Barely a month ago I
wrote about a spate of recent incidents in which schoolchildren as young as
five were seriously punished for committing no reasonable offense whatsoever
other than triggering the anti-gun hysteria of politically correct, progressive
school officials. Those incidents were just the beginning.
In arguably the most ludicrous and outrageous example yet, a
seven-year-old with ADHD has
been suspended from his Brooklyn Park school for two days because he
accidentally shaped a breakfast pastry to resemble – according to his teacher –
a gun. Apparently he was trying to shape a mountain out of it, but it turned
out to be the school authorities who made a mountain out of a molehill. Playing
with his food actually drove Joshua’s teacher to tears (“She was pretty mad,” he
said), and she took away the pastry and tossed it in the trash. The father
confirmed with the school that no students had been upset or hurt or scared,
but the principal determined that “a threat had been made.”
Ponder that for a moment.
Joshua’s elementary school later sent students home with a
letter citing the Code of Student Conduct to parents and guardians which declared
that “one of our students used food to make inappropriate gestures that
disrupted the class. While no physical threats were made and no one [was]
harmed, the student had to be removed from the classroom.” This is curious
reasoning, considering that it was the hysterical teacher who disrupted the
class, and since the incident had no adverse effect on any of the students,
there was no reason to remove Joshua from the class, much less suspend his
education for two days.
Astoundingly, the letter went on to offer reassurances to
anyone who might have been traumatized:
If your children express that they
are troubled by today’s incident, please talk with them and help them share
their feelings. Our school counselor is available to meet with any students who
have the need to do so next week. In general, please remind them of the
importance of making good choices.
The “good choice” that schools now want your children to
make is to banish from view anything that might remotely resemble a gun,
because the progressive goal is to brainwash impressionable young generations into
considering guns themselves verboten,
rather than understanding their centrality to American freedom and making
rational distinctions about how they are used.
How pathetic are American adults becoming, that we actually
now need school counselors to deal with students “troubled” by gun-shaped
pastry? The truth of the matter is that children are not troubled by such
incidents at all; it’s progressive adults
who, in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting and the subsequent opportunism of
the Obama administration, have whipped themselves into an irrational state of
pacifist horror unmatched in the history of humankind. How America’s enemies
must be exulting over the extent to which the most powerful nation on earth has
been emasculated by cultural Marxism’s political correctness.
As I wrote in my
previous piece about the brainwashing of our children, the left does not
want American citizens to own guns. They want to mold future generations into a
helpless citizenry that entrusts its protection to the well-armed State. The
radical left is hell-bent on subverting our 2nd Amendment right to
bear arms, because that right stands in the way of their tyrannical ambitions.
Moving on to another incident: in a
radio interview with talk show host Tony Katz, actor Joseph C. Phillips,
who happens to be openly conservative, related how his fifteen-year-old son
took his camera to school in Woodland Hills, California to show off a photo of
himself with a BB gun. The boy’s social studies teacher, James DeLarme, saw it,
“snatched” the camera out of his hand and declared that the police would have
to be notified. Outrageously, he and another teacher scrolled through all the
photos on the camera before returning it. Then, in front of all the students,
DeLarme asked Phillips the Younger, “Do you have any animosity towards your
classmates? Are you angry at anyone at school?”, implying that a photo of him
with a BB gun marked the teen as a loony, imminent threat.
The elder Phillips, who was not notified of this by the
school, was rightfully outraged and wrote a letter to the principal. “Owning a BB gun is NOT an indication of
mental instability!” Ah, but that’s where progressives would disagree;
demonizing law-abiding gun owners as mentally and morally unstable is precisely
their goal. In any case, the principal didn’t deign to respond, but a vice
principal did, claiming that DeLarme had done the right thing to “secure the
safety of the 3,000 students and the 250 faculty members at the school.”
Interestingly, as Katz points out in his Townhall article
about the incident, it turns out that social studies teacher James DeLarme has strong
feelings about his opposition to gun ownership. In an interview
with the school paper in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting, he said, “We
need to discuss the number of guns we have in this country,” and asserted that our
country’s position on gun control and violence is what makes such situations as
Sandy Hook probable.
Joseph C. Phillips complained in his radio interview that “at a certain point, people have to stand up
and say ‘Enough with the hysteria! Enough is enough!’ We are not going to
sacrifice the dignity of our children, our own dignity… What they [the school]
did is not keeping anyone safe.”
Obviously he will have to join Joshua’s father in
reeducation camp.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 3/8/13)
