A pencil is a weapon.
 

Two Boys Suspended For Pointing Pencils Like Guns
By Elise Solé


A 7-year-old boy, who was suspended for two days after playing a game of make-believe with his friend, returned to school on Wednesday.

On Friday, Christopher Marshall, a second grader at Driver Elementary School in Suffolk, Virginia and his classmate were playing with their pencils, pointing them at each other and making machine gun noises when a concerned teacher pulled them into the principals' office.

"I got a call from Christopher's school at 12:30 on Friday," the boy's mother, Wendy Marshall, 34, a stay-at-home mother of five, told Yahoo! Shine. "His teacher told me that Christopher and his friend were playing with pencils, making machine gun and 'bang bang' noises. I asked if they were pointing the pencils at anyone else, if they were angry or hostile, disrupting class, or refused to stop when asked and the teacher said no. I told her that I would speak to Christopher but his teacher said she was under obligation to report them anyway."

Wendy immediately picked up her son from school and when she got there, the principal explained that due to the school's zero tolerance policy against weapons or anything that resembles a weapon, Christopher would be suspended on Monday and Tuesday, allowed to return on Wednesday. Bethanne Bradshaw, a spokesperson for Suffolk Public Schools could not be reached for comment but according to a report from Fox43 she said, "A pencil is a weapon when it is pointed at someone in a threatening way and gun noises are made" and that "Some children would consider it threatening, who are scared about shootings in schools or shootings in the community. Kids don't think about 'Cowboys and Indians' anymore, they think about drive-by shootings and murders and everything they see on television news every day." According to the Suffolk News-Herald, the school had received hundreds of emails and on one day fielded about 75 phone calls per hour regarding the matter. Bradshaw wrote in an email to the paper that the reaction to the incident was overwhelming. “Opinions were very strong and mean-spirited, and often included abusive language and profanity.”

"I told the principal that Christopher's father is an ex-Marine and he was just emulating his dad," said Wendy. "Apparently the students were told at the beginning of the year that they couldn't pretend that objects were guns—there are only four weeks left in school. How could they remember that? Kids need to be reminded to bathe and brush their teeth. Besides, they were just being boys. The disciplinary report will be on Christopher's record forever." The report, below, was provided by the Marshall family.

Wendy took her son home and asked him to explain what happened. "He was shaking with fear and didn't understand why he was in trouble," she said. "So we reenacted the scene and I told him that he did nothing wrong." Christopher's father alerted the local news station and Wendy and Christopher spent the next two days eating ice cream, playing Mario Go Kart on Wii, and cleaning the house. "I let him drink soda too," she says. "I'm not going to punish him."


Wendy did not want to identify Christopher's friend but she says she believes he got a similar punishment. "I would understand the school's point better if the kids were older and they were being hostile toward each other," she says. "But these kids were laughing and playing and Christopher is being made into an example, which isn't right."

Yahoo article

This is such crap, they should be teaching gun safety and about the 2nd Amendment..http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1368049512.jpg

I want to cry

My little girl is in Kindergarten. They had "community helpers" week or something. a cop counts as a community helper. Whatever?

Anyhow she told me they weren't allowed to draw pictures of the cops gun because it wasn't "appropriate". She drew handcuffs but wanted to draw the taser, but said she didn't know what it looked like. LOL.

Sad state of affairs. I'm going to go buy some gun T shirts for when I pick her up.

When I went to high school, during huntin' season the parking lot was full of rifles and shotguns, pistols were in our backpacks.
How ever did we survive

My son wanted to take a squirt gun to pre K for show and tell last week. How do you explain that?(wife is in LE)

I told him that guns were scary to some people, not bad just some people think they are scary.

This is a perfect example of what happens when you let idiots run the education system, and why my kids went to (an expensive) private school.

so is the principal an accessory for supplying weapons to the children?

BAN ALL PENCILS NOW.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1368052973.jpg

zero tolerance is a stupid idea-

how can we in one sentance teach to be tolerant of others, their way of life and zero tolerance of others and their choices-

Crayons until 18.

Does this mean mechanical pencils are now high capacity assault weapons?

That article is from the Onion, right?

I wish it were.

High capacity pencil holder.
http://www.scarletstarstudios.com/ar...ncilholder.jpg

Spent casings.
http://leafstitchword.files.wordpres...shavings-2.jpg

Zero Tolerance = Zero Thinking!

Youhave to study who is running the show here.
It's the effeminate and the feminists.
Mind blowing. The hipocrasy is so obvious.
TV and all the violence and GUNS are ok and in your face all the time but pencils used as toy guns that show creativity and Boys being Boys are inconsolable.
When they finally change the boys into little girls what will happen when they start hitiing each other with their purses.
This make me very angry.
Makes me want to shoot someone.

Lol

Would a kid get expelled for this?

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1368061918.jpg

I say absolutely.
I am levitating as of now.

I've been hurt plenty worse by pencils than by guns. I shot on the skeet team at my high school and that was in the late 80s in gun-unfriendly NJ.

I also have an 8 year old boy. Al he talks about are guns, bazookas, atomic bombs, etc. I don't talk about that stuff so he must hear it at school. This country has gotten rediculous.

No it's insanity.

uh oh...
http://www.midstateprint.com/pencil09c.jpg

Try having this argument with a progressive some time. The mental gymnastics are astounding.

For example, in college, my RA explained to me that quietly drinking in my room was somehow "disruptive", but his all-night, screaming gay sex orgies were okay. I was instructed to be "tolerant" of his lifestyle, but when I asked him to be tolerant of mine, he would explain why tolerance didn't apply to me. :rolleyes:

Lol.
You know when a boy has a pencil that big, either he's gonna be popular with the girls or
He is using it as a pike to display the head of his elementary school aquaintance that he just murdered with his compass.
BTW- Can kids bring compass's to school now or. ..........I dont know what to say.:(

Nuts!
There has to be a reason how/why this change happened and so quickly.
Is it because -its the new modern way-?
That still doesnt explain it for me. There is no logic to it.
Modern today, is not usually good.

It has to do with personal accountability and placing blame on objects.........
No child left behind had turned into no child being taught common sense.....
They are all fear mongrels.......
Wtf has happened to common sense?

Hear hear....

The teachers union doesn't allow it:mad:

I picked up my kids, 5 and 7 from school a few weeks ago. The little one was playing in the school yard shooting with their water bottles making machine gun noises. The principle heard that and put a stop to that immediately. I am surprise they don't ban Transformer t shirts, and lunch boxes. They shoot bad guys all the time. That exactly what the kids were doing. Many of you know I do not own a gun and haven't shot a gun since I was 20, but I was going to say something to her but decided not to. Its like arguing religion with the *******s around here.

Why did the l i b t a r d s got can in my last sentence?

When my son was in grade 2 I received a phone call from his school telling me there was a incident between him and another child. The other child had a stick and was using it as a gun. He poked my son with it and the stick hit my son just below his eye. A inch higher and it would have been in my sons eye. The other kid was suspended for a week under the schools zero tolerance policy towards violence.

This was twenty years ago. There was no CNN trucks outside my home waiting for a interview. No moral outrage. Just two kids who learned a lesson that day (and the other kids parents). The other kid learned not to poke someone with a stick at school and his parents learned to find him a sitter for the week. Mine learned not to let someone poke him with a stick cause it hurts. Life went on.

Times have changed, we were all about "bomb the Dardanelles" and war games. We all wanted to be the Germans as they were more interesting.

Zero Tolerance does not teach anyone anything.

The whole thing is dumb. My son has been told, along with other boys in his class they are not allowed to play guns during recess. He hasn't been suspended yet and I'm positive he's had to be reminded because if it isn't part of him physically he will forget it the instant he learns it until he realizes I have forgotten in then he will remember and remind me that I forgot it.

We have baseball practice on his school campus. He brought a toy gun with him when we went. I told him to leave it in the car, there are no guns allowed on campus toy or otherwise. He didn't leave it in the car. I told him to go put it in the car right before practice started and he did so. After practice he's out there running around with the gun again on campus. WTF!? I tell him again of course...

when we get home he asks if he can play with my ipad - I say 'Dude, it's pretty sad - I don't have the energy to let you play with my ipad because of the whole gun on campus thing from earlier.'

DOH!

Boys learn through consequences.

Common sense went out the window a long time ago. We never pretended pencils were guns, we pretended they were swords. So we used to play fight and stick each other with the pencil tips. I had little black dots on my arms, shoulders, & legs until I was pretty old. We never got into trouble for that, but it was a long time back. Mikeesik is correct too. The general testosterone level of the male population is going steadily down.

The average kid doesn't grow up to be a mass murderer. The average kid grows up to be a great person. Profiling will help identify the odd ones.

Hello Bill Douglas. How do you mean?

Ya know, most kids are kids and grow into decent adults.

When I was in high school, I made a few swords in metal shop. I did have to do some pretty good convincing, though.

But.. this zero-tolerance thing has reached a high level of stupidity.