There's very little in the actual news about this story, which is pretty local for me, just down I-95 a bit.
That may have been written by his father, also named Andrew Mikel.
His father, assuming I’ve got the same guy, and I’m guessing yes because it would explain the WND connection and getting the Rutherford institute involved, is active in the Tea Party movement. His name appears on a lawsuit regarding a petition drive last year where a candidate he backed was rejected.
So this could be a bit of retaliation (the severity of the punishment). The problem is that the behavior was clearly inappropriate and deserving of punishment. Once you cross that line, your arguments become a lot more difficult.
I’ve been trying to find a better explanation of the projectiles. They sound to me like AirSoft pellets, and a picture I saw of them LOOKED like AirSoft pellets, but another description sounded like they were NOT, (too foamy and flimsy).
As a kid, we show rolled-up paper with rubber bands, sometimes with paper clips embedded — they would put holes in the suspended ceilings if you used multiple rubber bands. We deserved to be punished, but that was a different time. (Some just shot the paper clips, which was just cruel).
When I went to a summer job, the guys would shoot 10-gauge solid copper shielded wire with rubber bands, until they put a dent in a cabinet and punched a hole in an overhead light fixture cover one day.
Anyway, I prefer to use “zero-tolerance” stories when there was no real violation of any rules, because it’s easier to argue the point — with a story like this, a significant number of people will relate to being shot like this, and not be persuaded that punishment was wrong.
Nice!