club t-shirt with a computer symbol saying "protect your rights" the teacher would have found it disruptive? After that we can talk about a t-shirt with a copy of a search warrant mentioning the fourth amendment and "protect your rights". Explain to me how that would have escalated to this point. That is the exact phrase on the t-shirt in question. If it is not offensive to support the first or fourth amendment then it should not be offensive to support the second amendment. Anything other than this show's a clear bias and should mean that the authority figure in question needs a good looking at.

If we don't fight tooth and nail for these rights, let me assure you we will lose them.
 
Nor does his 1st amendment rights allow him to disrupt others right to an education.
Click to expand...
Actually, I'm not finding a right to government-provided education in the Bill of Rights, or anywhere in the Constitution for that matter. There is, however, a very clear protection for the right to speak one's mind, which the courts have found is particularly acute when such speech involves political issues.

Furthermore, I'm in agreement with Vanya: it was a shirt. In and of itself, it was not disruptive in any way. The only thing disrupting the educational process was the reaction of staff and law enforcement.
 
JMR, given the info presented in the report, I have to disagree

This is not a gun rights argument. The same thing would have happened if he were wearing a pro life shirt, gay pride shirt, a PETA shirt, or anything that would have caused controversy at school.
Click to expand...

Logan County Schools' dress code, which is posted on the school system's website, prohibits clothing and accessories that display profanity, violence, discriminatory messages or sexually suggestive phrases. Clothing displaying advertisements for any alcohol, tobacco, or drug product also is prohibited.
Click to expand...

There doesn't seem to be any justification, given the School District's dress code, for the teacher to have bothered this boy about his shirt.

And Logan, West Virginia is sufficiently removed from Newtown, Connecticut that the teacher can't even claim the kid was being insensitive. Wearing that shirt last week while congress was in session debating the issue shows a willingness to be involved. This should be encouraged by educators, not used as grounds for harassment when the person in question stands on the other side of ones personal line of beliefs.

The teacher was wrong, the school was wrong. They are finding out how wrong they were as this plays out.
 
Anything that disrupts classes is not allowed.
Click to expand...

In the reports that we have, which admittedly may be incomplete, he did not disrupt class in any way. He went to class all morning and was challenged in the lunch line by a teacher. I note that there is not only no report of him disrupting class, but no report that any of his morning teachers challenged him about the shirt.

If I were this kid's father, or lawyer, I would be asking whether, indeed, it was the student or the teacher who disrupted someone's education.

This kid was suspended because he knowing challenged a school rule to draw attention to his beliefs.
Click to expand...

Did he? Again admitting that the article may be incomplete, the school policy "prohibits clothing and accessories that display profanity, violence, discriminatory messages or sexually suggestive phrases. Clothing displaying advertisements for any alcohol, tobacco, or drug product also is prohibited." Neither firearms nor political organizations are mentioned among the prohibited displays.

This incident differs sharply from that described by SPEMack618 in that the latter reports that the policy was clearly delineated (no shirts depicting items that were not allowed on school property), whereas in the former case, a new policy seems to have been created on the fly. I believe the phrase lawyers like is "arbitrary and capricious."

IANAL, but I would not want to have to prosecute this charge or defend his suspension.
 
OK, so some more digging. The school is claiming that this has nothing to do with the shirt but it is about how the other students reacted to the confrontation in the cafeteria.

Lesson to be learned: Don't do this kind of stuff in the cafeteria teachers.

EDITED:

On a side note: I found a picture of the shirt and now we see the real reason the teacher got all worked up. It's the picture of an AR-15 on the shirt that sent him over the edge. Still, I do not see that this violates the School district's dress code and the school downplaying the shirt and playing up the disturbance.

And this is where the disruption comes in;

The t-shirt confrontation drew attention and cheers in the cafeteria at Logan Middle School last Thursday before Marcum was taken to the school office. Students were reportedly yelling for him and Logan law enforcement officers were called to the school to help restore order.
Click to expand...

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/04/23/dad-west-virginia-boy-arrested-over-nra-shirt-says-hell-fight-punishment/
 
Last edited:
Yes, it's a picture of an AR-15 on the t-shirt, with the message "protect your rights".

Let's look a little more closely at that. Allow me to repeat myself here.

Aside from that can you seriously say if this had been a National Press Club t-shirt with a computer symbol saying "protect your rights" the teacher would have found it disruptive? After that we can talk about a t-shirt with a copy of a search warrant mentioning the fourth amendment and "protect your rights". Explain to me how that would have escalated to this point. That is the exact phrase on the t-shirt in question. If it is not offensive to support the first or fourth amendment then it should not be offensive to support the second amendment. Anything other than this show's a clear bias and should mean that the authority figure in question needs a good looking at.

We need to stop backing up and acting like the second amendment is any different than the others. We would find it unreasonable if the teacher was ticked off at the symbol of the first amendment yet you could easily lay every death at the hands of repressive regimes, every death in civil and revolutionary wars over history , and most especially every death in our own spanish american war in the lap of people freely speaking their minds in opposition to something. In other words what the first amendment protects.

What if we were talking about universal background checks and government registration of reporters. People die here because of their reporting the truth even (Rodney King and Koran burning coverage anyone?). They are clearly, provably, dangerous. Let's register and restrain them. "If it saves just one life".

These restrictions are simply not reasonable.
 
Edited, Scudbar I needed to read your post more thoroughly.
OK, got ya,
These restrictions are simply not reasonable.
Click to expand...

And I agree.


But the teacher didn't find the shirt disruptive, and the disruption wasn't about the shirt.

The teacher didn't like it or didn't fully understand the School's dress code. He tried to make the kid take it off, the kid refused.

Then the other kids went crazy over it yelling, making noise, being unruly teenagers.

The teacher is claiming the kid got belligerent with him over it and that is what drove the other kids into a frenzy.

The school called in the cops to quell the riot.

Then, in the School Office, they asked the kid to take off the shirt again, again he refused, they suspended the kid blaming him, not the teacher or the other kids, for the disturbance, and had the cops arrest him for it.

The teacher was wrong to ask the kid to take off the shirt.
The teacher was really wrong to do it in the cafeteria instead of somewhere more controlled.
The principle is wrong for calling the cops, can't handle the kids, shouldn't be doing the job.
The cops were right in responding to the school's request for help, but they were wrong to arrest the kid. They should have known better.

In fact, the Officers should have recognized the real trouble with all this, called a Police Chief in, had a good talk with the principle and released his officers back to their other assignments and duties. Police Chief then should have called the School District's Superintendent and let him/her know that this School Principle is about to get the District and maybe the City sued.
 
Last edited:
“disrupting an educational process” just sounds like a blanket law that can be applied to anything when there is nothing wrong and they cannot find a rule that was broken.
“obstructing an officer” is another blanket law that can be applied to anything like refusing to turn a shirt inside out.

The kid only refused to turn his shirt inside out. He didn't refuse to go to the office or be detained in the office. I hope the school gets a lawsuit and people get fired.

The real issue is adults abused their positions of power to bully a kid because he did not share their political beliefs. These people need to be kept away from kids and any kind of positions of authority.
 
If that is the situation then I certainly can't fault LE.
Lc,where did you find that info? I followed the earlier link you had and couldn't find it.

The unfortunate thing is I could see this being one of my children. I taught them to stick up for their beliefs regardless of who it was challenging them. It never escalated to this point but there were times I ended up in school officials office over it.

My kids knew that this was going to be the expected result and that the only reason they would be punished by me was if they had been disrespectful so they were pretty careful. After the school official involved interviewed everyone, and we talked about the teachers inserting their political/religious views into the classroom (my kids had normally put me in a position where the teacher was pretty clearly over the line) the administrator found himself apologizing instead of handing out punishment. You have no idea how many times this happened with four kids in school for more than two decades. :rolleyes:

That being said, it was never handled this badly.
 
After the school official involved interviewed everyone.....
Click to expand...

Well this is key isn't it.

You had the benefit of a School Administrator who knows how to handle things.

The School in Logan, WV. seems not to be so fortunate and instead of taking personal responsibility to first, take control of the student body, and second, to get a clear picture of what happened, and involve the parents in what should or shouldn't be done. This administrator simply called the cops to establish order and washed their hands of it. Now it will come back and bite them in the arse and they still won't understand why it's all going wrong. It will be someone else' fault but not theirs.

I'll find those other articles.
This is from a more or less local news agency and it details things by tracking their initial reports and following with updates.


http://www.wsaz.com/news/wvnews/headlines/Student-Arrested-203875101.html
 
I doubt this district will have a football team for the next four years as they pay off this lawsuit. Oops. I agree in that I hope the teacher gets fired ASAP.
SPEMack618 , I don't know when/where you went to school, but I was part of JROTC in the early 80s, and we wore our OG-507 fatigues to class on uniform day, later upgraded to the woodland camo BDUs. Many of us wore camo to school, surplus pants or shirts, gun t-shirts, tanks/fighter plane/insert random military image here t-shirts with no problems. Heck, we had a rifle range on campus! This was in Free AZ, of course. If I had worn a t-shirt such as stated in this story to school, I probably would have had Sgt Johnson tell me how all of that extra battery junk on the pictured rifle would have failed him in Vietnam, and a few other teachers might have commented that they wouldn't mind buying one themselves.
 
Actually Lc, we did have a really gifted administrators we ran across. We also had a few that had already decided the correct punishment for having an actual belief system different than the staff's, especially one that they could defend well, should probably merit harsh punishment without even talking to the child involved.
Once I got on the scene I helped them understand a few things. A. I knew that they hadn't done their homework, so to speak and I had more and better info than they had gotten. B. I knew the rules almost as well as they did. C. I was capable of being a serious problem, and in fact their boss knew me by name from previous encounters. D.I had been volunteering in their school and I knew where the teacher in questions problems were, as did others.

This was all pretty easy as normally this teacher was out of the norm so to speak and had quite a reputation as a problem child before they stepped this far over the line.

Once our respective positions were defined then everything worked out.
My wife once called this part of my personality Papa Bear.
 
The district will have football teams. The teacher, principal, district, and officer are not going to be fired.

Aside from what was mentioned in the article specifically, it conveniently left out the following aspects of the Logan County Schools dress code...

Since there is a direct relationship between dress and behavior, it is believed that students and staff should dress appropriately for the school setting. Appropriate, will be defined here as right and correct for the school setting and functions, conducive to learning, and shall not distract from or be disruptive to the learning process.
Click to expand...

If the NRA shirt was deemed as not appropriate, then it isn't appropriate. The listing of various things not considered appropriate is only an example list.

The district may get sued, but I bet they don't lose. Their rules give leeway as to what is appropriate and what is not and it isn't what is defined by the student.
http://lc2.boe.loga.k12.wv.us/manhigh/code.htm

Let me add that I think the shirt should have been allowed. I also though political shirts should have been allowed back in 1980 when I was in high school, but they were deemed inappropriate in the weeks leading up to the election, again, at a public school. Kids had to turn their shirts inside out if they wore them and got detention for secondary offenses.
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top