US student expelled for playing videogame
You’ve got to wonder what children across America are thinking at the moment. After the shock of the Virginia Tech massacre, a news story broke that 18-year-old student Allen Lee was arrested for writing a “disturbing” essay that depicted shooting and necrophilia. The debate about his arrest seemed to be dividing people. Now, after that, there is the case of a senior high school student in Texas who has been expelled for posing a terrorist threat by playing a videogame.
The student used the game Counter Strike to create an environment very similar to Clements High School, where he studied. The student was, effectively, simulating a shooting at his own school. While this is probably in poor taste, it seems to me just a case of a student using his imagination based on his surroundings. It may be a little perverse, but what harm was he really doing, and should he have been expelled? I think not. It is also not made clear if he created this virtual environment before or after Virginia Tech.
The real stupidity, as I see it, in this story comes forth here (taken from Click2Houston.com:
"Because of the violent nature of the game — people killing people. The setting of the game was an exact replica of Clements High School," said Mary Ann Simpson, the Fort Bend Independent School District spokeswoman. "I think removing him was probably a good thing to do because we have no idea if he was actually going to come to school with a gun or something," student Maggie Berado said.
She thinks removing him was probably the right idea because she has no idea if he was going to come to school with a gun or something. What an absolute disgrace. Are children not allowed to be children anymore without fear of being expelled from school? Not everything that comes from a student’s imagination is going to be pure and to society’s liking; surely that’s the nature of being a child. This student had done nothing that in any way suggested he would be coming to school some time to massacre his friends.
If I had had a game such as Counter Strike when I was younger, I might well have made a setting similar to a place I had been to. How many more stories of American schools second guessing that their students might be potential killers are we going to see in the next few months.
Techno' tags: America, Virginia Tech, Allan Lee, Texas, Clements High School
