Constitutional Rights at school?

[EddieMcD]

Originally Posted by Cory

And while we're on the topic, that's absolutely ABSURD that you can even have a gun in a rack in your car, unloaded or not. Johnny pisses you off in English class, and you go to your car during break, grab your unloaded gun... and what do you do? proceed to load it and go shoot Johnny. Yes an extreme case, but guns have ABSOLUTELY NO BUSINESS at schools unless it's in the holster of a police officer

Yet more proof that humans are their own worst enemy; "Guns don't kill people, people kill people."

Originally Posted by Cory

It's the school's job to keep you safe. That's been deemed important enough for you to sacrifice those rights. I'm against things like the Patriot Act, but I really don't see the problem here. What do you have in your locker and/or car that you don't want to see? If you don't have anything allowed, what's the problem?

Slightly more on topic (and keeping with my theme of quoting), I'm going to play devil's advocate here and say that (slightly paraphrased) "Those who give up a small amount of liberty for a small amount of safety deserve neither." The thing is, if they start taking away rights, it can easily become a domino effect. Let's say that a school can search a backpack of any person it deems could potentially start a problem to keep the place safe. Sure, we're only sacrificing a little bit of privacy in a public place, and it seems like a good cause. Now what happens when they start automatically searching backpacks when the students come in. You think that okay, we've only sacrificed a little (keep in mind this is relative to the first part of this), and we may be a little safer. Now, a completely sane and not weapon-toting person is thought to have something dangerous. Because of the previous rules, now there's a new rule that they can hold the person at gunpoint, and it doesn't seem like much... until you step back and look at it from the outside (which IMO, is the main problem with the Patriot Act, but that's another discussion). The same holds true with searching cars (which the schools have absolutely nothing business with). And what could a person be hiding that they don't want anybody to see? I can think of a few, among these are medication you don't want others knowing about (and this could technically bypass the lawful doctor/patient confidentiality), gym clothes (especially when it comes to those hormone bombs known as freshmen), sports equipment (which can easily be misconstrued as a weapon), valuables, cell phones, perhaps a game boy, CD players, I-Pods (all things which are legal to carry, but schools like taking away at first sight, even without them being on), magazines (which someone will attempt to find immoral no matter what it's about), etc. I think you get my point in that there are many things people like to keep to themselves that are perfectly legal (especially when you consider humans are quite possessive).

Slight tangent: a few years ago, there was a large mock trial with a lot of Rhode Island schools involved on this topic. Using every aspect of the law (mostly at the state level), the results were quite simple: lockers are school property, and thusly anything in them can be searched (for the record, I just found it easier to carry everything with me). However, backpacks are not school property. While on the person, they are personal property, and would need a warrant from a judge to search via the fourth ammendment (note that this changes once they enter the locker). Same with cars, though public highway laws still apply in the parking lot. Just a small FYI from my corner of the country.