At what point will the American people finally rise up and say ‘enough is enough?’ Seriously.
A Georgia high school senior was reportedly charged with a felony for the supposed crime of keeping a knife in his tackle box on campus during school hours.
The Washington Times reports:
Police were performing a random sweep of a Georgia high school when they charged a 17-year-old student with a weapons felony for fishing knives in a tackle box in his car.
Cody Chitwood, a senior at Lassiter High School and avid fisherman, turned himself in and was released on $1,000 bond, The Daily Caller reported.
Drug-sniffing dogs detected black powder in the student’s car, which turned out to be a firecracker that had been in the car since Independence Day, the report said.
The firecracker was enough to warrant a full search, which lead police to the tackle box.
“It’s pretty ridiculous,” Chitwood told The Marietta Daily Journal. “I have an attorney and I’m hoping to get the felony dropped so I can still get in the Air Force.”
If the district attorney goes forward with the charges, Chitwood could face up to 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
It would be one thing if the kid had brandished his fishing knife on school grounds -- and then threatened students with it. But that never happened. Instead, a strange set of circumstances allowed policemen to search his car, and thus find the “weapon” in question.
One obvious problem here, my friends, is that the regulatory state has become so swollen and so bureaucratic that it appears to be virtually impossible to even know what the laws of the land are anymore. As Mark Steyn has pointed out, Americans are guilty of violating any number of laws on any given day without even knowing it! I wonder: Did this poor chap even know he was violating school rules, let alone state law, when he left his knife in his tackle box before heading to class? Who knows? Strangely, we now live in a society where murder, arson and kidnapping are on the same level, legally speaking, as storing fishing tackle in one’s own car. Good grief.