In separate incidents, Woonsocket arrested two 12 year olds.  The photo accompanying Lauren Clem’s Valley Breeze article is worth a glance.  It shows a child being led away in handcuffs by a much larger police officer while another carries his backpack.

One of the children (although I don’t know whether it was this one) involved a student “overheard making threats against the school.”  As usual, we get no details about what he said, but he now faces that catch-all charge of “disorderly conduct.”

The other student supposedly posted somewhere on social media that he had a knife and could get a gun.  Again, we go from zero to sixty in a split second.  Because he did have a knife on school grounds, he’s been charged with “possession of a prohibited weapon.”  And again, we get no details about the knife, whether it was a small Swiss Army knife or a large hunting blade.  We’re left to wonder whether that makes a difference.

Another Woonsocket school was locked down for two hours because one student told another on the phone that he or she thought some other student had a gun.  No gun was found, but five students (apparently separately) had skipped out of class, so the worst was assumed.

It’s starting to feel like there are no grownups.  We’re being swung around by people who want to victimize us and people who feel the power of their own sense of victimization.