Jake Shoemaker, a senior at Hilliard Davidson High School in Ohio, was suspended this week for refusing to participate in the walkout that students staged against gun violence in schools.

Jake was given the choice of attending the protest or going to a mandatory study hall, both of which he felt like would sit him on one side of an issue on which he wished to remain neutral. Jake said:

“I really didn’t have a choice here. If you walked out you were with the protest, you were for gun control and anti-gun violence. And if you sat in this pit with all these other people you were pro gun-violence.”

Jake defended his decision to attempt to stay neutral during the protest by stating the following:

“It’s the least political protest that exists. The thing that I was protesting was politics in the classroom. I feel it has no place in a school, in a district, anywhere.”

Shoemaker had even met with the principal of the school the day before to discuss the protest’s purpose, and he was told it was a way for students to express themselves. When he stayed in the classroom to do homework during the protest, he was served a 1 day suspension for “refusal to follow instructions”.

To those with any common sense, forcing the kids to either attend a study hall or go to the “walkout” is a poisonous dichotomy, making it seemingly impossible to have a pro-gun opinion in this situation. Who wants to sit in a study hall when they could be free to roam the campus in protest? The school clearly was encouraging students to attend the walkout by creating this set of two choices, one of which is clearly the more attractive option (attending the walkout).