High school student faces adult felony charges for setting off chemical reaction
themarysue.com
themarysue.com
http://www.opposingviews.com/i/health/carmen-tarleton-attack...
The MSDS specifically says never to mix lye and aluminum in a closed bottle. In fact, you're never supposed to go anywhere near lye without goggles and a dust mask. Kids will be kids and if they want to do this stuff in their garage then whatever, but doing this in a public place where no one has any safety gear on is wildly irresponsible and puts everyone at risk.
Permanently expelling the student and pressing felony charges might be overkill, but anything less than suspending them for a couple weeks would probably be similarly inappropriate.
Is it just me or is this state hell bent on breeding more stupid by grinding up the smart for sustenance?
Funny story. The high school (and I believe the middle school too) in the town where I grew up is close enough to the CIA campus in Langley that model rockets have been known to land there and be returned by men in suits (with any cameras taken out, of course).
See also:
Florida Man, the world's worst superhero: https://twitter.com/_FloridaMan
The 'Florida' tag on Fark: http://www.fark.com/topic/florida
Oh, wait, someone did, in 1927, and nobody launched a generalized war on sanity as a result.
There must be something else different.
While I can't know the internal motivations of those involved, I would observe that neither the race nor the gender issues are necessary, in the Occam's Razor sense of the term [1]. The student suspended for chewing his poptart into a gun was a 7-year-old white boy. The student suspended for discussing shooting a Hello Kitty bubble gun was a 5-year-old white girl. Zero tolerance stupidity has been doled out across the board with no apparent regard for, well, anything, like sanity, let alone race or gender lines.
The 1995 Valedictorian of my high school lit off the hydrogen in the hydrolysis experiment, because, you know, it was there. Good thing he didn't pull that stunt today. Though I imagine that experiment has probably been long removed for creating dangerous quantities of explosives in the classroom.
[1] As a reminder, Occam's Razor is a heuristic, not a proof. Perhaps racism or sexism is involved, the lack of necessity is not a disproof of their presence, but the Razor suggests that aspect be cut away from your dominant hypothesis, pending future evidence requiring them in the explanation.