Earlier this month, March For Our Lives members in Atlanta staged a student walkout in protest over the state of Georgia not passing a pile of gun control. That was far from the first walkout over anti-Second Amendment sentiments we've seen, either, and in neither case were the students involved punished. It was a matter of free speech, we were told.
Meanwhile, there's a case working its way through the courts right now that shows a double standard at work on guns and free speech.
While students can disrupt the entire school with their walkouts and be celebrated by teachers and administrators, a third grader in Michigan was prevented from wearing a hat on "hat day" with an AR-15 and the words "Come and Take It," a historic quote that's a common sentiment in gun rights circles.
The Firearms Policy Coalition is taking the matter to court:
Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) today announced that an opening brief was filed in an FPC-backed lawsuit challenging a Michigan public school’s ban on gun-related speech that prevented a third-grader from wearing a hat to the school’s “hat day” bearing the text “Come and Take It” and an image of an AR-15 rifle. The brief, filed with the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, can be viewed at firearmspolicy.org/mccrumb.
“Public schools may not violate the First Amendment rights of their students because they don’t like the Second Amendment and protected weapons like America’s Rifle, the AR-15. The Sixth Circuit should remind school administrators that the Constitution’s protections apply even to speech they disfavor about rights they dislike,” said FPC President Brandon Combs.
“[Plaintiff’s] speech, which expressed her views about constitutionally protected rights, is protected by the First Amendment: Elementary-school students have the right to speak in school unless their speech falls within one of the narrow exceptions to protection (which are not applicable here) or unless their speech can be reasonably forecast to cause substantial disruption,” argues the brief. “And on this record, no such forecast is possible.”
The issue is that schools have had a zero-tolerance policy on the books since Columbine, apparently under the mistaken idea that would-be mass killers somehow broadcast their plans by wearing shirts and hats that just so happen to have guns and literally no one else would do so.
Of course, since Columbine, we've seen a whole lot more mass murders in our schools despite this idiotic rule.
We've also seen kids famously punished for biting their Pop Tart into the shape of a gun. About a week ago, a girl in Brunswick, Georgia, was suspended for pretending a banana was a gun. Neither of these were harbingers of impending doom.
In this case, there's even less reason to be concerned because this wasn't even just a random activity of a kid. This was political speech, which is expressly protected by the Constitution. While students at our schools often don't realize they have rights, including the right to speak freely, that doesn't mean they don't actually have them.
What this kid did was covered.
Walkouts, though, which I mention at the top of this piece, actually aren't. As the FPC notes in their comments, speech that causes "substantial disruption" isn't considered protected speech in schools. You can wear a hat with a political position on it, but you can't get up and have a mass exodus. Administrators can act to prevent walkouts. They can punish students who take part. Yes, they can prevent them.
But they don't.
They only seem to want to do that when a kid wants to wear a hat with a slogan they don't like. Ironically, administrators taught the kid why it's important that if they want the guns, they shouldn't be given up easily.