6-year old brings Quarter-sized toy gun on bus, threatened with detention and suspension
School district finally agrees not to punish the child for Lego GI Joe toy after mother’s protests
My wife screamed “sick in the head” when we saw this on the local news tonight.
We’ve previously covered the gun-shaped breakfast pastry and a pencil pointed like a gun.
Now this:
A Palmer, Massachusetts, 6-year old faced detention and suspension, and was forced to write an apology letter for bringing a GI Joe Lego toy gun the size of a Quarter onto a school bus:
Via WHDH ABC:
A plastic LEGO-sized gun caused a disturbance on a Old Mill Pond Elementary School bus Friday morning.
Mieke Crane is the mother of the 6-year-old kindergarten student who brought the gun on the bus.
“I think they over-reacted totally. I totally do,” said Crane.
Another student on the bus saw the toy and yelled to the driver.
“She said he caused quite a disturbance on the bus and that the children were traumatized,” said Crane.
The school sent home a letter to parents of students who take the bus explaining what happened. It stressed no gun was on the bus and there was never any danger.
The letter also has photo of the toy showing it’s actual size, which is slightly larger than a quarter.
“I could see if it was you know, an air soft gun or some sort of pistol or live bullets or something. This is just a toy,” said Crane.
She is upset with how her son is being disciplined. She says he had to write an apology letter to the driver, has detention on Tuesday and could be temporarily suspended from the bus….
School officials, however, eventually decided not to discipline the 6-year old after the mother’s protests:
A kindergarten student that was supposed to get detention for bringing a Lego sized gun onto a school bus Friday morning is no longer being disciplined by the school for the incident.
Mieke Crane, the boy’s mother, says he was worrying about his detention all weekend, but is relieved it’s not happening.
“He smiled when we told him, he was very excited when we told him he didn’t have to serve the detention,” said Crane….
“She [the principal] looked at the tape, the children were not standing up hollering, nobody was ducking, no one was screaming he has a gun. The little boy raised his hand properly the first time,” said Crane.
Originally, when the school learned about the incident Friday they had the six-year-old write an apology letter to the driver. They also gave him detention that was scheduled to be served Tuesday along with a bus ticket.
A letter explaining what happened was also sent home to the parents of the students on that specific bus.
If we could save just one child from this mental abuse, shouldn’t we take that step?
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Comments
I got in trouble for playing with toy guns in class when I was about ten. The teacher took my water pistol and didn’t give it back until the end of the day.
But we were still allowed to play with them at recess.
I live in MA, and my toddler son loves to play guns. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that he’ll be making the news in a few years.
for this sort of thing, I forgot to add.
HOMESCHOOL. Public school is nothing more than commie indoctrination.
If kids are “traumatized” by seeing a Lego gun, they must be basket cases by now after searching so much tv.
Interesting thing about expat life in Korea: go to the toy aisle and see how many LIFE SIZE replicas of M16, Baretta 9mm, Colt 45 and many more are on the shelves. Al capable of firing plastic pellets, some even on auto fire.
In fact, my son has half a dozen different in his room and is always playing War with all the other boys living in the compound. Is he ever going to have culture shock should we ever return to the states!
BUT as the final quote makes clear, no one was traumatized, no one was yelling. This is a case of a bus driver acting stupid and an administration acting stupid.
The children were fine. It’s the adults who need suspensions.
Agreed.
If anyone likely wet/crapped his/her pants it’s the single-synapse bus driver (most likely an Obamaniac-drone zero-information voter).
Probably figured the Teamsters Union and school administration would award the Courage-Under-Fire Award for bus safety.
Sheesh. I get back from vacation, and I log into my favorite blog to find this story?
The one who needs to apologize is the bus driver, and the school district. If I were that parent, I’d hire a tutor to home school my kid and tell the principal to either go to a psychiatrist for obsessive compulsive disorder, or find a new line of work which doesn’t involve mentally abusing 6 year olds.
Oh, and to see how to “properly” familiarize children with guns, check out the clip from 0:30s to 1:00m (satire)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijvTiDnWJLE
This is all indoctrination Professor, just indoctrination. The liberal/progressives play the long game and in just 12 short years little Jimmy is going to be a freshman in the local state university. This will be just about the time Hillary would be ending her 2nd term in office. Imagine how triumphant the Democrats will feel after they really do stop the sale of guns because “the people” demanded it.
Exactly. As usual, the right is slow to realize that the Left is always playing the long game.
Many times they do these things and then back off because they have already accomplished their purpose: Making kids regard guns with horror. Note that it was another child that raised the alarm. Makes me think of the last scene in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
There is a reason they went first for control of the media and the schools.
In this case, we can fight back however. Start visiting your local school board meetings. Get a copy of the system’s rules concerning guns and be very familiar with it. Ask questions about policies. Bring print outs of stories like this with you and ask what would happen under the same circumstances. Then push for common sense changes specifically banning punishment for stupid things like this.
Over time, it will have an effect once they know someone is watching.
I’ve seen Chinese boys walking the street with toy AK-47, or whatever their military carries. I’ve seen them walking with toy caps guns, and water guns. I’ve yet to see anybody freaking out or the cops rushing the kid, or the school suspending the kid.
The land of the free is gradually accustoming its citizens to bondage to government, and its children to Communist weaseling. Children are citizens with the same constitutional rights as an adult, as a SCt justice said in Lopez, the rConstitutional rights of children do not stop at the schoolhouse door.
The mental midgets in the public school indoctrination system are creating a generation which recognizes no constitutional right. Since when is possessing a toy a crime? What law says so?
Update: The mother is upset with how her son is being disciplined. Palmer police chief, E. Warren Moonbatt, says that she has no right to be upset. Her “irresponsible parenting” is the source of the problem, according to Moonbatt, who has ordered her to attend sensitivity training this summer. The father’s gun permit has been permanently revoked as well.
It’s LONG past time to remove these fascist tools and elect/replace them with people who embrace freedom and liberty. If the people want to continue to be slaves to Political Correctness and statest totalitarianism then let them continue to be quiet and calm.
Sue the bastards! In the first case, requiring gun permits to own a gun is a hold over from the days of making sure blacks don’t own guns. We can not and should not accept limitations on our Second Amendment rights, and a permit is definitely a limitation that the “authorities” can and will use to strip us of our guns. Conservatives should start the good fight against requiring permits, requiring the government to say it’s okay to have a gun because the day will come when the government will say no permits and no permits mean no guns.
Sue the bastards! Sue the hell out of the moron police chief who thinks a child having a toy gun (not against the law) is just cause for attacking his mother’s parenting and for stripping his father of his gun. What crime has the father committed? Wherein has he done wrong? The comment against the mother and the deprivation of the permit is an attack on the character of both parents. Sue for defamation of character or slander.
This is Pavlovian conditioning, where the sight of anything gun-shaped or even gun-reminiscent gets kids in trouble. The object is to instill an unreasoning fear of guns. It’s quite deliberate.
Thinking long term here…
Teach children to hate firearms. Reward them for telling on any classmate who pretends his hand is a gun or brings a tiny Lego sized gun to school. Convince them that firearms are evil. Condition them to wet themselves at the very thought of guns.
As they move into higher grades convince them to tell their parents that they’re scared of the guns in their homes. Have them write plays about how wrong it is to own a gun. Have them sign petitions to register all firearms. Hook them up with political organizations whose leaders are looking for the next generation of anti-gun activists.
Our children are being groomed to be the generation that repeals the Second Amendment.
I want my America back!
I want to return to the days when you were a kid and could carry a 22 Winchester, shoot cans ‘n bottles at a local sand bank after hours or shoot rats at the local landfill.
I want to deal with people with rational minds.
I want common sense to trump all other considerations.
Am I wishing for too much???
Be careful Red Ryder, lest you shoot your eye out.
When I was a kid shooting rats at the landfill for target practice, we never called it the landfill. It was always “the dump” or “the city dump”. Have they subconsciously gotten you to adopt their language?
Heh… You might be right on that landfill vs. dump thang ’cause that’s what we called it too! Every town had their own and not only was it a place for target practice but it was also a place where many things really got “recycled.”
Sending your kids to public school is child abuse, pure and simple.
The appearance of that tiny gun must have disturbed pea-sized brains.
I wonder if there would have been any commotion if a little girl had brought out that plastic gun.
Don’t forget, Holder wants to “brainwash Americans that guns are bad”. Look it up.
What utter dopes!
Homeschool! Who needs the “socialization” of public school? I laugh at people who say my kids won’t be “social” because they were homeschooled….yeah, because everyone sends their children to public school for social interaction….because it sure isn’t for a good education.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/03/18/holder-in-1995-we-must-brainwash-people-against-guns/
Holder equates “right to bear arms” with smoking cigarettes.
Who will resist guys like Holder then? Who will fight the Chicago Machine connected mobsters? Who will join our military?
How about we instead “brainwash” kids to hate corruption in government, and that lying under oath is wrong?
Because the actual Common Core K-12 implementation is so built around social and emotional learning these stories will become more common. Not bringing a tiny toy gun replica but a belief among administrators that children’s beliefs and feelings are a major function of education now.
In fact most parents and taxpayers when they hear a school is committed to continuous improvement assume that means an increasing base of knowledge. Not a federally mandated Positive Behavioral Program for all students that snuck in under a woeful reading of federal disabilities law. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/how-social-and-emotional-learning-as-the-primary-focus-is-coming-in-all-the-windows/
It actually gets worse since Arne Duncan keeps asserting that federal civil rights laws disallow anything that impacts equal opportunity. Since feelings and emotions are the only thing distributed fairly equally by nature, that misreading further enables the SEL as primary focus.
I even had a new middle school principal tell me to my face a couple of years ago when I asked about changes in math that:” we now know what students feel is more important than what they know.”
She had been told that in her Ed Doctorate program and she fervently believed it. Because it fit with the way she wanted world to work in the future.
Combo of power, taxpayer money, and no common sense. Education in the 21st century.
“we now know what students feel is more important than what they know.” — That is how they got Obama elected, after all. People felt so good about voting for The First Black President that they didn’t even want to know much about him.
Craig Richards, then a chair at one of the departments at Teachers’ College, CU, was big on feelings over facts. He pushed that line and I rejected the hell out of it. What you feel is your business; what you think and how you came to your conclusion is mine.
It’s natural for kids to resist authority and eventually see adults as stupid. Good to see public school authorities are giving reasons for younger and younger kids to adopt that mentality. Perhaps this kind of zero tolerance nonsense backfires and ultimately takes credibility away.
These toy guns are taking pressure off the kids who “smoke” pretzel sticks from being disciplined for the anti tobacco policy (I am not kidding, I know kids who got in trouble for that).
Of course, depending on the state they are in, they could just claim that pretzel stick is a big splief and get away with it.
I propose a new constitutional ammendment called the “no nonsense amendment”. this amendment will mandate the death sentence for penalizing on pastries, water guns, lego guns, and anything else that is beyond a reasonable doubt not an actual fire arm.
“Another student on the bus saw the toy and yelled to the driver.”
Sad. Just sad. Said “student” has already been brainwashed beyond reason. Its bad enough the adults have lost their sanity.
What can you say: These people are just plain nuts.
No. These people have an agenda, and we must fight against it. If all we say is they’re nuts, twenty years from now, there will be no Second Amendment because that kid who screamed gun, likely programmed by his parents AND the school, will be voting to repeal it.
Scientific studies by leading universities have proven that Lego toy guns are a gateway weapon to AK47s.
Actually, both the Cornell and Dartmouth studies found that Lego toy guns were a gateway first to Nerf guns, which then were a gateway to BB guns, and then on to AK-47s, but ultimately you are correct. Horrible. GI Joe has much to answer for.
As Prof Reynolds has noted – sending your children to public schools is pretty much parental malpractice.
Civil disobedience. At some point parents will get together and conspire to send EVERY child in their area to school on the same day with identical toy guns and dare the school system to suspend them all.
Imagine if schools punished kids for wearing the color blue. Or for saying “blue” or even referring to something that is often blue.
Then when they grew up and voted, they’d never be able to vote Democrat.
>>”Originally, when the school learned about the incident Friday they had the six-year-old write an apology letter to the driver.”
That’s the real problem, and that’s why we lost here. We need to absolutely refuse to write such letters. No apologies. If we protest the detentiona and suspension but not the letter, we haven’t really won.
Our son’s best friend when he was in the first grade caused a stir. His father grew up in the midwest and is a hunter.
Every summer the boy and his brother went to a camp on a ranch when the family visited their old home.
For show-and-tell, the boy brought an old-fashioned looking, black and white photo of his brother and himself dressed as cowboys, holding BB-gun rifles, which was taken at the camp.
His mother told my wife that one of the mothers called her up on the phone that night, completely hysterical when she heard the boy had brought a picture showing “guns” to school. The wife couldn’t calm her down, and when she demanded to talk to the father, he refused, telling his wife to tell the woman to “get a life.”
…any parent that subjects their child to the unionist socialist extremism of the public “education”/indoctrination system should be put into prison for child abuse.
Interesting thing happens when things are forbidden to a child, when they grow into the teenage years what is forbidden becomes irresistable. So this episode of hysteria from the adults is implanted in this kindergartener’s psyche and when he is 14 thereabouts he becomes a gun collector. The second amendment will become an obsession in the teenager’s mind and restoration of America becomes possibility.
We are already seeing that in teenagers regarding the first amendment, the adults are spouting against prayer in public places, prayer in schools and the teenagers are founding Bible clubs, organizing prayer around the flagpole when school opens, and openly praying at graduations. Adults forbid prayer and it becomes irresistable to teenagers. HOPE FOR AMERICA!
Teachers and Principals attend conferences and have regular training. This cr@p is very likely training-based. Stories like this pop up with far too much regularity for this to be accidental.
There is a source for this lack of judgment.
This all about indoctrination. Don’t pay attention to the school’s rules, pay attention to how easily the other kid told on his friend. Every tyrant, every communist, every Maoist, every Progressive knows children want to be belong. They want the approval of adults and authority figures.
You will find those authorities asking your kids about your actions, just like Mao did.
THIS should scare you.
http://truthandcommonsense.com/2013/05/29/missing-the-point-of-zero-tolerance-for-guns-in-schools-not-about-safety-but-about-turning-your-kids-into-spies/
Post-Sandy Hook, I actively support summary firing for school personnel who do this.
Parents need to tell their kids: I brought you into this world, and I will take you out of it for going to school and telling your teachers about family business.
[…] previously covered the gun-shaped breakfast pastry, a pencil pointed like a gun, and a Quarter-size Lego piece. Hot Air also has the story of the 5-year old who brought a cap gun to […]
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