By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
The nation’s elementary schools are overrun by
small-minded and unreasonable people, prone to hysterics, who can’t distinguish
between make-believe and reality. They are called school administrators.
In the wake of the Newtown, Conn., massacre, they have been
punishing little children for making gun-like gestures with their fingers, and
other harmless horseplay. The people who run our schools must have been too
busy brushing up on their “zero tolerance” policies to notice that Newtown was
perpetrated with an AR-15, not with a toy or with a finger. We expect
five-year-olds to be childish. What’s the excuse for the people running our
schools?
Five-year-old Joseph Cruz brandished a gun made out of
Lego in his day-care program while, in the words of the Barnstable Public
School District in Hyannis, Mass., “simulating the sound of gunfire.” For a
layman, that’s called saying “pow.” Cruz got a stiff warning for “using daycare
toys inappropriately.”
A five-year-old girl was suspended from kindergarten at
Mount Carmel Area Elementary School in Northumberland County, Pa., after
“threatening” to shoot classmates with her pink Hello Kitty gun, which fires
soapy bubbles. A mandatory psychological evaluation found, according to a news
report, “that the girl did not represent any threat to others.” Whew.
White Marsh Elementary in Maryland suspended two
first-graders for playing cops and robbers on the playground. In true
21st-century fashion, the school board said it was forbidden from giving out
more information “due to confidentiality requirements under the Federal
Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).”
Melody Valentin, a fifth-grader, was reprimanded for
accidentally bringing a paper gun to her school in Philadelphia. When another
kid saw her throwing it away, she was reported to the authorities. Perhaps she
should have sought out a paper-gun buyback program rather than disposing of it
so carelessly in a trash can, where it could have been found and used by
someone else? “He yelled at me,” Melody said of an administrator, “and I kept
telling him it was a paper gun.” Melody’s argument would seem utterly
unassailable, “but he wouldn’t listen.”
An eight-year-old in Prince William County, Va., was
suspended for firing back with an imaginary gun after a friend shot him with an
imaginary bow and arrow. Evidently, nothing happened to the other kid. This
points to a disturbing “bow and arrow” loophole that could conceivably
accommodate everything from imaginary poison darts to make-believe medieval
siege weapons.
The Al Capone of the zero-tolerance offenders is the
daring second-grader in Anne Arundel County, Md., who chewed his strawberry
breakfast pastry into the shape of a gun and then brazenly pointed it at a
classmate. Park Elementary School suspended him for two days. The child’s
father says he really pointed it at the ceiling, but apparently hasn’t stopped
to consider the mayhem that would ensue in a room full of children if ceiling
tiles were shot out with a gun-shaped strawberry pastry.
Who defends this foolish lack of proportion? The American
Association of School Administrators. Its executive director, Dan Domenech,
told USA Today: “Parents have to be aware that talking about guns or using your
fingers to point like a gun is no longer tolerable or prudent.” Why, pray tell?
School shooters tend to be disturbed young men. In no case has a shooter ever
been an adorable five-year-old child.
In the grips of a strange mania, school administrators
believe that any symbolic representation of a gun, no matter how innocent, is
all but indistinguishable from a real gun. This is not a mistake that gun
owners make. I have never known the National Rifle Association magazine to
feature an article on how to form your finger into the shape of a firearm. The
finger gun doesn’t do much for the average sportsman. It can’t bring down a
deer, and doesn’t exactly light up the gun range.
No matter. We don’t have common sense; we have rules. We
don’t have judgment; we have bureaucratic procedure. Too often, our grown-ups
are the ones desperately in need of adult supervision.
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