Posted on 02/02/2011 5:07:09 AM PST by Second Amendment First
Andrew Mikel II admits it was a stupid thing to do. In December, bored and craving attention, the 14-year-old used a plastic tube to blow small plastic pellets at fellow students in Spotsylvania High School. In one lunch period, he scored three hits.
"They flinched. They looked annoyed," Mikel said.
The school district saw it as more than a childish prank. School officials expelled him for possession and use of a weapon, and they called a deputy sheriff to the scene, said Mikel and his father, Andrew Mikel Sr.
The younger Mikel, a freshman, said he was charged with three counts of misdemeanor assault. The case was first reported by the Web site WorldNetDaily.
Spotsylvania school officials declined to comment on the incident, citing student confidentiality rules. But documents that the school produced when Mikel's father filed a Freedom of Information Act request show internal division over the matter.
The federal Gun-Free Schools Act mandates that schools expel students who take weapons, including hand guns, explosive devices and projectile weapons, to school. E-mail traffic among school officials showed they ruled that Mikel's plastic tube, which was fashioned from a pen casing, met the definition of a projectile weapon because it was "used to intimidate, threaten or harm others."
School officials in some e-mails referred to the plastic casing as a "metal tube." The plastic pellets were called "B-Bs."
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Half the kids from my era would have criminal records for shooting spit wads through Bic pens.
You got that right! We would be locked up as terrorists today.
And who are the idiots implementing these stupid rules? Typically boomers, the worst generation ever in this nation.
Heavy rubber band as a crossbow—index finger and thumb, tightly folded piece of notebook paper. Now that was a weapon. They would call the FBI on me today; it’s an IED!
All of you just took the words out of my mouth.
I can not add anything, hahaha
I would have been imprisoned as a terrorist.
I invented the spit-wad CANNON. Take your BIC pen, tape over the hole on the side. Obtain a piece of wire about 9 inches long, place it inside the tube, and bend it into an L (for a handle).
Take spitwad, insert and pack at bottom of tube using the wire. Get another spitwad, and using the wire - ram it while pointing it. The air inside the tube will compress, shooting the first spitwad a considerable distance, and your ramming spitwad will be the next projectile.
Makes a little ‘pop’ when fired. Very fun and entertaining.
The correct term is Pea Shooter . The plastic spheres are ideal for a pea shooter but maybe too small for best use in a typical soda straw hence the use of a smaller diameter pen tube.
I’ll be forced to do a test. My lawn is littered with the small green spheres fire by “the boys” who seem to have semiautomatic repeaters with which they have wars.
Oh yea, we had the HEAVY rubber bands. Paper clips were sometimes used as projectiles, but never at people, just metal wastebaskets.
And we all carried pocket knives.
The “air conditioning” in our old school study hall was the huge windows without screens on them that they would open up on warm days. The study hall had two floors of classes directly below it. I can’t tell you how many times bored kids would light a firecracker and throw it out the window when the teacher on duty wasn’t looking to buzz things up a bit.
I would imagine that would be a life sentence today....
Dang, more and more, I wish we could go back in time to when we weren't so scared of our shadows......and lawsuits!
Thanks, I had forgotten the term “pea shooter”.
Right, and you had to hold you finger over the side hole for better pressure.
One of the after school detention activities was going through the classrooms and removing all the paper wads stuck on the ceilings and walls.
We seemed to survive OK.
My whole class would be in jail.
We were especially criminal as we threw erasers, made spitballs, rolled water filled rubbers down the hall, why we even had snowball fights when it snowed.We were even known to sneak a smoke behind the gym.It wasn’t too unusual to hear a firecracker go off down the hall.
Three counts of misdemeanor assault. Give me a break, Any good principla would have solved this without it leaving the school with a phone call to Mom and dad.
Indeed we did! I even remember when I used to carry one everyday to the office and to court with me. We also played wit mercury on our desks...which, come to think of it, may explain why some of my generation mates think a kid with a pea shooter should be expelled from school....
It’s the Feds fomenting the whole problem (let me guess, it’s a string attached to Fed, meaning tax payer, funds) into a much bigger deal than it needed to be. Can’t paddle or spank egregiously misbehaving students, can’t even sit them in a corner with a dunce cap on.
Dear England, we are now thee.
A few counties away from this story, I attended high school in the 70s. A teacher wanted to borrow a shotgun for deer season opener and a student brought him one in class the next day. We all had shotguns in our cars. And, there were no problems.
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