Blagnet.net

Toy guns aren’t weapons

I have difficulty believing anyone actually supports zero-tolerance policies and extreme political correctness anymore—anyone, that is, except government bureaucrats. By “extreme” I mean atrocities such as this, which any sensible person would be outraged at:

NEWTON COUNTY, Ga. — The latest case of zero-tolerance at the public schools has a 10-year-old student sadder and wiser, and facing expulsion and long-term juvenile detention.

“I think I shouldn’t have brought a gun to school in the first place,” said the student, Alandis Ford….

Alandis’ gun was a “cap gun,” a toy cowboy six-shooter that his mother bought for him.

“We got it from Wal-Mart for $5.96,” Tosha Ford said, “in the toy section right next to the cowboy hats. That’s what he wanted because it was just like the ones he was studying for the Civil War” in his fifth-grade class at Fairview Elementary School.

Tosha said that Wednesday afternoon, after school, “six police officers actually rushed into the door” of their home. “He [Alandis] opened the door because they’re police. And then they just kind of pushed him out of the way, and asked him, ‘Well where’s the gun, where’s the real gun?’ And they called him a liar…they booked him, and they fingerprinted him.”
[...]
Lt. Mark Mitchell said Thursday that Alandis had used the toy gun to threaten other children on the school bus and in his neighborhood, which Alandis denies.

Alandis was charged with possessing a weapon on school property and with terroristic acts and threats.
[emphasis added]

Let’s compare the accusations and police-state-speak of the thugs in clown suits to the child’s account of the incidents:

“On the school bus,” on Tuesday, Alandis said, “when I dug into my bookbag trying to get my phone out, the boy beside me, he reached in my bookbag and got it [the toy gun] and started telling everybody, ‘He’s got a gun, he’s got a gun,’ and spread it around the whole bus. So I put it back in my bookbag.”

But he said the students kept shouting, “He’s going to shoot all y’all, he’s got a gun, he’s going to bring it to school and shoot all y’all.” Did Alandis ever say anything like that or make any threatening moves with his toy gun? “No!”

In police states of the past, all it took was a rumor, an accusation, a vindictive psychopath wearing a clown suit, or a disgruntled bureaucrat to ruin a peaceful, innocent person’s life. Here the worthless pieces of trash who work for this child’s government school and the jack-booted thugs who probably at some point mouthed the words “serve and protect” take the incidents that the child described above, on the school bus, and report them as having happened in exactly the opposite way. The other children took his toy and taunted him with wild and obviously false accusations; if his account is correct, he clearly wasn’t going to (pretend to) threaten anyone with his cap gun, or else the one bully wouldn’t have had to take it out of the child’s backpack, against the child’s protests. This complete misrepresentation of the accused child’s account of what happened is a characteristic of totalitarian police states: you’re guilty until proven innocent, and don’t question the government’s authority figures.

Oh, yeah, I forgot: children don’t have rights at school.

The next day, the kid went to his neighbor’s house to ask him if he wanted to come out and play cowboys and indians or something. Read the neighbor kid’s reaction to the sight of—gasp!—a toy cap gun, and weep:

“He saw the gun that I had. So he ran in the house and called 911.”

Alandis said he found out later that his friend had never before seen a gun and thought it was real, and thought Alandis might shoot it. Alandis insists he never said anything to the friend other than inviting him to come out and play.

“The 911 call that we received” on Wednesday, Lt. Mitchell said, “was that a 10-year-old male was outside of a residence with a gun threatening to shoot another child.”

Mitchell was referring to the incident report from the Newton County Sheriff’s investigators who write that deputies “responded to a 911 call from a ten-year-old [neighbor of the Fords] who said there was a boy outside of his house with a gun trying to kill him.”

This probably isn’t the strongest evidence of my theory, but I think much of the Statist rot that has infected our minds during the last few generations has led to the self-hatred, disrespect for life, externalizations of blame, and vindictive attitudes that lie at the root of so many youth shootings. Guns are not the problem, and even lack of proper training with firearms, like many children from hunting families receive, is not the problem. This paranoia about weapons, the knee-jerk reaction that anyone with a weapon is a criminal and should be turned over to authorities, and the suspicion that a 10-year-old with a cap gun is a potential murderer are all part of the Statist malaise that either causes or certainly doesn’t help prevent school shootings. In other words, this kid’s paranoia and the weapon-hating, authority-kowtowing, State-worshipping mindset are more to blame for public killings than kids having access to guns.

Alandis’s mother sounds like a sharp woman:

“Someone heard that Alandis had a toy gun in his bookbag and said, ‘Oh, Alandis is going to bring a gun, he’s going to shoot everybody.’ He [Alandis] was wrong, he should never have taken it to school. And I told him that. And he’s being punished” at home. “But also on the other side of the coin, I think it’s a travesty what’s happened to him…. For them to say that’s he’s made terroristic threats is just ridiculous. We’ve taken it and changed what ‘terroristic threats’ was meant to be for.”

Perhaps another good measure of the extent of your police state is the increasing frequency with which the word “terrorism” is used, especially regarding actions that are clearly not terroristic in nature. Yeah, I think this story demonstrates three characteristics of our society that make it more or less a police state: ordinary actions are considered crimes that weren’t in the past; these actions and actual crimes that could only be considered threatening to a small number of people are labeled “terroristic” to trump up the perceived gravity of the matter and therefore the leeway of the clown-suited gangsters; and “public” is conflated with “the State,” at least in the minds of the law-enforcement officials. (Maybe this last one is more implicit than explicit in this incident, but I usually interpret this type of incident in that way.)

The public relations officer of the school system hides behind rules and procedures and political correctness like any useless drain on the human race would:

Sherri Viniard, the Director of Public Relations for the Newton County School System, emailed a statement to 11Alive News Thursday that reads, in part:

“Student safety is our primary concern, and although this was a toy gun, it is still a very serious offense and it is a violation of school rules. We will not tolerate weapons of any kind on school property.”

A toy gun is not a weapon. You acknowledge this yourself. You are too blinded by your irrational hatred of all guns (not wielded by someone wearing a clown suit) that you think a toy like this could actually be dangerous. What is dangerous is your Statolatrist, police-state-enabling, guilty-until-proven-innocent attitude towards AN INNOCENT CHILD!

The main police officer quoted in this article is similar: he has some vague idea in the back of his mind that what they did was wrong, but they can’t quite grasp the concept that following politically correct zero-tolerance policies could ever lead them astray:

“A toy gun is a toy gun,” Lt. Mitchell said, “to be played with and for kids to have fun with. But when kids use it the wrong way, just like anything, then it can be scary.”

It wasn’t used in the wrong way, unlike your gun and your position as monopoly law-enforcement official. And you ought to be an authority on scary.

The only people in this entire matter who have demonstrated the slightest bit of common sense, compassion, or social intelligence are the accused child, his mother, and the reporter. Unfortunately, Alandis still wants to be a police officer when he grows up. I hope that changes. I hope he works hard and goes into a field where he can add something to society instead of parasitizing it, like business or science or medicine. Or maybe a political activist (the good kind). I hope this sad saga alters him in a fundamental way such that he develops a healthy distrust of authority and hatred of the State. That could be a very bright silver lining to this atrocity.

And, you know, I could say all I’ve said before about government schools and monopolistic law-enforcement systems—how no one would ever freely choose to be victimized by their school and the police like this, how monopolies will never get better, how competition would go a long way to preventing such stupidity from ever happening and completely prevent it from continuing. But who is going to listen? Every Statist who hears about this story is going to blame everyone but himself and blame every way of thinking but his own. They think that the extent of their involvement in the government is to vote for politicians who are the lesser of two evils and maybe serve on a jury. It doesn’t occur to them that their explicit and repeated acts of support for this entire Statist system are exactly what allow bureaucrats to commit wrongs against people without fear of punishment. They are scared to death of letting us run our own lives and freeing ourselves of their Statist nightmare, so they will never let the freedom of association flourish that would punish and prevent these rights-violations. As evidence that I’m right, that libertarianism would promote peace, respect, and common sense where government monopolies currently forbid them, consider how few people actually support zero-tolerance policies that lead to the arrest and fingerprinting of a 10-year-old with a cap gun. These animals in clown suits and the lifeless pieces of sludge that populate school boards would either demonstrate some intelligence or become jobless and penniless in a real hurry.

I try to show my outrage and frustration at these injustices as passionately as possible in posts like this, but it’s hard. It’s tiring. You all agree with me, and you’ve heard all this before. Probably because these are far from isolated incidents, which makes it harder to evoke outrage at any particular incident either in ourselves or in others, but their commonplace nature is exactly what should outrage us the most!

Posted in Education, Fascism, Police/law enforcement, Statolatry