Guns and poses: Nebraska school OK's guns in senior portraits

BROKEN BOW, Neb. -- A central Nebraska school board has decided to let students pose with guns in their senior portraits.

Hastings television station KHAS says the Broken Bow school board took the action at its meeting Monday night.

The issue arose last year when a student was denied permission to pose with a gun.

Superintendent Mark Sievering says that as district officials talked about the issue, "There was a sense that to allow a student to have a firearm, as long as it was done in a tasteful manner in terms of a hunting or sporting-type picture, that that might be OK."

Ken Myers, the Broken Bow School Board President, echoed that sentiment.

"We have the 1 Box Shooting Club, a great trap range and sporting clays range," Myers said. "A lot of youth are interested in that so that brings up firearms, I guess, a little bit more to the forefront along with the hunting."

Sievering says students may not be pointing guns at the cameras in their pictures or the photos will not be used in yearbooks or other school publications.

In 2004, a New Hampshire school board voted to ban a photo of a student from the senior section of his high school yearbook because he posed with a shotgun. The student later unsuccessfully sued the school.