Rorschach Stupidity: “Shaped Like a Gun”

by T.L. James | 2:45 pm, March 2, 2013 | Comments Off

If this is in any way an accurate description of what happened, the “educators” involved should not be teaching at or wardering administrating the school – or any school:
Pop-Tart Pistol?: 7-Year-Old Gets Suspended for Gun-Shaped Pastry

7-Year-Old Joshua was suspended this morning from Park Elementary School in Brooklyn Park. Joshua says he was eating a pastry during snack time and trying to shape it into a mountain, the teacher said it looked like a gun and took him to the principal’s office. Joshua’s parents were called, he has been suspended for two days.

A seven-year-old…chewed a pastry…into a shape…that resembled a gun…and not one but at least two adults felt threatened. This is idiocy so incandescent that I’m truly at a loss to understand how they could possibly have a rational basis for their response. Nobody was in danger of being shot with a pastry, obviously, so they can’t claim the boy was acting in a manner that posed a direct danger to students or staff. The boy claims he was making the shape of a mountain, so the connection with firearms was made by the teacher who observed him eating the pastry – absent any other indications not mentioned in the story, that eliminates any of the usual contrived concerns that the boy might have been ‘unduly preoccupied’ with guns, or that he might (say) bring a real gun to school, thinking it a toy, or that it was a warning sign of mental imbalance, etc.

Joshua’s father says it’s ridiculous since no one was threatened or harmed by the pastry.

That right there sums up the utter absurdity of the situation, and of Progressives’ pants-wetting attitude towards guns and anything associated with them: we are now to regard even the resemblance or generic shape of a gun as equivalent to making an overt threat of violence, even if the shape appears in the course of an otherwise innocent activity. What about shop classes, with their abundance of pistol-grip-equipped tools? Or art classes – will students have to exercise extreme caution when painting a picture or forming a piece of pottery that they never incidentally or transiently produce even a vaguely gun-like shape? Taken to its absurd extreme, will we have to change the shape of the letter L and the number 7, lest schoolchildren end up with suspensions any time they are entrapped with spelling quizzes or math drills in class?

Seriously, Progressives – you need to grow up.

(Some idle speculation: It’s reasonable to assume that these ridiculous incidents are being documented in school records under such terms as “making threats involving a firearm” or in some other manner that rationalizes the teachers’ and administrators’ overreactions. How do we know these things won’t someday qualify as grounds for a mental-impairment rejection of a firearm-purchase background check? If all firearm transfers become subject to background checks without exception, as Colorado Democrats are pushing in the coming week, it becomes trivially easy to expand over time what criteria and evidence constitute grounds for rejecting permission to buy a firearm. Think about it: isn’t it reasonable caution and a commonsense approach to consider the public danger posed by gun ownership by those who once made a firearms-related threat to schoolchildren? This is no less predictable than your Obamacare medical health records being used in this manner – how better to assess your mental suitability for a firearms purchase than to check if you’ve ever been treated or counseled for depression, mood swings, anger management, or other “warning signs”, or even merely raised the subject with your doctor?)

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