Some Bayesian analysis would help here, but that appeal to rationality is hopeless.
How many actual bombs are discovered in school lockers that are actually bombs. How many bomb threats or things that might be bombs occurred? How many of those were false? (Almost all). I don’t have time to find the data for this, but people who work on this all day long and force school evacuations do.
Feel free to evacuate a school for what is almost assuredly a false alarm.
I’m finding some of these comments terrifyingly incendiary!
I don’t know if it helps or not; but the question of ‘how should we panic when it almost certainly isn’t a bomb?’ admits not only of appeals to rationality; but appeals to inaction based on hysterical fear.
The path and location of school evacuations is virtually always well known(barring something unusual, it’ll be exactly the same one followed during fire drills). Not uncommonly, the need for enough space for everyone to stand around means an athletic field or parking lot gets used. Either such area is almost certainly easier to plant a bomb in without being detected(concealed in a vehicle, trash can, althletic equipment storage/bleachers, etc.) and allows for larger devices than something you have to carry into the building without arousing suspicion. Evacuation areas also tend to be big, flat, and open(sometimes surrounded by chain link fence, which would concentrate the crowd for trampling were it to panic and attempt to flee.
Unless the hypothetical attacker is an idiot, or really has something against the school building, they would do much better to issue a bomb threat and either have an explosive concealed in the evacuation area, or be in a concealed position from which they can fire on the crowd(plus, guns are substantially more legal than bombs for most people and in most places, and if you are attacking from a distance the inability of the crowd to rush and disarm you until they’ve figured out where you are means that even relatively low performance hunting equipment will do substantial damage). It’s about as perfect an ambush opportunity as one could ask for.
Neither outcome is actually likely in practice; but the argument that fleeing the building is at least as dangerous, probably more, as staying inside and carrying on with your day is fairly compelling.
Well, this is the same thing as when the Boston Police freaked out over some LED guerrilla marketing signs for Aqua Teen Hunger Force-- the logic is “we over-reacted, so you are guilty of terrorism.” Or as someone else put it “if during a thunderstorm the lightning makes an oak tree in your backyard look like a monster, that doesn’t mean you should go cut it down.”
I’m glad I’m not a kid now, and I feel sorry for those who are.
My girlfriend works in one. Already happened, by all accounts.
It’s not about actually simulating a bomb, “hoax device” basically means, “anything where we don’t know what it is,” given how people have been prosecuted.
I guess the one thing that can’t be taught in school really is judgement.
The police would like you to know your prank is not harmless or funny. (One or the other, they’re not sure which.)
In my high school, they set fire to the fetal pigs for advanced bio…Man did that stink.
Funnily enough, I’ve had WAY less hassles transiting through US airports with my kids, vs travelling alone (as a mid-30’s, average looking white dude).
There was a serial arsonist at my high school about 5-7 years before I attended there (which was from 91-96)… Not a student, some jackhole was coming in off the street and setting fires in the bathrooms. One day, the principal at the time (former CFL football player Russ Jackson) caught the would-be vandal coming out of one of the bathrooms, chased him out of the school, down the street, and full on tackled him face-first into the sidewalk. That’s how MY high school dealt with firestarters in the 80’s 
As for this stupid story… Bah. Welcome to the post-Columbine future.
Yiiiick. As if dissecting them wasn’t bad enough.
That’s one bad-ass principal. We need more like him.
It’s tired, but insofar as terrorists actually exist, this is a huge own-goal by their foes.
This kind of nonsense is also a thoroughly-gross calumny on real victims of terrorism.
That this patronizing smarmy nonsense is so firmly entrenched in purportedly “small government” conservative circles is frustrating as hell. “You dumb shits, you don’t even know what terror is!” Meanwhile they’re voting to reinstate mass surveillance legislation and fretting about immigration.
/me fumes
Nothing is funny in America anymore. America is no fun. Fuck the joy-killers and anti-laugh assholes.
Of course the cops were pissed, they didn’t get to use their swat team toys and there were no handy black kids to kill. This situation really sucks.
I recall bringing a fake time-bmb to high school for the photo shoot of our sf club (for 1976 yearbook). I painted three cardboard tubes dark red, made a stencil and sprayed the word (invented by Nobel) with yellow paint on each one, wrapped them up in electrician’s tape, and added an old fashioned alarm clock connected by coils of wire. A lab coat and pocket protector w/pens completed the effect. (My own thick glasses were sufficient.)
I would scan the photo and share it but then I’d get on a list somewhere.
I shudder to think that, if the same (non)sensibilities had been in play then as now, I’d still be in jail.
The ones who should go to prison are the idiots who think that in a world of digital clocks and cell phones that any kind of bomb would tick. Hell, they didn’t even tick in James Bond movies!
Plus, I’m also pretty sure these sorts of reactions were one of Osama bin Laden’s goals. 13 years after his terror attack and people are still all freaked out.
My senior year in an enthicly diverse magnet school, the Italian kids came in together dressed in gangster suits, sunglasses,and carried fake guns. They proceeded to the main office where they kidnapped the president of the school.This was 1979, and the photos were later put in the yearbook. What have we become, life is not that scary.
So what would be the appropriate modern day punishments for the stink bombs, random fire alarms, toilet papering, and drive-by catapult attacks that plagued the secondary schools I had the misfortune to attend?
