When elementary school children get expelled for for violating the school's weapon policy because the plastic army men in a Veteran's Day project having teeny weeny bazookas and machine guns school administrators have raised "organizational dumbass" to Olympic levels!

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/boys-army-hat-violates-drugs-and-weapons-policy-at-us-school-in-rhode-island/story-e6frf7jx-1225880898797

Incidents like this are inevitably followed by calls to have toy and replica guns painted in unmistakable garish colors. Normally this comes from people who do not possess two functioning brain cells they can claim as their own.

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jun/07/local/la-me-lapd-fake-guns-20110607

What amazes them is that the criminal's capacity to exploit such laws. To them it makes perfect sense that criminals would follow this law. The same brands of spray paint he uses to tag his gang signs all over every unblemished surface comes in garish colors which can be used to disguise his real gun to look like a toy. "Pimp my Glock Pink" is one choice....



Do-gooders or prohibitionists consistently and completely underestimate a criminal's capacity for creativity in evading whatever simplistic crap "solution" they promote. Here a thug has a fully functioning sawed-off 12 gauge shotgun concealed as part of a fully functioning squirt gun.



http://www.everydaynodaysoff.com/2009/11/09/super-soaker-shotgun/

All this does is give the police an out when they shoot a kid with a black squirt gun.

and register their serial numbers. Perhaps we could make any replica gun that was black and looked like a military weapon illegal.

We could require an NICS background check for anyone who wished to buy one and require all replica guns to be safely stored. We could require anyone who takes a replica gun out of his house to have a replica gun carry license.

We could set a legal age for owning any replica gun or toy gun and require adult supervision for all children who are playing with toy guns.

We could do all this and still not accomplish a damn thing. And we probably will.

...they are stupid and natural selection is a bitch?

Of course, the situation in Brownsville wasn't quite so innocent. It appears the corpse was dumb enough to not only NOT drop the gun but to point it at the officers who shot him.

Toy or not, I cannot fault the officers for not waiting for the idiot to pull the trigger to find out it was a toy.

but in fact this one was no toy. It was a pellet or bb gun, and could cause harm. Point one at a cop and bad things can happen.

Kids do stupid things because they don't fully understand consequences.

Where do they learn the consequences? From their parents? As a person who is exposed to other peoples kids all day long, I can tell you that not all parents teach their kids the things that others among us assume are common sense.

...to be brought to schools. A zero-tolerance policy is sent home with the child and admittedly it might be up to the parent to explain the consequences. I'm just saying, it's not a secret to the child that this is unacceptable and punishable behavior.

I think they often do it as an expression of rage...a sort of look how cool I am, I have a toy that can hurt someone.

...those are just cool.

and sorry for the late reply, but I still think there is a huge assumption here that someone is telling students what can/will happen to them if they bring such an object (toy gun specifically) to school. You say "Schools generally make pretty clear . . . " [by sending home a note stating that kids may not bring a toy gun to school and that there is zero tolerance, and consequences for that]. In fourteen years of daily presence on an inner city high school campus in southern California, where one LAUSD student dies violently every school day (not on campus, mind you), I have never seen such a notice. Further, it has not until now occurred to me that I should say to my students, "You know, if, while playing in the streets, you carry an airsoft pistol that looks like a real 1911, you might get your ass shot off." After all, how should I know what toys the students have if they have them when I am not supposed to see them? "It might be up to the parent to explain . . ." It is ABSOLUTELY up to the parent to explain. It is absolutely the parent's obligation to protect their child from a situation in which they might accidentally get shot because they have a toy that looks like a real gun. What's the alternative, It's my responsibility? Kids bring shit that they aren't supposed to have to school all the time. If we teachers were cops, we could search the students. We are not cops. We aren't the kids parents either. If a kid doesn't know what "common sense" dictates, then it is the parent's job to fill in the blanks, considering that "common sense" isn't as common as we sometimes think.

...I went to Pasadena USD and it was always made pretty clear to us that we were not to bring such items to school. I'm pretty sure just about every year we were sent home with or given a lengthy statement of policy on conduct and standards. This was post Columbine mind you...

LAUSD, like many of our school districts, needs a new curriculum, and a great emphasis on community engagement. What do you think of Green Dot schools?

http://www.greendot.org/

but toy guns are not specified. Real guns are specified, of course, and that situation comes up from time to time too. My point is mainly that it is a parent's job to inform their kids. Parents give toys like that and then tell them "go play in the yard" without teaching them the possible dangers. Kids also bring inappropriate stuff to school to "show off" to their friends. They are thinking of showing off, not about how they are about to get their heads blown off. Control of these things needs to come from home, not from teachers who have no authority over such stuff as might be in a student's backpack.

Off topic: Community engagement: We are creating new schools to address this issue. As we speak, I am part of a new school designed by teachers, one of the cornerstones of which is community engagement. All of this comes through grassroots reform called "school choice." Charters have won a few slots, but ground up teacher designed schools have won more, and are performing better when you consider the advantages that charters get (like public funding on top of private funding).

Off topic: Green Dot? I'm not a fan of charter schools at all. All of the high school charters in Los Angeles have at least this in common: Job 1 is making sure that their scores look good. Job 2 is get rid of students that make their scores look bad. Job 3 is to look busy in case anyone asks what's happening with the taxpayers' money. Every year about October LAUSD schools get a fresh influx of students who scored poorly at charters. Their scores go up, ours go down, they get the praise for increasing "performance," and we get the blame for low achievement. LAUSD is dedicated to educating all comers. The charters are dedicated to serving who they choose to serve. Not exactly the spirit of public education. They also run on public funding, in public buildings, and yet they don't have to reach the same stringent standards that the rest of us do. Not to mention that the teachers get paid less (though to be fair they don't need to work nearly as hard, since they get to keep the more compliant and motivated students, and they don't really need to meet state standards anyway) and they don't have union protection, which may undermine the rest of us at some point. Bottom line is, even though they "cream" students, they don't perform any better than we do, which means that even though the access disparity is on their side, we do a better job.

...and when we can do things to make their jobs easier from a policy perspective - I think that's a good thing.

I think you and I agree on education reform generally, the public school system needs to be more engaging, and splitting it up isn't the way to go. I think the main things we need to get back to is building new schools, reducing class sizes, and increasing community engagement so that schools produce responsible citizens. I think we can both agree that the failure that leads to high rates of gun violence starts at home, carries through the schools, and manifests itself in adult life. I think it's sad that the debate we were having in the late 90s in California about school reform has largely gone to the wayside with the economic collapse. We are not well-positioned for a fruitful future and that is why so many of us are concerned about the colliding wave of ignorance and guns being combustible.

Thank you for your insightful comments.

...the kid learned the consequences the hard way. Too bad for him - but good thing for the gene pool.

If you make it to your mid-teens and don't realize that pointing a toy gun at someone with a real one is a Very Bad Thing, that's really your own damn fault.

Sympathy? Nope- fresh the fuck out.

At a certain point, assuming that the parents have done their job in raising their kid, in teaching him/her that a toy gun that looks exactly like a real gun can cause a very real reaction, then there is nowhere else to turn to in the blame game. The kid was stupid and paid the ultimate price for it. My point was simply that there are plenty of parents who give things to their kids to get the kids off their backs. They don't always mention that you could get yourself killed with such a toy. If I had a kid, giving a toy like that would be part of the teaching process for owning the real thing. I would teach that the realistic toy was to be treated exactly as though it were the real thing, thus avoiding all of this kind of trouble (unless my kid were really stupid, and pointed the fucking thing at a cop, at which point I could only kick myself for having fathered such a dumbass).

On Jan. 4, in Brownsville, Texas, a panicked assistant principal called 911 and reported that a student was in a hallway brandishing a black gun. Police entered and later said that they repeatedly warned Jaime Gonzalez Jr. to drop his weapon before an officer fatally shot him. It turned out the boy, 15, had a black "nonpowder" BB gun that closely resembled a high-powered Glock firearm, according to police.

On edit--one wonders though why the asst principal didn't just ask the kid what he was doing, ask if the gun were loaded, what kind of gun it was. That's what I would have done. Sounds a little like gun-derangement syndrome on his/her part.

and you'd try to interrogate him before calling police?

I really don't think that's in the A.P.'s job description/requirements.

as a gun collector, I'm not hysterically afraid of guns either.

In this case, panic and terror of the gun did more harm than the gun itself.

No-one is under any moral or legal obligation to confront an apparently armed person while themselves disarmed (by law, I might add). What do you think could have occured had it been a real gun?

I'd say the most appropriate actions were taken: alert police and try to clear the immediate area.

I would have done it differently. Yes, they did everything by the book, no one can fault them. And a 15 year old kid is dead.

I suspect the Asst. Principal doesn't know guns. And he-she apparently doesn't know the students very well either . . .

wow, you could put an eye out with that thing.

Gun hysteria.

.. whether or not it's a real gun or a bb gun.

I'm sure you'll be able to successfully tell three or four of them before the odds catch up with you.

Confinscated a delivery of Airsoft AR's and declared that they could be modified to fire full auto with real ammo.

Oneshooter
Armed and Livin in Texas

put a magazine of real ammo in the weapon and fire away. I don't think he would do too well after round one or two.

He also did not seem to be too comfortable handling the weapon for a guy who supposedly handles them for a living.

Nor does the "lower receiver" have a hammer that would strike a firing pin (assuming you fit a real upper on it.)

Our tax dollars at work.

"I rather suspect this kid was acting out a cultural "demand:" To strut about like a thug wannabe, gun-in-hand (however low-powered) and when told -- repeatedly -- to drop the gun, quite simply refused, this in order to complete the circle of hardness and defiance. This cultural demand in some cases may exceed that which the family, school or other institutions can provide as an alternative. As for "knowing the consequences," this may juice up the act of defiance in the eyes of admirers."

Or he was mentally ill and untreated...

Mental illness is too often shorthand for "I can't come up with any other explanation that fits my worldview."

And it certainly is cited as reason to prohibit or excuse this or that.

I've seen it too often, ellisonz, on a "smaller scale:" The drunken frat rat on 6th Street who is ordered to get out of the right-of-way by police, who nevertheless closes his eyes half-way and pushes out his naked chest in defiance. Several times. Until he is forcibly seized by police, whereupon he fights back and inevitably loses.

Only in these "mental" cases, he sues the cops later.

...my money is on seriously troubled, and not thug wannabe in this case.

Anyone significant????



Didn't think so...

The National Replica Association.