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“While the device created by these two students would meet the strict definition of a weapon as defined by the zero tolerance policy, and while [the] employer’s policy pertaining to weapons on any of its premises is reasonable, strict application without thought can potentially stifle or impede learning.” – Arbitration ruling in Science teacher prevails in battle with L.A. school district over ‘guns’ [via latimes.com]

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49 COMMENTS

  1. Yeah, the air pressure one could possibly do serious damage if you hooked it up to enough pressure. When I saw the coil gun I was convinced I made spitwad shooters that were more powerful.

    Wait, I suppose a common straw out of the cafeteria could be considered a weapon by that standard. EXPELL ALL STRAW USERS.

  2. I have to wonder how many nascent John Brownings, Eugene Stoners and Mikhail Kalashnikovs are preemptively detoured from great careers by the stifling effect of things like this. (I’m pretty sure my high school science project would have gotten me in trouble, had I been going to high school today rather than elsewhere and a while back.)

    The world needs more than just the next greatest app.

    • +

      Even worse, because you mention Browning, et. al., – I once had an English Lit. Professor who said “Shakespeare was truly great, truly gifted, BUT, how many Shakespeares are there NOT, because there was a Shakespeare”.

      I took his meaning to be, don’t let anyone else’s achievements or prowess affect you from attempting to develop your own. Don’t let someone else’s resume kick your ass, get out there and fill in your own.

    • Between the anti education, and the ATF, it would not shock me if more then a few great minds were prevented from happening, if not rotting in prison or a mental “health” hospital by leftists quacks.

  3. Regressive leftism strikes again.

    Back in the day they’d have been the ones warning about fire and how we shouldn’t use it.

      • That was Berkeley last weekend…

        By the way, your point above was outstanding, and very true.

        The way to deal with people whose wings are bigger than yours is to choose your own flight path, not cut theirs off.

        • “By the way, your point above was outstanding, and very true.”

          Indeed.

          I was tempted to make a wisecrack like “You’re gonna have to stop doing that Joe, or you’ll blow your wacko-extremist reputation you’ve been building here.”

          But I thought the better of it…

  4. One little kid gets kicked out of school for making a “clock” (read: timer) that could feasibly be used for detonating an explosive, for the purposes of (?…). Kid then gets invited to White House and Facebook HQ as guest of honor. Kid later moves with family to terrorist sponsor nation before returning to US 9 months later.

    A teacher gets kicked out of school for making a “gun” that couldn’t possibly be used to hurt anyone, for the purposes of teaching science. Teacher later loses everything in protracted legal battle to clear his good name. No White House or Facebook HQ invites appear forthcoming.

    • Clock Boy didn’t make a thing. And I don’t think the school did anything to him but call the cops. He just disassembled a commercially made clock and rearranged it as if he were using it for a detonator and then his parents screamed “Islamaphobes!” when the cops showed up to investigate.

      I’m 99.9% convinced that the whole thing was an adult planned publicity stunt.

  6. It was at the end of another overnight shift. Standing around waiting for the relief shift to arrive so we could hand off the assays in progress to them, I was idly cleaning my fingernails (stained brown from nitric acid) with my trusty Spyderco ‘Harpy’, the new boss had a look of shock and horror on her face when she said “That’s a weapon!”.

    (Image me double-take)

    Huh? “That knife, that’s a weapon!” she said. “That’s a *tool*” I said. “And besides, if you want to make an issue out of it with the company, in every mechanic’s pocket out there in the plant is knife a whole lot larger than this thing.” I reached around me on the counter I was leaning on where there was a rack of 30 250ml volumetric flasks set up with filter funnels over them. (see just below) and plucked one out and held it up:

    http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/product/aldrich/z647861?lang=en&region=US

    Holding by the neck I said to her “I can crack this flask down on the counter and make a wicked sharp knife a whole lot larger than my little pocket knife. There are 30 lethal weapons right *here*. Is this going to be an issue?”

    She had a very confused look on her face and suddenly realized there was something she needed to do elsewhere and exited the scene.

    Never heard anything more about it (at that time). Wonder why?

    (The relationship steadily deteriorated over the next year and a half. Three years later, I went to work for the company that bought that company, and for a substantial raise in pay. The people at the old company were amused by that turn of events, having had a front-row seat to me not taking her crap the first time around.)

    EVERYTHING and nearly ANYTHING can be a weapon, people. Even a charming personality like mine…

    *snicker* 😉

    • I’ve said before that this kind of “weapons” policy is the direct result of policy being made by people who are comfortable with neither weapons nor tools.

      • One of my favorite King of the Hill episodes is on this subject, when Hank becomes the substitute shop teacher and the students get in trouble for carrying tools around the school.

        • Man, when I was in school there was not a single day from about 7th grade on that I didn’t have at least one (and up to 5) kind of bladed implement. Kept a 12″ chunk of rebar in my backpack for an attitude adjuster too.

          When you’re a kid and a scrawny little shit the bullies need to know that if you start something with me, you’re not walking away scott free.

    • “EVERYTHING and nearly ANYTHING can be a weapon, people. Even a charming personality like mine…”

      This is an excellent point. To me, the even more important point to raise with fans of “weapons policies” is that the people who have the intent and the drive to do harm to another human don’t let “policies” stop them. Bans on knives, firearms, etc. may keep scary things out of the public eye, but they also make the general environment less safe from the truly dangerous people.

    • Yup, I witnessed a similar issue happen in My workplace. My employers have a total “Zero Tolerance” to so called weapons. I witnessed a Middle-Manager castigate another employee for using a pocket knife with a 3inch blade to cut thick plastic strapping…The Female manager yelled, ” THAT’S AN ASSAULT WEAPON !!! IT’S ILLEGAL IN THE WORKPLACE !!!” She then threatened the employee with their job employment if they didn’t immediately surrender the knife to the Mgmt. Rep. …I was present and objected in the other employees defense…I said to the manager that it is a lawful tool, being used as a lawful tool, and no one was threatened with it, or menaced…I told her she was grossly misrepresenting her authority…I asked her to see her “Police credentials, and warrant card…” I asked her “From where she was drawing her police powers…And that if she was an LE…The other citizen could obviously strongly object, and state that they DON’T CONSENT TO SEARCHES AND SEIZURES…! ” The Female manager stormed away….To this day I’ve heard of a least four employees that were subject to this kind of gross abuse of authority. One employee stated they were threatened because they were using a “Pocket multi-tool”. They also said the Mgmt. Rep. stated it was an “ILLEGAL ASSAULT Weapon on company property…A year later, there was a refresh course by H/R on the company’s “So called Workplace violence, and active shooter policy (made up by a bunch of office Liberals with no F***ing clue.) Out of shear coincidence, a commercial for an attorney’s office was displayed on the TV/Teleconference system. It was for hiring an attorney in case of an active shooter, and workplace violence…About how an employer with no SECURITY and zero tolerance to any defense has now opened themselves to liability for YOUR personal safety, and how they can be held legally culpable ! I yelled OUT, “Somebody get that phone number! I think were going to need it ! ” The Mgmt. Reps, and H/R. got real quiet as people were writing dowm the number!!! Lol!

  9. The teacher and project students are in the right, of course.

    Still, if you’re an adult living, working, teaching, raising your family in a place like California, you no longer get my sympathy. You are part of the problem, regardless how earnestly you protest on blogs, om social media, or in old fashioned letters to the editor.

    Yes, quitting is a viable option. Pull up stakes and go somewhere else, even if it takes years to carry out the plan. Millions do so around the world every year. Otherwise, you’re just perpetuating a rotten-to-the-core system that can never be reformed. It’s too late for that.

    At this point, it must collapse completely and be rebuilt. That can’t happen any time soon as long as people continue to enable the state to hobble along. Walk away and let it crash.

    • I say this all the time, to no avail.

      Peaceful secession people, peaceful secession. Must preferable to bloody war.

      Don’t vote for a politician, vote with your money and your feet.

      We definitely have the government we deserve because we prefer velvet chains to true liberty or freedom. I’ll say it til I’m blue in the face: If every gun owner/2A loving american/conservative/libertarian would just unite on one issue, one, and that being stop paying taxes, that would make the leviathan stop and take notice. Starve the beast.

  10. Clear case of “constructive possession”. Even though no air compressor was attached to the “gun”, a compressor was likely nearby. Someone should have asked for an ATF letter. Even if the parts for the “gun” had been scattered around the science room, “constructive possession”, right? Right?

    The school district should re-define weapon to something near the ATF declarations of “constructive possession”. The school district should publish a notice that if any component of a gun, in raw or fabricated state (or even imagined as a gun component?) is “constructive possession” of a weapon. Let’s stop all this nonsense of inserting common sense in a situation that is obviously the precursor to a mass shooting of marshmallows !

    • “Even though no air compressor was attached to the “gun”, a compressor was likely nearby.”

      Human lungs make a dandy improvised compressor, as the tribal folks in South America long ago discovered would propel a scavenged thorn dipped in poison-dart frog skin secretions would take down game quite handily.

      Beautiful little amphibs, I briefly considered raising some during my lizard and snake phase, but lost interest when I discovered they are only venomous due to the South American jungle insects they eat…

      https://www.joshsfrogs.com/frogs-for-sale/all-poison-dart-frogs.html

  11. Am I the ONLY one who rarely clicks on leftard sites? Sorry but I’m not going to get the “full” story. Make your post a bit longer TTAG. Oh home/private school. Duh…

    • One of those rare instances where clicking the link was worth it – the reporter clearly was under no illusions that the school district was run by morons and made that very clear in the article. There. Now you got the rest of the story.

  12. Interesting story, but coming out of California I’m in no way surprised. What DOES surprise me is that he coaches a fencing team and that’s apparently Kosher with California these days, since fencing is basically mock combat. I was in public elementary school in the mid to late 90’s, and remember playing “dodgeball” in gym. We actually played with what were basically Hacky sacks filled with cotton. They sucked because they were so soft and lightweight that they couldn’t be thrown with any kind of accuracy or distance. Well a couple years later our “dodgeball” games, which we enjoyed all the same despite the puny balls, was banned by the schoolboard. They said that throwing the “dodgeballs” at each other were “intentional acts of violence” and was unacceptable. Even as a 7 or 8 year old at the time I recall that being one of the most asinine things I’d ever heard, and this happened back in the 90’s. I later went to a private middle school and we played real dodgeball with real rubber dodgeballs and most everyone loved it. I also recall in a physics class in college we set up an experiment where we shot suspended pieces of wood with BB guns to calculate the amount of force directed at the wood from the BB and the amount of swinging it would cause on the wood. This would have been in 2009 or 2010, also at a private college. Looking back I was always amazed that we “got away” with that, and I wonder if they’re still doing it now.

    • “What DOES surprise me is that he coaches a fencing team and that’s apparently Kosher with California these days, since fencing is basically mock combat.”

      Thanks to the popularity of the Dystopia-themed ‘Hunger Games’ movies, competitive archery is making a resurgence with teenage girls in middle-high school.

      A bow and arrow in the hands of an angry teenage girl can easily *kill*, nearly silently.

      Good thing teenage girls *never* get angry or do impulsive things… 🙂

    • “What DOES surprise me is that he coaches a fencing team…”

      I was on my college fencing team. At a tournament, the blade of foil broke near the protected tip. The riposte continued into the jacket of the opponent, and out the back. Fortunately, the jacket was at least one size too big (we used what the college provided), so the wearer was not injured.

      Point? A broken fencing blade is a real weapon, and can kill. Never read about anyone being killed with a broken gun barrel.

      So….once again, diseased liberal thinking, regarding weapons.

  14. what got me???

    Was the school was not fully locked down, SWAT and bomb squad called!
    Letters sent home with each student in the school saying “Please watch your child, they might go crazy now —gasp! a guns was ‘near’ them!”
    Then the whole school leveled after a year long protest ‘that its dangerous now and must be made into a park!’
    Oh and chastise the teacher for being white!!!

  15. The nugget at the end of the story: the assistant principal who reported the “guns” to higher-ups was promoted, and is now the school’s principal.

    That’s progressivism for you. No good deed goes unpunished, and no idiocy goes unrewarded.

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