More crazy reaction to VA-Tech killings: Chinese boy arrested for possessing map, hammer

Posted by Joshua Holland at 6:30 AM on May 4, 2007.

Earlier this week, it was a high school kid arrested after turning in a violence-filled creative writing assignment, and now it's an incomprehensible story about an un-named Chinese-American schoolboy* …

Richard Chen, president of the Fort Bend Chinese-American Voters League and a acquaintance of the boy's family, said he is a talented student who enjoys computer games and learned how to create maps (also sometimes known as "mods"), which provide new environments in which games may be played.

The map the boy designed mimicked Clements High School. And, sources said, it was uploaded either to the boy's home computer or to a computer server where he and his friends could access and play on it. Two parents apparently learned from their children about the existence of the game, and complained to FBISD administrators, who investigated.

Maybe this is a badly written report, or maybe I'm dense, but what exactly is the problem with mapping the school? At least absent other danger signs. I mean, I can see how it could be used for planning and maybe practicing for a killing spree, but couldn't it also be for 8,000 other things, including the kind of nerdy hobbies that might get a kid a healthy salary in architecture down the road (heard of Autocad?).

"They arrested him," Chen said of FBISD police, "and also went to the house to search." The Lin family consented to the search, and a hammer was found in the boy's room, which he used to fix his bed, because it wasn't in good shape, Chen said. He indicated police seized the hammer as a potential weapon.

"They decided he was a terroristic threat," said one source close to the district's investigation.

A "terroristic threat." Ugh.

This is our national obsession with fear at work. It's the argument Michael Moore made in Bowling for Columbine -- it's our AusländerHass and War on Whatever and gun culture and fear of being overrun by dusky immigrants all coming together until everyone in that Fort Bend school was waiting for the monsters to show up on Maple Street.

PS: According to the Vatican, simply criticizing the Pope makes you a terrorist.

*HT: reader katz22br]

Tagged as: civil liberties, va tech

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.