"Would you be saying that if she had been selling crystal meth and crack to her friends and been caught with it?"

Even though that's not really analogous to what happened, I would still be calling for the guilty officials to be hung from lamp posts in front of the school district headquarters and left to rot as a warning to others. The entire drug war is insane, precisely because it's used to justify crap like this.

A better analogy would be if she had been accused of what you said by a student who actually was caught dealing.

See my comment up-thread

Therein, I mention the Deacons of Defense, armed civil rights activists.

Also note that many post-Civil War gun control laws in the South were intended with the specific intent of disarming blacks; it was widely accepted that these laws would never be applied to white folks.

The antebellum Dredd Scott decision said you can't make blacks citizens because then we'd have to let them have guns -- an implicit acknowledgment that arms are useful for resisting tyranny.

And, seriously now, would you burn a cross on the front yard of a house with man holding his shotgun on you?

Outside the U.S., let me point to the Warsaw Uprising, where a poorly-armed neighborhood of Jews stood off the German Army for months.

History abounds with examples of enslaved people achieving freedom through force of arms; those like you who scorn the idea somehow never manage to show the example of a free people being subjugated despite being armed. Put up or shut up.

Dab Nang It!

This, of course, was in response to Qrlx's post, and that's the one that showed in preview.

So, why is my reply now showing as a reply to a reply to a reply that wasn't even there when I started typing?

"...The practical reason for the Second Amendment is that private ownership of guns was necessary to perpetuate slavery."

I cannot let this go unchallenged.

The practical reason was that the Founders had just won a war against the most powerful nation on Earth starting with a privately-armed militia. They knew from strong, recent experience that a people well practiced with arms they owned were the first defense against tyranny.

Concorde -- "the shot heard round the world" -- was fought over a gun-control action: the British trying to confiscate privately owned arms and put them into an armory they controlled.

I agree with your comment to this extent: citizens should be able to possess the current military issue-weapon. In our times, that would be M-16s, or at least its semi-auto equivalent, the AR-15 and clones thereof.

(Hey, Mr. Obama! Want your new mandatory-volunteer corps to be actually-volunteer? Set it up as an Article 1, Section 8 militia, and let volunteers keep their issue weapon after their training hitch in high school.)

In any event, times have changed. The very first gun control measures were laws keeping guns out of the hands of slaves, indentured servants, and Indians. Many modern gun control laws were originally enacted after the Civil War to keep guns out of the hands of freed black men.

One of the reasons given in the infamous Dredd Scott decision for not accepting black people as real human beings was specifically that then they'd be allowed to possess arms under the Second Amendment.

In my own lifetime...look up Deacons For Defense and Justice, armed black churchmen who rode with other, more pacifistic civil rights activists as body guards.

In the current case, scroll down through this thread and read the comments from those who would use their arms on the school thugs who perpetrated this vile sex crime. That's what the right to keep and bear is about -- not revolution, not overthrowing the government, but checking it, returning it to its limits. Reminding officials who might otherwise think themselves above the law that there are consequences beyond the law. Yes, the citizens imposing those consequences would be in prison or dead themselves -- but that's exactly what Jefferson was talking about when he said the Tree of Liberty must occasionally be watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.

(And, yes, I agree one hundred percent that sex-offender registries are also abominations, but if we're going to have them, the two women who actually performed the search and any school official who approved it should damn well be on one, if they survive prison.)