What hath the NRA wrought? A teenager is arrested for wearing an NRA shirt

The paranoia of school administrators, especially in the South, is getting out of hand.

On Thursday, 14 year old Jared Marcum, an 8th grader at Logan Middle School was arrested and charged with "disrupting an educational process" (SAY WHAT?) and obstructing a police officer. The source of the problem? An NRA (National Rifle Association) t-shirt, which Marcum reportedly refused to remove while in line for lunch at the school cafeteria. According to a report by the Associated Press and picked up online by Yahoo!, Marcum had worn the shirt through 5 class periods without incident. Come lunch, an unnamed teacher sees the shirt, forces Marcum out of line, and orders him to either turn the shirt inside out (which would've prevented further drama) for the rest of the day, or remove it altogether. Marcum, knowing that the shirt was not in violation of the school dress code, refused, and, well, you know the rest.

Getting away from the topic for a moment, what in the name of Julia Child is going on here? Lunch constitutes an "educational process"? If there'd been no complaints about the shirt in 5 earlier classes, why bug the kid during a lunch break?

The problem at the core, is, of course, the NRA, whose influence in Congress has resulted in gun reform bills being defeated in Congress because the gun lobby has too many lawmakers in their pockets. Wayne LaPierre and his legion of followers whine about the 2nd Amendment being violated, but what they fail to see, blinded by the money they toss around, is that the 2nd Amendment has been abused by an assortment of people, and by defending the Amendment, the NRA is unwittingly enabling more psychologically or morally challenged individuals to obtain firearms with few or no restrictions. In this case, the mere presence of the NRA's logo has become anathema to certain people, and if those people are in positions of authority, they in turn are misinterpreting their own rules to satisfy themselves, leading to some embarrassing situations such as the one in West Virginia described above. If anyone was actually causing a disruption in the cafeteria, it was the teacher who was upset with young Jared Marcum and his choice of t-shirt.

Trust me, if Marcum chose a University of West Virginia shirt to wear, there'd not be a problem.