We have witnessed a series of “zero tolerance” incidents in which school officials punish young children, usually boys, for using their imagination to play act guns:
- 10-year old Johnny Jones suspended for shooting imaginary arrow
- The zero-tolerance war on kindergarteners
- 12-year old RI student suspended for small keychain “gun”
- Maryand school offers counseling for students troubled by “pastry gun” incident
- 6-year old brings Quarter-sized toy gun on bus, threatened with detention and suspension
- Second Grader Suspended for Pointing Pencil Like a Gun
Here’s another one, from The Columbus Dispatch:
A Columbus principal suspended a student for three days last week after the child pointed a “ lookalike firearm” at another student in class and pretended to shoot.
The boy’s age? 10. The “level 2 lookalike firearm” cited in his suspension letter? His finger.
“I was just playing around,” said Nathan Entingh, a fifth-grader at Devonshire Alternative Elementary School in a far northern section of the district. “People play around like this a lot at my school.”
Other kids have been caught playing pretend gun games on the playground at Devonshire and weren’t suspended, Nathan said.
Devonshire Principal Patricia Price has warned students about pretend gun play numerous times this year, and everyone should know the rules by now, district spokesman Jeff Warner said. Nathan put his finger to the side of the other student’s head and pretended to shoot “kind of execution style,” Warner said.
“The kids were told, ‘If you don’t stop doing this type of stuff, there would be consequences,’” Warner said. “It’s just been escalating.” Warnings included three newsletters sent home with kids, he said.
The boy’s father, Paul Entingh, said no one felt threatened, and it’s the adults who are acting childish in their response to a typical 10-year-old’s misstep.
“He said he was playing,” Paul Entingh said. “It would even make more sense maybe if he brought a plastic gun that looked like a real gun or something, but it was his finger.”
The other student didn’t even see the offense — a teacher witnessed the hand gesture, both sides agree.
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Comments
Ah. They are finally starting to print the name of the perpetrators of these crimes, such as Devonshire Principal Patricia Price.
Devonshire Principal Patricia Price should be fired.
Also, this principal has been trained to act in exactly this fashion. The trainers should be fired, too.
The “trainers” are the professors that operate the Schools of Education on each and every College campus in this country. This type of emotional nonsense is ingrained into every teacher that earns their undergraduate and master’s degree in education.
My son reported to his principal that another student had a handgun in his locker at his rural NC high school. The other boy had an Uncle as Central Office and got off with in school suspension (ISS). And, the @##@#$ told the kid that my son was the one who turned him in!
So, the moral is that it is not what you do but who you know!
Evacuate that child!
This was just a warning. Leaving him in that school system would be abuse.
Rags, check the Tipline for some awesomeness out of CT on the 2A. I know we share belief and intent on civil disobedience – they’re doing it in CT as we speak, a molon labe call.
Yep. Been watching that for the last few days.
Reminiscent of the “Come and take it” response from the Texas Revolution.
Just hope no other-wise law-abiding citizen gets ground up by the police-state.
In an event unrelated to the link I posted on tipline, a Navy vet and retired fireman went to the mike at a public hearing on their new law in CT and told them he didn’t appreciate being turned into an instant felon with the stroke of some government pen, that he had no intention of complying, and just how did they like that? Crowd went wild in the video.
Very kuhl…!!!
Remind me to have a look at the tip-line more often! I used to, but then fell out of the habit. But there’s some really interesting stuff that gets posted there! Thanks 🙂
The most effective solution may be something out of the pages of Monty Python.
Ask the principal to describe what happened. If he/she makes a hand gesture similar to a “gun,” demand that the principal be suspended.
The blog is . . . strange today.
Another one for Instapundit’s “Is sending your kids to public school parental malpractice?” file.
http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/?s=Public+school+parental+malpractice
Did Devonshire Principal Patricia Price mention that the boy’s finger wasn’t loaded and could never be?
Devonshire Principal Patricia Price has a very small caliber brain.
Use a different finger and become a world leader.
I guess we should be thankful he didn’t mime an 18 round magazine, he might have gone to jail.
Or “the shoulder thing that goes up”!
P.S. Yes, that was me who down-thumbed you … accidentally.
On my iPad, it seems to be an occupational hazard of trying to hit the “reply” function. I wish there were a way to take back a vote!! My apologies :-s
vote it up on same machine and should neutral it
I tried that, and got an admonishment that I’d already rated that comment 🙁
NP I am not as thin-skinned as our Dear Leader…:-)
🙂
I think that it is becoming more and more clear that this has nothing to do with safety in the classroom, and everything to do wit indoctrination, and, in particular, brainwashing children to freak out whenever they see any sort of firearm, as long as it isn’t being held by some authority figure like a police officer.
For some, in society, I think that this brainwashing is working. I think that you see more and more people who just go spastic when they see any sort of firearms in civilians hands. One of the worst I saw was a brother of mine, who went almost crazy when I brought a shotgun, in a locked case, in to my father’s house (and, never mind that said father has had a 410 there my brother’s entire life, along with shells starting a decade or so ago). These people must think that they are vulnerable for being shot down right then and there.
The gun grabbers have failed in the law courts and the courts of public popularity, and now are seemingly shifting their focus to the next generation. If they can convince enough vulnerable kids that guns are evil incarnate, then maybe when they get older, they will freak at anyone carrying a gun, and vote for more gun control legislation.
As Reynolds points out, public school education may be child abuse.
Liberals would rather put the fear of ‘means-to-an-end’ crime into people rather than mitigate the reasons for crime. And, the reasons for crime are not due to poverty or to income inequality or a need of a bigger ‘better’ bureaucracy and not enough NEA funding or to gun laws.
The reason for crime is due to a lack of parental/familial character training in doing what is right – exactly what the Romeikes want to home school their children into doing. The expectation of crime and its repetition is due to human nature exposed to a morally-relative-nihilistic-Godless universe.
Today’s culture – village – does not hold people personally responsible for their actions. In a morally relative culture no one is responsible for actual crime or misbeahvior but only for the vicarious-virtually imagined thought crimes. The pointed finger is a means to and end. That is how they think.
Though a boy’s finger lacks any verisimilitude to an actual weapon because of it liberals have ‘seen the future’ and know that a crime is the intent in the boy’s heart.
In an alternate reality, the lack of gender and political diversity in schools and schools of “education” would be the discrimination and bias issues of our time. But since they ALO have the media, these are relegated to the backwaters of conservative political blogs and the occasional segment on Fox News. The absence of men serving as teachers in secondary and elementeray education is a BIG problem, but more important is the horrible education our secondary and elementary schools are recieving from “schools of education.” Rather than focusing on mastery of their subjects, we send them through these watered-down, jargon-filled, and Left-dominated “education” programs where they are fed all this junk. My mother wouldn’t have reacted negatively to horseplay that involved guns. And neither would have the teachers I had. My friends and I played “war” all the time – strangely, none of us grew up to commit mass shootings.
And this is what we get. Time to look into home schooling…
D.GOOCH
anyone who sends their kids to a govt school is quilty of child abuse.
zero tolerance = zero intelligence
I’m going to have to start pointing my finger at people when I argue 2nd amendment rights with them ^^
[…] cleanse the palate, via Legal Insurrection. Lest you think the punishment was unwarranted, the school district wants you to know that the kid […]
Those of you with kids, grandkids, nieces, nephews, etc., in high school need to tell them you’ll pay a bounty for videos of school employees pointing their fingers. We put them on YouTube and we demand each be suspended without pay for brandishing a weapon.
I don’t think schools understand how common finger-pointing is as a directional signal and how often they do it themselves. I’d love the irony of school indoctrinators getting ‘schooled’ from the mouths of babes, their own students.
And Henry, don’t forget that some of these kids will grow up to become police officers. You’ll probably get shot by one of them for pointing your finger.
The long view is ugly, Henry. Hey, you should design a glove that makes it impossible to point your finger, a sort of ‘safety’ device. Probably get a government subsidy for research and development. Do it For The Children, dude.
Hey, the kid’s white, male and statistically speaking will probably will grow up to be straight. So he had this coming to him. /sarc
What exactly is “Alternative” about Devonshire Alternative anyway? Their website doesn’t seem to specify exactly (though the linked page has Principal Price’s work email). Is it a particularly granola school where this sort of idiocy might be expected? Whatever it is, it seems to not be doing all that great academically: “… worse than 78.4% of all elementary schools in Ohio.” But at least the students are being protected from index fingers, so that’s something.
Go to the original article, read the comments, and weep. There are apparently a significant number of people of adult age who are unable to discern the difference between a finger and a gun.
The progressive war on young boys continues.
When I was younger I had an Annie Oakley outfit complete with a gun and holster. Not once – on my neighborhood block or at a family get-together did some adult take my gun away.
The super-paranoid behavior of today’s teachers creates mental disruption, confusion, confrontation, and fear THAT WAS NEVER THERE BEFORE!
Is this some plot by child psychiatrists to build more business?
This ain’t about boys or school violence. This is the feds, NEA, and other leftist orgs working the long game against the Second Amendment. They are demonizing the very thought of firearms, painting them as so evil and so dangerous that merely playing that you’re shooting a gun must be outlawed. They are conditioning children to hold an inherent aversion to firearms, to make that decision for them with indoctrination they are powerless to avoid when so young.
Good thing he wasn’t picking his nose with that dangerous digit, otherwise he might have been placed under suicide watch for attempting to blow his brains out…
The carnage created by pointed fingers must be stopped! He could have put an eye out!
This is one more example of people criticizing after receiving limited information about an event and being sucked into the Columbus Dispatch media drama train. I am not employed with Columbus City Schools but I absolutely know the following facts that may be interesting to some… This child, as well as others, were warned repeatedly about this action and this kind of conduct for days on end, multiple children were given numerous warnings of this kind of behavior, the child that Entingh’s son put his finger gun up to “execution style” and not only said “boom” but also “you’re dead” to was an elementary student from another country where gun violence, corruption, murder and mayhem is an everyday way of life, and the Entingh child was not the only child sanctioned in some form for this on going behavior. To top it all off Mr. Entingh was called in for a meeting with school representatives after the occurrence to discuss what happened and he agreed that all decisions were appropriate just to then turn around and cry to the media just the opposite. Now, who’s in the wrong here? I ask you all to send your children out this evening in your neighborhood to give everyone “the bird” with their middle finger. There’s nothing wrong with this either….right? It’s not like it’s a plastic bird that looks like a real one, it’s just a game all the other kids play….right? Sure many of us used to play “cops and robbers” or cowboys and Indians” when we were little and used our fingers as guns. This happened in a day when children also got their bottoms smacked with paddles in school for getting out of line, parents actually believed in teaching and disciplining their children instead of pawning their kids off onto someone else, there weren’t gang signs on elementary school properties, their was no such thing as a school shooting, kids rode their bicycles to school, and people believed in good community values. How many parents would scream holy hell if their young child was going around twerking like Miley Cyrus? Which is worse? An elementary child pretending that they’re having sex or an elementary child pretending they’re killing another child? So you would punish your kid for pretending they were performing sexual acts but you say it’s alright to pretend they’re putting a bullet in another kid’s head? I applaud the schools action. It does appear that this child was not only punished for just pointing his finger like a gun at another student but also because time after time after time he chose to not follow the rules or instructions. Have any of you disciplined your child after you have repeatedly told them not to do something and they chose to ignore you and kept doing it? It appears that the post media involvement was simply a hyped up “got my feelings hurt, over-glorified pity party” on the parent’s part. Some should keep the Monday morning quarterbacking to their own back yard and not draw conclusions on media hype. This coould have had nothing to do with a finger gun. It could have been a game where a bunch of the kids had a game running around slapping other kids on the head. THey were told repeatedly for days on end to stop. They didn’t. They pay. I will agree though that this kid’s finger pointing isn’t nearly as bad as all the unjust finger pointing I’ve seen in this blog.