Institutional hoplophobia knows no bounds where government schools are concerned. The most innocuous, everyday item, when accompanied by the right sounds or trigger cocking motion, can (and will) be treated as a threat to another student, followed by swift and harsh punishment. Proportionality be damned. The latest wanton offender is a Suffolk (Virginia) Schools (Every Child a Star!) second grader at Driver Elementary. The offense: pointing his Ticonderoga #2 and saying “pew, pew, pew!” wset.com quotes a district flack, speaking for Superintendent Dr. Deran Whitney, who tried to justify the tike’s 2-day suspension by pointing out that “a pencil is considered a weapon when it’s pointed at someone in a threatening way and gunlike noises are made. (Bethanne) Bradshaw says some children would consider the incident threatening.” Yes, and some children no doubt would consider a pop spelling quiz threatening, too. How long before we see those on the verboten list?
Soon, we may not have the country we want, but we will have the country we deserve.
“We” deserve better. “We” didn’t vote in these wannabe dictators. So please, refrain from lumping us in with those statist martians.
Just what we need in America–schools banning pencils because they are “weapons.” Kids will just have to learn by rote repetition and memorization. They don’t need to know how to rite anyways–thas wha phones is for.
They already “learn” by regurgitating and parroting the teachers rather than thinking for themselves, right? Who needs to learn how to think?
“[District policy] bans drawing a picture of a gun” If I were in that class I would organize a draw in and draw the oldest, most antiquated musket I could envision.
It’d be interesting to know what specific policies were violated. A pencil and saying “pew, pew, pew” does not meet their (and Virginia’s) definition of a firearm.
http://www.spsk12.net/parents/policies-and-regulations/
Zero Tolerators LOVE zero tolerance, because it keeps them permanently off the hook for automaton-style behavior. Behaving like Humongous Hall Monitors from Hell is their perfect comfort zone.
And that guy looks as if he had just burst outta some poor starsailor’s abdomen. OW!!
Whitney’s $h1t eating grin makes it look like he’s proud and celebrating having scored another point for the gun grabbing crowd.
The grabbers whole anti Second Amendment anti gun exercise in persecution has become “1984” “Animal Farm” and “Lord of the Flies” all rolled into one ongoing crusade.
Mr. Burke.
Exactly!
Private skool, bitchez.
What else do you expect when the majority of teachers graduated from college in the bottom 1/3 of their class?
OMG OMG OMG it was a #2!!! That is an assault pencil right there!!!
Thank God it wasn’t a mechanical pencil. They have re-loadable high capacity magazines.
Wonder if the diameter of the projectile of that assualt mechanical pencil is the dreaded .9mm? Save the children!
I use this high-cap .9mm Assault Pencil, complete with fast-reloading semi-auto clicker, removable support clip, and hidden eraser, to throw large amounts of lead at innocent papers and 2×4’s all the time.
The Pentel P209 does almost sound like a gun…it’s amazing I’m allowing to carry this thing concealed.
Can you believe these Assault Pencils are available to the general public? And sold on the internet? Without a background check?!?
This evil black pencil could terrorize schools, workplaces, and homes everywhere. Some of the features from their very own website:
-Convenient side button propels lead for continuous writing without changing hand position.
-Brass clutch guarantees consistent lead advance every time
-Transparent barrel allows user to monitor lead supply
-Available lead sizes: 0.5mm, 0.7mm, and 0.9mm
Available in the following barrel colors:
0.5mm: Black, Transparent Black, Transparent Blue, Transparent Green and Transparent Red
0.7mm: Transparent Black, Transparent Blue and Transparent Violet
0.9mm: Transparent Black, Red
-Refillable with Pentel Super Hi-Polymer® Lead and PDE-1 large refill eraser
This menace must be stopped!
Yea, but the kids stick the thing that flips up, up their noses.
How soon before writing “Gun” is a 3 day vacation? I believe drawn pictures of G**s and horizontal letter “L”s are already misdemeanors.
Horizontal L… Lady Liberty toes-up.
Time to start homeschooling your kids there. I have already put the school board on notice that if anything close to this happens to my kid they can expect a lawsuit and to have less students in class the next day as ALL of my kids will be home schooled from then on. Hit them where it hurts – their funding, less kids = less funding. The internet has made it more than possible to give your child a better education at home than they would receive at a public SKOOL.
Check the rules in your state. Many make it very, very difficult to home school. Regardless, tech has basically made schools obsolete already. I view the traditional school system as Wile E. Coyote. They’ve already run off the cliff, they just haven’t looked down yet.
Ha Ha HA…
Good one!
AAA+++
Yes I live in PA and they make it hard – but I would definitely do it. And if I had to I would appeal to every organization I could to help me relocate if I couldn’t home school them here. I am already seriously considering moving to Montana but I feel right now I can do more in PA by standing and fighting for my gun rights here. We are still a very strong 2nd amendment state and we need all the pro-gun people we can get here to hold of the jackals from Philly and DC.
This might be good if you’re interested in world domination. Just imagine running into the middle of a city pointing your finger saying pew pew pew then yell I’m in charge now when everyone hits the deck in fear of your full auto assault finger with high capacity palms.
Maybe if he was making a stabbing motion..? I know I have treated a classmate after being stabbed with a pencil. But, “pew pew pew?”
I was stabbed in the leg with a mechanical pencil. Took years for the piece of graphite to work it’s way out of my leg. Near as I recall, the teacher just told us to knock it off. Different times.
For the last couple of decades, believed that kids were getting dumber and dumber, as if the genes were getting fragile or something. Now I believe, as Gershwin wrote, that it ain’t necessarily so. IMO, idiot teachers and idiot administrators produce idiot students by the trainload.
I blame the parents for suffering such fools. The parents have the hammer. They could run these assh@ts out of town on a rail if they got together and used their muscle. The fact that they don’t makes the parents the biggest idiots of all.
Parents more and more cede responsibility for child rearing to the school, and thereby the state. No wonder the state sees itself as responsible for raising a child — parents are facilitating it!
The same is true for food & health care & living quarters (food stamps, medicaid, subsidized housing). We see an intrusive government trying to dictate how to live — well when a person partakes of the welfare system that’s what you get! “My house, my rules”, says the State.
Then the state State overreaches and tries to run the lives of independent citizens.
The majority of voters decided that Obama deserved a second term. Common sense is in short supply among adults.
Common sense 50 years ago is rocket science today.
As an actual rocket scientist, I take exception to your wording.
However, I also take your meaning. 😉
Suspending a second grader for playing. What is this, North Korea? I dream of a day when people like Mr. Whitney face jail time for their actions, and I have a dream of a day when kids can be kids again.
My first question to this idiot is how much Zero Tolerance training did they give the children. Were the children explained the rules before class started. If the answer is “none”, which I expect it is, I would then file a lawsuit against the school and the principle for failure to provide the proper instruction in the bull-shit they are spewing. How can a child of that age expect to know and retain zero tolerance rules. They are children and children play in their own world until they get old enough to understand.
Do you really need any more reasons to get your kids out of the public schools ? When this kind of thing hits the news it’s one out of a hundred incidents just like it or worse, which don’t get reported.
If you want to be certain that all of the values you’ve tried to instill in your child are diminished, ridiculed, and spit upon then by all means, keep your kids in the public schools. Make no mistake, public schools today believe that their job is not to teach the kids the old fashioned “reading, writing, and arithmetic.” They see their job as flushing everything of value that you’ve worked to build with your child and to substitute modern PC “social justice” nonsense in place of history; to teach your kids to “feel” rather than think; and by all means, to teach them that Guns Are Bad. This is not random. It is systematic.
If you think you can’t afford to home school your kids, get them in a home school co-op, get them in a Catholic school … anything … but get them the heck out of the public schools if you value your kids at all.
My kids never have and never will see the inside of a public skrool.
Boy, we are gonna save a ton equipping the police and military!
Some children would consider paste to be a tasty and nutritious snack. That’s why we have adults around to exercise their better judgement.
And that right there is the Holy Grail of progressivism — when any given person’s emotion of the moment is the legal arbiter of your behavior.
It’s anarchy and tyranny all rolled into one.
Pencils???
Pew????
Suspensions????????
Lord, what fools these mortals be.
Why are people so afraid of using their judgement and then standing by the outcome? Zero tolerance is a CYA responsibility-shirking crutch for cowards and idiots.
Zero tolerance policies are like Hammurabi era punishments. You steal like Bernie Madoff they cut off your hand. You steal candy bar, they cut off your hand.
No, not really. Well, the era, but not the code.
He introduced an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth – in a time when you could be hanged for stealing a loaf of bread, his code was a hedge against barbarism. He instituted the notion of “Let the penalty fit the crime.”
You want bad, look at early medieval Europe or England…
Going to have to disagree with you there. The Hammurabi code included many of the barbaric punishments of the era including cutting off body parts and putting people to death outside of the parity of “eye for an eye”. Here are just a small sampling:
2. If any one bring an accusation against a man, and
the accused go to the river and leap into the river,
if he sink in the river his accuser shall take
possession of his house. But if the river prove that
the accused is not guilty, and he escape unhurt,
then he who had brought the accusation shall be
put to death, while he who leaped into the river
shall take possession of the house that had
belonged to his accuser.
6. If any one steal the property of a temple or of the
court, he shall be put to death, and also the one
who receives the stolen thing from him shall be
put to death.
7. If any one buy from the son or the slave of another
man, without witnesses or a contract, silver or
gold, a male or female slave, an ox or a sheep, an
ass or anything, or if he take it in charge, he is
considered a thief and shall be put to death.
21.If any one break a hole into a house (break in to
steal), he shall be put to death before that hole and
be buried.
22.If any one is committing a robbery and is caught,
then he shall be put to death.
109. If conspirators meet in the house of a tavernkeeper, and these conspirators are not captured
and delivered to the court, the tavern-keeper
shall be put to death.
110. If a “sister of a god” open a tavern, or enter a
tavern to drink, then shall this woman be burned
to death.
194. If a man give his child to a nurse and the child
die in her hands, but the nurse unbeknown to the
father and mother nurse another child, then they
shall convict her of having nursed another child
without the knowledge of the father and mother
and her breasts shall be cut off.
195. If a son strike his father, his hands shall be hewn
off.
205. If the slave of a freed man strike the body of a
freed man, his ear shall be cut off.
218. If a physician make a large incision with the
operating knife, and kill him, or open a tumor
with the operating knife, and cut out the eye, his
hands shall be cut off.
226. If a barber, without the knowledge of his master,
cut the sign of a slave on a slave not to be sold,
the hands of this barber shall be cut off.
253. If any one agree with another to tend his field,
give him seed, entrust a yoke of oxen to him, and
bind him to cultivate the field, if he steal the
corn or plants, and take them for himself, his
hands shall be hewn off.
192. If a son of a paramour or a prostitute say to his
adoptive father or mother: “You are not my
father, or my mother,” his tongue shall be cut
off.
193. If the son of a paramour or a prostitute desire his
father’s house, and desert his adoptive father and
adoptive mother, and goes to his father’s house,
then shall his eye be put out.
All part of the governmental plan to indoctrinate the next generation into subservient tax cattle. The children today will undoubtedly grow up to be the most mentally-damaged, slave-like, unrepentantly leftist in American history. The fact that parents allow this rather than tar and feathering any automaton that perpetuates it means the last generation got it pretty good in the head too.
Sending your child to public school is child abuse.
The US is not going to make it I’m afraid.
Oh, the depravity of it all.
OBEY!!!!!!!
You joke about banning pop spelling tests because kids are threatened by them. It is worse than that: I taught at a supposedly “elite” “progressive” high school and we weren’t allowed to give pop quizzes because they fostered an “adversarial environment” between students and teachers. I don’t work there any more because I made the kids do homework and take tests and that wasn’t sufficently “progressive”.
I wish you were kidding, but as one who’s taught in Калифорния I know that you are in dead earnest.
My sympathies, sir; it takes a long time for the lousy aftertaste to fade.
I teach college (chemistry and physics) now, and have been a teacher for 15 years at this point, and I see all too painfully the results of all this crap. I get pre-meds who cannot do basic mathematics, even with a calculator.
All that “Zero tolerance” and “progressive” educational “theory” has accomplished is to create a vast herd of people who can’t count past ten without pulling their socks off, and who are incapable of functioning outside the proscribed boundaries that their programming has set for them.
At the high school, I had some student turn in a paper that was just abysmal, poorly edited, poorly researched, and lacking in any hint of intelligence. I gave it the grade it deserved. The student complained to me that she worked for many hours on it, didn’t she deserve credit for all that effort.
I told her that effort was commendable, but wasted effort was just a waste.
I wasn’t popular with the administration, no sir.
Every day I lose more and more faith in humanity. Pretty soon, jellyfish will have more brains and a stronger backbone
What really is serious is when a kid starts biting in class 3 features into his pop tart, like a silencer. Call out the goons grabbers, you look more foolish every day, Randy
I read the story.
My comment:
You have GOT TO BE Fu<king kidding me.
guess not.
I see my spelling of fu<king is catching on. Sh¡t is easily spelled as well…
And I’m about to move to suffolk… nice.
This goes against child brain development. The human brain is not fully developed until the late 20s. Due to this fact children win make rash decisions and act on impulses. They may not even understand what they are doing is considered “wrong”. Fast forward a few years in states like MA where 12 year old kids get charged with felonies for having a rock fight in the neighborhood. One kid ducked and the rock went through the front window of the neighbor. Instead of working out how the kid will pay for it, the moonbat called the cops. They charged him with a felony and assault with a dangerous weapon. Of course they plead to a lesser charger but it still pops up as a felony charge on background checks. Zero tolerance laws are hot garbage and remove the decision making and common sense (TM) to solving problems.
Some human’s brains never develop, even after 20. They become school administrators and enact zero tolerance policies.
Those who can, do.
Those who cannot, teach.
Those who cannot teach, administer.
Those who cannot administer, vote in Chicago.
Those too dim for any of the above, write for the History Channel.
Those communities are getting exactly what they deserve. They made their bed. Let them lay in it.
Lie.
Stinking evil libtards.
What if the kid was just insinuating that the other kid smelled bad by pointing and and saying, “pew, pew, … You stink.” Lol