It’s that thing that if a black man has it in a store that sells them, he can be summarily executed? I guess it’s progress that the cops didn’t do that, at least.
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Unrealistic appeals to authoritarianism is still a marginally better reply than the equiv of telling someone to google your argument, as if the burden of proof is somehow on the audience, as opposed to the person making the claim.
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Um, former teacher. I had a special needs student who brought in a cap gun. He had many issues, one being oppositional defiance disorder. He said, “Hi Mrs. ____. You want to my gun?” Unfortunately I had to let the administration know. I quietly told the institutional aide to take him to his Assistant Principal by telling him that Mr. ____ really needed to see him.
They kept him out of the classroom for the rest of the day. No cops, no expulsion, no multiday suspension. These type of issues can be dealt with fairly and on a case by case basis. A special needs teenager doesn’t fully understand their actions, and treating them as a criminal for something benign as holding a toy gun in their own home is overkill.
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Exactly. The students are in their own home. The teacher can easily remind a student that during distance learning same rules apply. The teacher should first use discussion and explain that the behavior is inappropriate while class is in session, especially since the child is at home and is definitely not a threat.
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Yes, but why would anyone listen to input from actual teachers who have dealt with similar situations in real life when we could just take the word of internet randos who insist that teachers have literally no choice other than dragging law enforcement into this kind of scenario? 
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SMMFH. This is why we can’t have anything nice. This is why our country is going down a shit hole.
The kid did absolutely nothing wrong. He wasn’t at school, he was in his home. You can’t shoot anyone through the Internet, even with a toy gun. He didn’t threaten anyone.
Is this a board invasion? Lots of cop suck up arguments from names I don’t recognize…
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Especially for a “welfare check” when you acknowledge the child had a toy and wasn’t actually in any danger… the check itself is the only actual danger to welfare.
So, you know, don’t call cops into the home of someone who has a toy gun there because they have a toy gun there. It’s literally setting up the kind of situation you’re decrying here, that didn’t exist previous to the school calling the cops.
Being brought to the school. Not at home.
Something which, everyone involved here is in agreement, did not happen in this case.
Apparently the school was recording everything coming over the student’s cameras (unbeknownst to the students). Students may not have been able to turn off the cameras.
The two do go hand in hand, however.
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I do not think they are mutually inclusive at all times of one another.
i regret i have but one like to give to that comment.
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i am speaking as a teacher with 26 years experience (23 in intermediate school, grades 4-6, and 3 in high school, grades 9-12) in public schools in texas. in my experience it has been much, much harder to invoke so-called “zero tolerance rules” against white students who thoroughly deserved to be disciplined than it has been to prevent such rules from being inflicted on children of color who absolutely deserved to be given the benefit of the doubt in a given situation.
in my experience they are rarely anything other than inseparable.
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IK noticed you used a picture of brightly colored obviously toy nerf guns. while burying in a link the picture of what he was actually playing with. I wish that we can stop making toy guns look so realistic.
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Well, thanks for exploring the damn thing, even if I want CO to be just cooler than MD. Also I think you should cross stitch a tasting-size spoon for that cross-stitch Melizmatic got for you if you want to be all ‘mitigation policy compels you.’
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it really is too bad there isn’t something built into toy guns that could set them apart from real ones. maybe if they manufactured them with a bright orange or red piece at the end of a toy gun’s barrel . . .
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Cue the regurgitative arguments that the orange tip signifying that it’s a toy gun may not have been visible to the teacher.
Y’know, it dawns on me that the first step on the teacher’s part should have been to contact the child’s parents with her concerns as soon as the online class was over.
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Althought that is the image from the link, the story clearly said that the toy gun in question was green. So it would not have looked as real as that image, and the teacher did not mistake it for a real gun.
ETA: description in WAPO was “The “gun” was obviously a toy, painted black and green with “Zombie Hunter” on the side.”
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Oh, FFS…
It wasn’t a gun.
He wasn’t at school. He was AT HOME.
There is a saying about not mistaking stupidity for maliciousness, (and/or vice versa), but damned if I can figure out which this is.
So, I guess the Venn for this incident is a circle.
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The family said the toy gun in question looked like this.
If it were like the Amazon link for Zombie Hunter as was provided in the BoingBoing article, I think I would have been unsure whether I was seeing a toy or a real pistol. Even being a relatively obsessively observant person, I wouldn’t have known how to interpret an apparent firearm having JUST an orange tip (whether it was a corrosion-proofing cap “please remove before use” or something). I see this is a major flaw in design, if this is indeed a toy that’s available for sale.
Reading the WaPo article, I would say most everything happened the way it was supposed to (teacher asked the student to put it away, parents were notified, vice-principal was notified), BUT they had a school police officer on hand, so then HE was notified. It all ended as well as it could (the TWO BLACK BOYS ARE ALIVE), minus the bureaucratic touch of suspending them and leaving a disciplinary note on their record.
All of this sucks.
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The lesson I learned in school in the 80’s and 90’s is that schools are ran by officious bureaucrats that apply the school’s code as broadly as possible in order to establish their twisted concept of order.
Sadly the way it is applied is never evenly distributed, if your family is poor, if you’re unpopular, if you have a disability, if you don’t have a teacher willing to stand up for you, or if you’re a minority. Then you face double or triple intersectional threats from the administrative staff.
I wish I didn’t have to keep repeating myself for the past 30 years. There is a rot in our public school systems, and it’s not new, and it appears to not have changed either. Keep sharing the bad news, and if possible point people to resources to achieve reform. I’m kind of done with the thoughts-and-prayers method.
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In related news, the armed security guard for the same school shot his computer monitor 13 times before remembering it was an online class.
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