PC Police Strike Again

The Left loves to claim First Amendment protection for everything from pornography to treason. However, they are not very good at extending the protection of the First Amendment to ideas with which they disagree. And the idea that the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution should be treated equally as the First is one they strongly oppose, to the point of censoring anyone with a differing opinion. Nowhere are these censors more active than in the school system.

The latest evidence of the PC police's inconsistency in First Amendment support and their virulent opposition to the Second Amendment came in Pennsylvania. According to the Associated Press, a fourteen-year-old boy who wore a T-shirt bearing an image of a weapon was given detention when he refused to cover the images. As the Associated Press reports,

The shirt bears the image of a military sidearm and on the front pocket says "Volunteer Homeland Security." On the back, over another image of the weapon, are the words "Special issue Resident Lifetime License — United States Terrorist Hunting Permit — Permit No. 91101 — Gun Owner — No Bag Limit."

Officials at the Millersville school told him to turn his shirt inside out. When Miller refused, he got two days of detention.

Fortunately, the boy's parents are more cognizant of the rights extended by the First Amendment than the blinkered school officials. They filed a lawsuit against the school district for denying their son his First Amendment rights. The school district's response? A lawyer for the school district claimed that,

...school must create a safe environment for students in the post-Columbine era, and bringing even the image of a gun to school violates the district's policy.

This is the height of idiocy. An image of a gun on a shirt that clearly is patriotic, pro-American is somehow creating an unsafe area? How about the kids who wear T-shirts celebrating drugs, or mass murderers like Mao Tse-tung or Che Guevara? Do those also create an unsafe environment? I would hope that the school district loses this case. If they had a uniform and the student violated the uniform code, that would be one thing, but disciplining the boy because he wore a shirt with the image of a weapon is entirely ridiculous.

On a side note, where is the press' usual reluctance to name names of non-adults? The student in question is underage. Were this a story about a teen pregnancy, I have no doubt the press would refuse to name the girl in question (though the purported father's name would probably be splashed all over the headline). Why was this student not treated similarly? is it becasue of his message or because of his gender?