Originally published at: Michigan school district has figured it out and banned backpacks | Boing Boing
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3 Likes
This makes no sense, how are they supposed to carry their emergency first aid trauma kits now?
25 Likes
As long as their parents will be able to keep collections of weapons at home, it’s all worth it!
9 Likes
What a lame idea. If you really want to solve this problem you need to ban the students.
15 Likes
Gun owners tuck guns into their waistbands, why not just outlaw pants?
16 Likes
This rule is stupid. You you imagine all of the middle & high schoolers having to deal with bringing in menstrual products. Or kids who have to have to carry around an epipen or medicine.
All because Jim Bob and Cletus are scared of little kids ringing their door bell.
14 Likes
My kids have graduated, but when they were in high school, they didn’t use the lockers because they carried all of their books in a backpack.
There were lockers - the halls were lined with them as is tradition - but the school didn’t even assign them, because the kids had stopped using them.
12 Likes
I’ll bet money they aren’t allowed to carry or take medicine, and have to go to the nurse to take it. Because drugs.
10 Likes
I’m still not coffeed-up enough to do the legwork; but I’m quite sure that a solid percentage of the notable school shootings of the recent past involved someone just carrying an un or minimially concealed weapon straight into the building from outside and using it more or less immediately.
There was the one case that involved backpack concealment, and made headlines because the shooter was atypically young and the teacher is making an occupational safety claim about it; but the idea that executing a school shooting relies on a level of concealment that you can’t get with just clothing; rather than being done either with an openly carried rifle and some alacrity or a handgun you could conceal in something rather smaller than a backpack seems like a massive ‘citation needed’.
At least the ban should massively impact legitimate use cases; that’s always a plus.
16 Likes
This is a bad call for so many reasons, and all it does is give the illusion of safety. But the kids only have to deal with about two months of this crap. Then the administration can make a new, hopefully better, decision over the summer.
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I don’t think anyone is under the illusion that they are safe in America’s schools.
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By the fall they should have had time to tweak the rule to include winter jackets.
13 Likes
They need to ban all that fucking homework for little kids - no child should have to carry the equivalent of a quarter or more of their weight.
13 Likes
My god… the ways America continues to bend over backwards in weird new ways to avoid getting rid of guns is bizarre and surreal. My hearts go out to these poor kids who are going to need a lot of therapy. 
17 Likes
A pretty dumb idea. On several occasions I had business meetings in (Ohio) state office and datacenter buildings that prohibit backpacks. My backpack has a simple way to hide the straps and carry by a side handle. That was sufficient to meet the requirements every time without leaving a single thing behind.
6 Likes
I think this is bettermore accurate…
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Many (most?) of the infamous mass shootings at American schools didn’t even involve kids smuggling guns in backpacks; you couldn’t conceal an AR-15 style rifle in a backpack anyway. The killers just enter the schools carrying the guns and start shooting people.
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No, because then you’d get kids getting hung | chocked out | tied up from them. /sarcasm
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