So basically Ahmed, a 14 year old boy from Texas, brought a device to school which resembles a bomb out of a movie. But it was actually a 1980s mains-powered clock, which he had transplanted into a small suitcase. blogs.artvoice.com/techvoice/2015/09/17/reverse-engineering-ahmed-mohameds-clock-and-ourselves/
It went off in his English lesson, and the police were called, on the basis that he had a suspicious-looking device.
When this was reported, there was outrage, and he has been showered with hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts, scholarships, invitations to the White House, and so on. twitter.com/POTUS/status/644193755814342656 microsoft-news.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/satya.jpg
The lessons that America has learned from this are not really clear.
Two kids have just been expelled from a competition for making a mild joke about this:
news.mlh.io/when-jokes-go-too-far-09-19-2015
And it turns out in the past that students have been given felony bomb hoax charges for putting alarm clocks in lockers, set to go off every two minutes. abc7.com/news/senior-prank-lands-2-students-in-jail-on-felony-charges/746904/
And in 2007, Boston went into panic as a result of LED displays which look rather less like bombs than Ahmed's clock did: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_Mooninite_panic
So AIBU to think that the final response to this saga is a lot of BS, given that in an environment where schools are shooting grounds, and bombs and other terrorist outrages are far from rare (there was an Islamist killing in May, not far from Ahmed's school), schools WILL continue to respond to suspicious looking devices as they did to Ahmed's clock, and it's a bit silly to say 'poor lad, just a misunderstanding, here have a pile of freebies and a massive cash settlement'. Ahmed's Dad is very media-savvy and Ahmed comes away very nicely, but this doesn't change the world we live in - schools, not just in the US, but in the UK also, are no longer places where you can 'mess around' in any number of manners, because activities that might previously have seen as 'hijinks', anything from messing around on school computers, to school pranks, to sending a photo of yourself to your boyfriend or girlfriend are now serious crimes. So for me the response is not 'poor Ahmed', but 'make sure your children don't things that could be result in arrests', such as off-colour posts on social media or bringing improvised electronics to school.