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Finger guns, toy guns and threats: The fallout of Sandy Hook

It's too large an article to do much more than highlight some of the amazingly stupid cases of zero tolerance that have emerged in education since the Sandy Hook massacre:

An 8-year-old boy in Prince William County pointed his finger like a gun in a school hallway after a friend pretended to shoot him with a bow and arrow. The class had been studying Native American culture and had just learned a deer-hunting song.

“It was playing — it was cowboys and Indians,” said the second-grader’s father.

The imaginary crossfire on Feb. 8 produced real-life fallout two months after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. The boy was suspended for “threatening to harm self or others,” a misdeed on par with bringing an actual weapon to school. He served an in-school suspension Wednesday.

So, let's try to be fair; maybe the thought crime here is thinking of Indians Redskins Native Americans as the enemy.

On Dec. 20, a 6-year-old boy in Montgomery County was suspended for pointing his finger like a gun and saying “pow,” an incident his Silver Spring school described in a disciplinary letter as a threat “to shoot a student.” He served his one-day suspension Dec. 21.

Six year old?  You're kidding me right? Sadly not.

In January, a 5-year-old girl was suspended from Mount Carmel Area Elementary School in central Pennsylvania for allegedly speaking about shooting herself and another girl. It turned out she was talking about her bright pink “Hello Kitty” gun, which shoots bubbles.

But at least we're showing some gender equality in our attempts to brainwash the children.

A widely reported Alexandria case followed in early February, when a 10-year-old was taken into police custody at Douglas MacArthur Elementary School for allegedly showing others on his bus a toy gun with an orange tip.His mother, Nakicha Gilbert, says the gun was mistakenly left in his backpack after a visit to a cousin’s house the previous weekend. The boy was charged with brandishing a weapon. He was fingerprinted, his mother said, and now has a juvenile record and a probation officer.

Some administrator probably shit himself, not realizing the convention that toy weapons have the orange tip, to suggest to the cops that they probably shouldn't kill the elementary school kid out of hand.

A 13-year-old at a Prince William middle school wrote what school officials considered a disturbing Facebook post in January. The school system ordered a threat assessment of the student but then told the family there was a backlog for such evaluations.
The teen will miss six weeks of school while waiting for the assessment, the father said.

 How do the schools justify such insanity?  Easily...

“I don’t see us as overreacting. I see us as being more sensitive,” said Kimberly Carter, a middle school teacher in Montgomery County. Especially with young adolescents, the key is “knowing when to coach them and when to discipline them,” she said.

I want to see zero tolerance applied to the school teachers and administrators who are applying such draconian punishments for such trivial though crimes. Because that's what this is all about, an attempt by the schools to produce a generation of gun hating sheep. Tar and feathers would not be overkill.