Well, they go it half right, and they still have light years to travel. Members of the school board in Crookston, Minnesota were treading on treacherous and controversial waters after concluding that all pictures of students with firearms, regardless of context, was not suitable content for the high school yearbook, in spite of the fact that the institution’s sports program showcases a trapshooting team.
The ruling also inexplicably put the proverbial kibosh on students raised around guns and hunting, to feature any images of guns within their senior portfolio.
The Crookston Times reports that the initial and questionable consensus by the board set off a firestorm of heated debate in the small town in the Northwestern corner of the state (this is not the blue ridden ominous haze of Chicago or Seattle), which ultimately led to a partial resolution Monday, allowing photos of guns associated directly with trapshooting team to be immortalized within the pages of the school’s yearly annual, but not before an edgy series of exchanges in the social networking theater ensued. Allegedly, opponents of the original ruling used the evidence of participants from other sports teams being granted permission to be photographed with related equipment or apparatuses, as their underlying argument to reverse the policy in relation to sports teams (detractors fail to realize that trapshooting is extremely sanctioned and regulated and competitors take the sports very seriously). However, the board’s original decision as to the inclusion of individual student yearbook firearm photos still stands, and apparently a student and family are left battling with the school over the ramifications of an overzealous bureaucracy.
While legal counsel for the student is currently being explored by the parents, the current knee-jerk overreaction to the concept of firearms by leaders in education, who influence tenuous and flawed policy, only equates to detriment and wasted resources in the convolution of fear and hysteria with reason and fundamental rights. In this case, the simple adoption of stringent guidelines on specified content, has literally backfired, and now the community has to pay the price as the legal tendrils are slowly and painfully untangled. Individuals and organizations forget the simple axiom, that while policy is easy to adopt, it is nearly impossible to erase. Unfortunately, more than a few individuals are intoxicated by the drug of regulation and control, and freedoms and rights are the inconsequential victims.
Read the Crockston Times article here.