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7 Kids Who Were Punished By Schools For Using Imaginary Guns
Townhall.com ^ | October 1, 2013 | John Hawkins

Posted on 10/01/2013 2:57:52 AM PDT by Kaslin

There was a time in America when the first priority of our schools was educating our children. That's no longer the case. Today, schools are primarily job programs for the unions and indoctrination centers for the Left. The great teachers in our schools are now used as cover for the mediocrities, the overpaid administrators, and the blatant attempts to force feed liberalism to children before they become experienced enough to recognize all the problems associated with it.

Since the Left has been losing the public battle to curtail the 2nd Amendment, liberals started fighting it in a place where they feel like they can get away with anything, our schools. Towards that end, they've instituted "no tolerance" policies that harshly punish children for wielding imaginary weapons. Even though no crimes are committed, no one is in danger, and no one is being hurt, these schools are persecuting children for pretending to play with guns.

The real problem here isn't the kids; it's the teachers, principals, and schools boards that are allowing this to happen and it's time we put a stop to it. When a kid is kicked out of school for playing with an imaginary weapon, they should be deluged with complaints. Conservative groups should offer to sue the school on behalf of the parents. The people responsible should lose their jobs. We won't need to do that a hundred times. Take three or four schools, makes examples out of them, and then you'll be surprised at how quickly the rest of the schools outside of the most hopelessly blue parts of the country start to become reasonable.

1) Suspended For Playing With Airsoft Guns In Their Own Yard (Virginia Beach, Va): Aidan Clark, Khalid Caraballo and a third friend were given three month suspensions for shooting spring-driven airsoft guns at each other on Caraballo's property. No one was arrested, no one was hurt, no crimes were committed, but all three children were suspended from school for AT LEAST three months. If a school can suspend kids for doing something legal on their own property that has nothing to do with the school, what's next? Suspending children for owning toy guns? Suspending them because their parents are in the NRA?

2) Students Suspended For Performing A Scientific Experiment With Permission (Edmonds, Washington): A group of students got permission from their teacher to bring NERF guns to school as part of a probability experiment, which actually sounds like more fun than anything most of us ever did in math class. Afterwards, the school responded by suspending all the children who brought toy guns to school and all the children who were present, while the teacher was unpunished. Well, at least the school is preparing the children for real life where government employees get a free pass for breaking the rules while private citizens are punished for doing nothing wrong.

3) Suspended And Arrested For Wearing An NRA "Protect Your Rights" T-shirt: Fourteen year old Jared Marcum wore a NRA "Protect Your Rights" t-shirt to school with a hunting rifle on it. Despite the fact that the shirt didn't violate the school's dress code, a screaming teacher demanded that he turn the shirt inside out. Marcum was then removed from class, suspended, arrested, and faced a year in jail for "obstructing an officer" because he wouldn't stop protesting his innocence while he was being hauled away. In this case, 100 kids wore the same shirts to school as part of a protest without being challenged and the family lawyered up and got the charged dropped. If everybody fought so hard to "protect your rights," these out-of-control government employees wouldn't be getting away with treating our kids like this.

4) Sixth Grader Suspended From School For Saying The Word "Gun" In A Sentence (Ownings, Md): The 11 year old son of Bruce Henkelman was discussing the Sandy Hook massacre with friends on the school bus and he noted that he wished he had a gun to stop the bad guys. This earned him a ten day suspension from school while his father received a visit from police who wanted to search their house without a warrant. Who’s running this school? Piers Morgan? Michael Moore? Barack Obama?

5) Deaf Preschooler Asked To Change How He Signs His Name Because It Looks Too Much Like A Gun (Grand Island, Nebraska): Three and a half year old Hunter Spanjer is deaf and signs his name in a way that looks like a gun. This was unacceptable to the school, which told Hunter's parents he'd need to change his name because its "Weapons in Schools" policy forbade "any instrument...that looks like a weapon." This sounds like the start of a "Chuck Norris at three joke," but it really happened.

6) Five Year Old Accused Of Making Terror Threats Over A Hello Kitty Bubble Gun (Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania: A five year old who was talking with her friends offered to shoot herself and her friends with a Hello Kitty bubble gun that she had at home. The school's reaction to the little girl's love of soapy bubbles? The school accused her of making a "terrorist threat," suspended her from school for 10 days, told her the police might need to be involved, and demanded that she get a psychological evaluation. The psychological evaluation should have been saved for the people who run that school.

7) Student Suspended For Chewing His Pop-Tart Into The Shape Of A Gun (Brooklyn Park, Minnesota): Seven year old Joshua Welch was eating a strawberry Pop-Tart and started playing with his food. After making a mountain out of it, he turned it into a gun. For that dastardly crime, he was suspended from school for two days and believe it or not, a letter was sent home to the student body telling them, "A student used food to make an inappropriate gesture." Thank goodness he didn't do something more serious like draw a gun in his mashed potatoes or Welch might have never been allowed to come back to school.

When do we put our foot down and say that the sort of people who are victimizing children like this have no business being around kids? If you're so ideologically rigid that a Pop-Tart shaped like a gun or a child who signs his name in a way that looks like a gun is more than you can handle, you don't belong in a school. It's time to demand better for America's children than what they're getting from schools today and the principals, teachers, and school boards that won't get on board with that need to be replaced.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS: antiguns; guncontrol; guns; hysteria; schools; secondamendment; zerotolerance

1 posted on 10/01/2013 2:57:53 AM PDT by Kaslin
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To: Kaslin
Number 4 makes me extremely mad!

More evidence that leftist scum, even the ones in the teacher profession did not give a damn about the Sandy Hook victims. It was only ever about their stupid g**d*** communist gun-grabbing agenda.

I still cannot believe that parents would actually give up the formative years of their children's lives to these subhuman two-legged viruses!
2 posted on 10/01/2013 3:09:04 AM PDT by Wanderer99
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To: Kaslin

Such turds are GOVERMENT employees (teachers) in total command on GOVERNMENT property (schools) protected by other GOVERNMENT employees (police) and backed up by other GOVERNMENT “leaders” (politicians). So how can kids these days even expect to play normally when encased and surrounded by The GOVERNMENT as soon as they step onto a school bus? One solution is home or private non-GOVERNMENT funded schools while your tax money goes to pay GOVERNMENT employees at every other facet of your child’s life. And recently, kids can’t act like themselves even in their own private property yards at home ! It’s a RATS maze out there for children to puzzle through created by democRATS. Rightfully fear for your children’s well-being and work like hell to remove ALL democRATS from office and facet of society at every opportunity and be forever vigilant. WHAT THE HELL HAVE WE GOTTEN OURSELVES INTO ?!


3 posted on 10/01/2013 3:22:56 AM PDT by AKinAK (Keep your powder dry pilgrim.)
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To: Kaslin

(am hijacking this pic from another FR thread)

4 posted on 10/01/2013 4:16:02 AM PDT by Lockbar (Quality Factory Loaded Ammunition ----- The New Gold!)
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To: Lockbar

Face it, folks. Liberals have been in charge of this country for decades. In charge of government, business, government schools (of course), the media — everything.


5 posted on 10/01/2013 4:42:40 AM PDT by Jerrybob (Truth -- the new hate speech.)
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To: Kaslin

It appears to be madness. For them, it isn’t. They are criminalizing the idea of a gun.
Thought control.


6 posted on 10/01/2013 4:45:39 AM PDT by I want the USA back (Media: completely irresponsible traitors. Complicit in the destruction of our country.)
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To: Kaslin

Timely post.
When I arrived home from work last night.
My wife showed me what my grandson did that afternoon.
He fashioned a pair of pistols out of Legos and asked grandma to play shooting with him.
He even has the kid provided sound effects down effectively.
He’s 2-1/2 years old.


7 posted on 10/01/2013 4:57:20 AM PDT by BuffaloJack (Gun Control is the Key to totalitarianism and genocide.)
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To: I want the USA back

“Thought control.”

EXACTLY
make the very thought of guns abhorrent

all parents in these schools should send their children to class with at least, waterpistols!


8 posted on 10/01/2013 5:01:50 AM PDT by aumrl (let's keep it real Conservatives)
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To: Kaslin

A repeat of my post of several days ago....

Here is my problem with the “no common sense” agenda in school......

When you have this sort of toy (a quarter sized gun key chain) declared to be “dangerous”, you trivialize the meaning of the word “danger”. The kids are not stupid, and know that toy is not dangerous.

Now, let’s tell them how “dangerous” it is to take drugs or get into a car with a stranger, or put personal info on the internet. They will equate that “danger” with the “danger” of the “gun’, and we end up with dead or damaged kids.

I first noticed this trend about 10 years ago when there was a public service ad stating “what do you call someone who doesn’t recycle? Dangerous”. It infuriated me that they were teaching my grandkids that I was on the same level as a violent criminal.


9 posted on 10/01/2013 5:10:02 AM PDT by Grammy (He frustrates the devices of the crafty, so that they cannot carry out their plans. Job 5:12)
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To: Kaslin
Here's the full text from one of the articles:

[A] group of students from Chase Lake Elementary School in Edmonds, Washington, asked their teacher if they could bring Nerf guns to school. The teacher gave permission, but the school punished the children with suspension anyway.

The students even had a perfectly legitimate reason to bring the guns to school; they wanted to fire foam darts 100 times as part of a probability experiment.

The school quickly enforced its zero tolerance policy and booted the students. In fact, they even suspended students who were simply present during the experiment.

Read that last sentence, again. The students that happened to be in the classroom got suspended as well.

I admire these kids: this is a really interesting experiment that teaches a lot about statistics, and shows how it applies in real life. I'm impressed they are grasping this concept so early.

I did a similar experiment, except it was a spring-loaded launcher and ball bearings. But, it was in a college freshman physics class.

10 posted on 10/01/2013 5:18:41 AM PDT by justlurking (tagline removed, as demanded by Admin Moderator)
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To: Kaslin

We’re only a few weeks into the school year. Expect dozens, if not hundreds, of “zero tolerance” outrage stories on this site over the next eight months.


11 posted on 10/01/2013 6:44:59 AM PDT by Fiji Hill
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To: Fiji Hill

The schools are afraid of statistics showing up more black students being disciplined than whites. So they adopt “zero tolerance” to shield themselves from having to apply judgement (and also to ensure that at least some white students get suspended to even out their numbers).


12 posted on 10/01/2013 6:50:09 AM PDT by PapaBear3625 (You don't notice it's a police state until the police come for you.)
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To: Kaslin

BFL


13 posted on 10/01/2013 8:31:18 AM PDT by zeugma (Is it evil of me to teach my bird to say "here kitty, kitty"?)
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To: Fiji Hill; Kaslin; PapaBear3625
We’re only a few weeks into the school year. Expect dozens, if not hundreds, of “zero tolerance” outrage stories on this site over the next eight months.

We didn't have to wait very long:

8-Year-Old Florida Boy Suspended for Making Gun Shape With Fingers: ‘It Was a Game’

14 posted on 10/01/2013 1:39:28 PM PDT by Fiji Hill
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