School Insanity: 17-Year-Old Hunter Faces 'Zero Tolerance' Criminal Charges

School administrators and
police in Pewaukee, Wisconsin, escalated what seems like a minor
disciplinary matter into full-blown criminal charges and likely
expulsion for the unlucky teen involved.

What did he do wrong? He was smoking on school property, and is
also a hunting enthusiast.

Seventeen-year-old student Alexander Chiers was apparently
caught smoking by a Pewaukee High School administrator. That’s bad,
sure—and it is against the rules—but couldn’t the school
easily have dealt with this on its own?

No, no, the school had to summon the police as well, and then
things got much worse for Chiers. A search of his vehicle revealed
that the teen had committed the most extreme of zero tolerance
violations: being an avid hunter. There was a rifle and bayonet in
his car, hunting knives, and 400 rounds of ammunition.

News sources disagree on the timeline.
WISN reports that a school official checked the car, noticed
the knives, and then called police;
TMJ 4 claims that the police were called to the school because
of the smoking incident and then discovered the weapons after
searching the car. The latter account makes the authorities look
worse since it establishes the act of smoking, rather than the
discovery of knives, as the impetus for calling the police.

I contacted both the police and the school to clear up the
confusion and learn more about what happened—neither office
responded immediately.

Regardless of which way it went down, Chiers is now facing two
criminal charges for bringing weapons onto school grounds. He has
also been suspended and will likely be expelled, in keeping with
the school’s zero tolerance policies.

It’s not even a possibility that Chiers was actually a danger to
the school: police and district officials questioned him and all
agreed that this is simply a kid who likes hunting. He said he was
storing the rifle for a friend and was planning a trip to the
shooting range. Nobody disputes that. He shouldn’t have been
smoking, and he shouldn’t have stored his hunting gear in his car,
but that’s all he did wrong.

Does the punishment fit the crime? Not even close.

I’ll add that the two media reports come off as extremely
unsympathetic to Chiers and make all kinds of absurd excuses for
the authorities. In particular, here is
WISN:

Since Columbine, and the dozens of school shootings since,
police have to assume the worst at first.

After recovering the guns, knives and hundreds of rounds of
ammunition, police said they had to do everything they could to try
to find out if the boy meant to do any harm there.

We know that neither Columbine nor any other school shooting
would have been prevented by hysterical overreaction on the part of
authorities to accidental breaches of school weapons policies. Zero
tolerance does not deter purposeful and murderous delinquents; it
always and only punishes harmless and accidental delinquents.

I’ll post an update if or when the authorities respond.