http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgp6S-fyGLg
A Rhode Island seventh grader has been suspended for bringing a tiny toy gun to school. Meanwhile, here in Texas, your humble scribe serves as a lunch monitor at a local elementary school. The kids are playing a new game called “guns.” Two kids face each other, seated. They tap their thighs, then bring their hands up. If their guns are cocked (if they’d tapped their thighs previously and pointed their gun fingers at the sky), they can shoot the other player. Unless the other player has his or her hands across their chest (“shield”). Shoot a shield? Tap thighs, try again. Don’t forget to cock your guns. It’s fast. And yes girls and boys play. And no, the teachers and administrators don’t say a word. Two Americas.
This “zero-tolerance policy” bullshit needs to stop.
Zero tolerance isn’t all that bad an idea. Problem is we seem to have moved into negative tolerance….
Zero tolerance applies to weapons, not toys. Because there was no weapon there should be no problem.
The problem with these policies is it takes “thinking” out of the hands of those who need to perform it.
Case in point: I grew up in Maryland, and when I was 7 I brought one of those tiny Swiss army key chain knives to school (the blade was like 2″). Somehow the principal got wind of it, he took it, and gave me a stern dressing down. I don’t even remember if he called my parents.
The crazy part? This happened in the most liberal part of Maryland (Howard County) in 1990. Had that happened today I would have probably been expelled.
I wonder if he open carried. Concealed is concealed!
And you wonder why your team gets so much flak….
See, now you’re just trolling.
Libturds just love them some “common sense” toy control. It’s for the children.
In 5th grade, 1992ish, I dressed up a private eye for Halloween and took a cap gun to school. I won 2nd place in a costume contest and for a photo the principal thought it was awesome and told me to pose with my gun and large magnifying glass out.
What a difference 20 years make.
Yes big difference back in 2nd grade i went as a soldier with one of those toy electronic noise maker guns and came in 3rd no one suspended me or went up in arms most my teachers thought it was cute.
Yeah, during a first grade play in 1991, I dressed up as Davy Crockett and walked around the stage with a lever action toy gun, one of the kinda/sorta realistic looking ones made of metal and wood, no orange tip. Nowadays, I’m sure someone would stand up and scream for me to be disarmed.
Or the local doughnut patrol would shoot you
I had one of those! You could cock the lever or the hammer.
Same deal man – I was in 5th around 94. We broughf toy guns to school to play with at recess – seemed like everyone had one of those flashing-tip clicking plastic Uzis. We also had Super Soaker fights before school let out for summer vacation..
The sad thing is that I think a lot of our own generation, or GenXers, are largely responsible for a lot of these rules once they got into admin/policy positions. I recall a lot of the stupid zero tolerance rules begin to creep in just before I graduated in 01, when they started banning everything from school – fingernail clippers, cell phones, OTC pain killers, etc. Curbed all of our schemes to get high on aspirin and stab the principal with a fold-out fingernail file, you know.
In high school we had pickups in the student parking lot with rifles and shotguns in the rear windows. In 7th grade I brought an H&R .22 revolver to school for a class demonstration. It was cleared by the teacher thru the office. Also, about the 7th grade I bought a .22 rifle at a yard sale and rode it home on my bike. About a year later I bought a bubbaded 03a3 springfield at a yard sale and rode it home on my bike.
Different America? How about a different dimension.
That noise you hear is a Mothers Against F-ing Everything (MAFE) head ASSPLODERING
In 1967, Berwyn, Illinois, JS Morton East High School, I was in Junior year Speech (writing & giving) class. One of the students wrote a speech arguing that Lee Harvey Oswald could indeed have shot JFK in the time allotted. To prove his point he brought an actual Manlicher-Carcano rifle identical to the one Oswald used and proceeded to cycle the action three times while another student timed him. Proved it could be done in the time given, did not prove the shots could be accurately made, IMO. He got an “A” for his speech and presentation.
And I have mentioned elsewhere how in 1964 in Chicago I carried a military mock-up (looked absolutely real) of a Springfield ’03 on the bus to give a demonstration of the Manual of Arms to my Boy Scout Troop.
Haha, such colossal stupidity. When they started the sentence, “We tried to get an answer from Coventry schools…” I knew it would end with “because this is such rank bullshit we can’t possibly comment without becoming suicidally embarrassed.”
Oh, wait. That’s what they should have said.
The 7th grader has the most sense of anyone involved. There’s no possible way that he’s unaware of “gun + school = bad” but at the same time, he’s got the blissful naivete of youth that lets him be 100% certain that “that rule doesn’t apply to this stupid little plastic toy.” He knows that, the adults don’t, and they’re all the worse for it.
Sad when the kids have more sense than the teachers ain’t it?
A stupid interpretation of an unnecessary policy. I liked the news coverage – the story did a good job of revealing just how stupid the suspension was. If I was the mom, I’d see that the kid gets driven to the field trip he is scheduled to miss.
I agree with you about the way they covered the story.
uh, not 2 Americas, just one, thank you. Anywhere within Bloomturds sphere of influence is not America.
Reminds me of my middle school years. We used to play “drawing.”
Two contestants would place both their hands on opposite sides of a desk. After a countdown, they both would “draw” a pencil out of their pockets, and attempt to stab the other contestant (with the eraser). First touch won.
I won.
7th grader has more common sense than his/her teachers!
Feinstein middle school. How surprised should anyone be, really?
Not that Feinstein. This one is a local philanthropist, and a pretty decent guy. A publicity hound, but a decent guy.
sigh.
2 Americas indeed. Wow, I like Texas. Geez, my son took my rubber training knife to school once. All I got was a call from the teacher. That was mid 90’s. We started having to frisk him before letting him on the bus. It became a game.
The -zero policy will only change if the schools start getting sued.
Rhode Island deserves to be disarmed. Their citizenry can’t be trusted with weapons.
Ahemm… COUGH COUGH…
Quiet.
My adorable nieces play that gun/shield game, here in TX. That game is crazy fast. I don’t even want to try to play it with them. They’ve all shot a variety of real guns too, thanks to their parents, grandparents, and aunt.
Stories like this really frustrate me.
These “zero tolerance” policies are aimed at traumatizing children (both those directly involved and those observing the lynching) so thoroughly that as adults they will have an ingrained aversion to even touching a firearm let alone fully exercising their 2nd amendment rights.
ban stupid teachers.
So, with all these Progressive Educators aggressively mentally neutering children against having anything to do with guns (and parents apparently going along with them), when do we get to the point that the Military and Law Enforcement can no longer fill their needs for finding new recruits/officers in some areas because all the eligible young people are hoplophobes? Or, does this end-up working as “reverse psychology” where the children taught in the Public Schools that guns are “forbidden” make their first priority on the eighteenth birthday to go out and buy a rifle or shotgun (maybe their second priority, but a priority nonetheless)? Hopefully, the latter, but then you get people with guns who imagine themselves to be Adults, but have missed the firearms training and education that children should have in order to handle firearms safely and responsibly.
Secretly, I have a mean-spirited fantasy that somewhere in a Blue State sometime in the future a Retired School Administrator that spent his/her “professional life” indoctrinating/persecuting school children against firearms calls 911 because some bad guys are breaking into their house and they are afraid for their personal safety and/or life. They get told it will be an hour, or more, wait for any Police assistance because the local PD can’t find enough new Officers who aren’t hoplophobes. They get advised to hide or get a pair of scissors and try to fend off the bad guys as best they can. I won’t go into how I imagine it all turns-out, but poetic justice is served…
This “zero tolerance” stuff has gone beyond ridiculous, and only looks to get worse. Maybe the State of Texas should put an emphasis on Law Enforcement courses in Middle and High School so they can export Soldiers and Peace Officers, but then, what self-respecting Texan would want to move to Rhode Island? Or California?
Maybe all the Second Amendment friendly Red States should enact laws that screen immigrants from Blue States and deny entry to anyone (and Family) that is a Progressive Liberal. doesn’t own at least one working firearm per Family Member (or more), cannot recite the Second Amendment exactly as written in the Original Bill Of Rights in the real Constitution, ever gave money to the ACLU, has an “Obama-phone”, thought Obamacare was a “good thing”…or some such rational criteria.
I suppose such Laws would be struck-down in Court, but you all need to get aggressive about preserving the Constitutional Republic wherever and however you can because Progressivism is a deadly disease that needs to be “cured” before it kills The Republic.
I have the feeling that this unthinking BS goes back to 9-11. Before that event, this was a confident country, and silliness like this “Zero Thought/Zero Tolerance” crap would have made news, but as the butt of jokes and an example of how NOT to act. In the security trade this is called Risk Management. You could be hit by a bus and killed, but you cross the street anyway.
Today we as a country live in fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of Big Gummint. Fear of your neighbor. Fear of big nasty gunz. It’s a mantra drilled into us daily wherever we look. DHS and TSA were literally created out of fear. In security terms this is called Risk Avoidance. Risk Avoidance is the bane of a seasoned security practitioner – it’s the sign of an ignorant amateur. Who’s afraid to cross the street.
We’re pretty much the only confident ones left. We can stand up for ourselves, and have the means to do it. When we’re gone the terrorists and their fear-ridden minions will have won. And America has lost.
Bah. That gun game had been around for at least 12 years, back when I was in elementary school.
A lot of folks in this country have gone the way of the coward.Sissy ass folks that can’t stand to have anything that resembles a gun even touching a child’s hands,but on the other hand some of these same folks call for the government to bomb a sovereign country into the stoneage,due to the fact that someone “thinks” that they “might” have used chemical weapons against someone,and there is no irrefutable proof that they did use chemical weapons against someone,no eye witnesses,no video or any other proof.But a toy gun,heck back when I was in school,I’m 57,we didn’t have to even think about this kind of crap,sometimes at recess we would play with our toy guns that we brought to school,the only thing that the teachers told us then was to keep up with our own toys.many a day we played cowboys and Indians or replayed parts of a show back then called Combat,without any problems.Now a days with the gun control agenda going almost full throttle and with all of the leftist s teaching the children in public schools,they are using whatever means they want to push the agenda.Myself I am tired of hearing the berating of people exercising their 2nd Amendment rights,by the people who think that the rest of us can’t make rational decisions,or think for ourselves,and feel they must tell us how to live and what to do.There is a fight coming and it won’t be good for the other side,because they don’t know how to take care of the problem,they figure that government is there to protect them,and will!Won’t happen,government will be too busy covering it’s own butt.Be prepared and ready.Keep your powder dry.
Wait. So you mean they invented rock paper scissors, but with guns?! Start spreading this to the kids around you, seriously. It will drive the antis nuts.
Libtards (democrats).
Pat, it’s always nice when you decide to join the conversation. Your intelligent, well thought out comments like this always give us much to consider. The fact that you leave the same basic comment in three or four threads a day does nothing to diminish its core truthfulness. Well done, sir.
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