Only In South Carolina ...

Last week I told y’all about the woman arrested in a South Carolina grocery store for dropping an F-bomb in the bread aisle, but this story makes that one seem almost sane.

On the first day of school in Summerville, South Carolina, Tuesday, Alex Stone completed a writing assignment on making fake Facebook status updates. Stone wrote about buying a gun and killing his neighbor's pet dinosaur.

Fake. He said:

"I killed my neighbor's pet dinosaur, and, then, in the next status I said I bought the gun to take care of the business."

Fake; but Sumerville High School officials were so concerned about him using a gun in a fake status update on a fake Facebook page that they immediately called police, who came sirens blaring, tracked down Alex, handcuffed him and arrested him.

A search of his backpack and locker was pointless; the fake gun wasn’t found. Still Alex Stone, who was doing what he was assigned to do — create a fake status for a Facebook page — was arrested for disorderly conduct for arguing with the police.

Karen Gray, Alex’s mother, was also stunned by the arrest:

"I could understand if they made him re-write it because he did have 'gun' in it. But a pet dinosaur? I mean, first of all, we don't have dinosaurs anymore. Second of all, he's not even old enough to buy a gun. … If the school would have called me and told me about the paper and asked me to come down and discussed everything and, at least, get his point-of-view on the way he meant it. I never heard from the school, never. They never called me."

Now, I understand a Zero Tolerance policy on guns in school but Alex Stone never said he had a gun in school; he wrote a fake status update saying he used a gun to kill a neighbor’s pet dinosaur and BAM arrested. Investigators say the teacher who assigned the writing exercise contacted school officials after seeing the message containing the words "gun" and "take care of business" and they notified the police.

Alex Stone was suspended for the rest of the week, but says he doesn't want to return to Summerville High; he now wants to be home-schooled.

Where, presumably, he can write a fictional account of dinosaurs and not be handcuffed for it.

source

Whaddya You !@#*% Mean You Can't Swear In Mother@#!&*% South $#*@ Carolina?

Last week Danielle Wolf was at her local North Augusta, South Carolina Kroger store when she was overheard telling her own children to, ahem, “Stop squishing the f**king bread.”

And she was arrested for it. Hands cuffed behind her back, and taken out to a patrol car and placed in the “rear caged area” for dropping an F-bomb in the bread aisle.

Danielle Wolf denies that she was speaking to her children, and said she was talking to her husband instead but, under a local city ordinance, a person commits “disorderly conduct” when they “[u]tter, while in a state of anger, in the presence of another, any bawdy, lewd or obscene words or epithets.”

Man. If that was the law at my local Kroger I’d probably be on Death Row by now for foul language in a food store.

Some folks are arguing that Danielle Wolf’s arrest is unconstitutional because in 1971, in the case of Cohen v. California, the Supreme Court stated that “the State has no right to cleanse public debate to the point where it is grammatically palatable to the most squeamish among us.”

Unconstitutional, sure; stupid, definitely.

Still, I might start checking myself while squeezing melons at the grocery store this week because, well, South Carolina … 

via Think Progress