Gun-Toting Senior Plans to Appeal Ban on His Pic
by Jim Brown
March 24, 2005
(AgapePress) - A federal judge has barred a New Hampshire high school senior from posing with a shotgun in his yearbook photo.Avid trap shooter Blake Douglass wants his Londonderry High School senior portrait to feature him with his shotgun broke open over his shoulder. But Judge Steven McAuliffe has ruled that the decision to ban the photo was made by student editors, and thus school administrators did not violate the free-speech rights of Douglass.
Attorney Penny Dean, who represents Douglass, says McAuliffe's ruling is not surprising considering he reportedly served as an advisor to anti-gun New Hampshire politician Jean Shaheen. Dean also says faculty members wanted the photo withheld from the yearbook due to their political and anti-gun bias.
"When you look through their yearbook, you have pictures of John Kerry posters in rooms and in the schoolteachers' classrooms," Dean offers as an example. In addition, she sees a double-standard being exercised against her client. "You have Blake's gun magazines being taken away from him and being equated with pornography when other kids are allowed to have violent video game magazines in the same class period in a time which you are allowed to have magazines," she says.
The attorney also asserts that school officials erroneously claim the photo ban was made by student editors. Based on testimony, she says, that appears not to be the case.
"I was really disappointed," the attorney says. "The school has said all along it was a 10-0 vote against Blake Douglass, and one of the students got up and said she had never voted against Blake -- which means there's at least a 9-1 vote, which is contrary to what the school had represented.
"I think the larger issue is that most of the kids in deposition testimony said they were not editors [but] that they had been asked to give their opinion and they thought they were [doing that], not making a decision."
School officials claim they were merely following their "no props" policy for yearbook photos. Douglass plans to take the case to the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
