Thursday, January 31, 2008
Don't Use the Sign for Gun Under Any Circumstances
Or you might be arrested like Benjamin Finley, an 18 year old student at the Iowa School for the Deaf. Finley used sign language to threaten staff members with being shot (Des Moines Register). He was arrested and charged with "intimidation with a dangerous weapon." (Apparently his signing hands were considered a dangerous weapon. One of the commenters asked if merely threatening qualifies as intimidation with a dangerous weapon, as opposed to actually brandishing a gun.) The charges were dropped though, and Finley was appropriately punished by being sent back to his home district.
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3 comments:
I don't see how sending him back to his home district is an appropriate punishment. How is that going to help him? Does his home district have qualified signing staff to deal with a student with prior behavior issues? I doubt it, especially in a state like Iowa.
If a hearing student in a hearing school so much as said "I'm going to shoot you", he'd be in hot water too.
When my son, who is hearing, was in first grade (6 years of age), he was purposely tripped by one of his classmates and he fell and hit his head on the wall. My son then promptly jumped up in anger and said, "I'm going to kill you". He was suspended for one week.
It isn't like when we were kids anymore. If you use threatening language, it is considered terroristic threatening and it's considered a serious offense.
ASL kills? That's a first! :-D
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