High school student, hammer arrested for creating in-game map of his school

According to FortBendNow, via Slashdot, a high school student at Clements High School in Fort Bend, Texas was arrested (and expelled) for creating a Counterstrike map that replicated the grounds of his school.

The student in question apparently created the map as a free download used primarily by himself and his friends, but since administrators simply lack the ability to differentiate fiction from non-fiction, as soon as they stopped looking for the Quad Damage, they removed him from class. Later, police went to the boy’s house where they arrested him and confiscated a hammer under the pretense that it could potentially be a “dangerous weapon”. 

The sheer idiocy of this event goes to show just how successful the media has been at convincing the general public that video games are tantamount to Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses for inciting violence. If parents and teachers could just learn to spend time getting to know the interests of the children they have in their care, instead of condemning them for those same interests, many fewer kids would find it necessary to seek out assault rifles to express themselves.