Florida Parents Call For ‘Assassination Classroom’ Manga To Be Banned From School Libraries Due To Its Depictions Of Violence
As the saying goes, ‘Never let a tragedy go to waste’ – and in searching for a target to blame for the recent shooting in Nashville, a group of angry moms have shifted their attentions from the usual favorite of violent video games to Yuusei Matsui’s best selling manga Assassination Classroom.
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According to The Florida Standard, just days after a transgender man robbed six people – including three children – of their lives at the Covenant School in Green Hills, Nashville, parents in the Hillsborough County Public Schools district began filing complaints over the school’s library carrying copies of Assassination Classroom due to its depiction of students actively trying to kill their teacher.
Serialized in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump from July 2012 to March 2016, Assassination Classroom follows the misfit students of Class 3-E who are tasked by the Japanese government to prevent the Earth from being destroyed.
As part of their training, the class must assassinate their alien junior high homeroom teacher, Koro-sensei, before the end of the school year. To make matters even sweeter, whichever student gets the kill will receive a ¥10 billion reward.
“It’s stating the obvious to say that the theme of this book series is disturbing in light of the prevalence of school violence, concerned parent Julie Gebhards told The Florida Standard.
“While the books have fictitious characters, the settings are realistic,” she argued, before questioning, “Why do we have 70 copies of Assassination Classroom in middle schools?”
According to the Florida Standard, Yusei Matsui’s Assassination Classroom is available in numerous “middle and high schools” throughout the district. At the time of their article’s writing, 45 volumes of the manga were being actively checked out of school libraries by students.
Interestingly, these parents were not alone in their efforts to get Assassination Classroom removed from school libraries, as the nonprofit group Citizens Defending Freedom announced on April 10th that they were likewise planning to campaign for the removal of Matsui’s manga from middle school libraries due to its “violent and sexually explicit content.”
“This is a non-partisan issue,” Citizens Defending Freedom’s National Communications Director Kristen Huber told Fox13 Tampa Bay. “We should all be able to agree that violence toward teachers and explicit sexual content is not something that schools should be glorifying or promoting, especially on taxpayer dollars.”
This is not the first time Assassination Classroom has drawn the ire of American parents.
In 2019, a concerned mother of a student at Markham Intermediate School in Staten Island, NY complained about the series’ references to classroom violence, which in turn resulted in the manga being pulled from the library’s shelves.
“My biggest thing was is it should have never been in that library and I would love to know how it got there and who thought it was a good idea to do that,” the mother, who wished to remain anonymous, explained to silive.com
As of writing, Matsui’s manga appears to have yet to be pulled from any Florida schools in relation to the above complaints.
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