I agree with you. This country has gone crazy.
Posted on 02/06/2013 7:42:40 AM PST by lbryce
The boy, a fifth-grader at Douglas MacArthur Elementary School whose name is not being released, was charged as a juvenile with brandishing a weapon, police said.
He was also suspended from school, and Alexandria City Public Schools Superintendent Morton Sherman said further action is being considered, including expulsion.
On Monday, the boy showed the plastic gun to at least one other student during a bus ride home from the school. The 10-year-old did not point it at anyone or threaten to shoot it, but he neglected to mention that the weapon was fake, said Alexandria police spokeswoman Ashley Hildebrandt.
School officials said they learned about the incident Monday evening and immediately started investigating. Alexandria police spoke to school administrators Tuesday morning before the boy got to school.
When the boy arrived, authorities found the toy in his backpack. He was taken into custody, transported to a juvenile detention center for booking and then released to his parents, Hildebrandt said.
"The safety of our students is always our first concern," Sherman said. "We appreciate the quick response and action by our police."
The toy resembled a semi-automatic handgun, said police spokesman Jody Donaldson. It was silver and had a black handle. It also had a orange tip that went into the barrel, showing that no ammunition was coming out of it.
In light of current events involving schools and guns, Donaldson said police "do have a heightened sensitivity to any rumor or concern" about a student possibly having a firearm.
"Any time we get a call like this, we take it very seriously until we can determine the extent of the weapon -- if it's real or not -- and what the student intends to do with it," Donaldson said.
But some people said police and school administrators overreacted.
"A toy gun is no danger to anyone," said Liane Rozzell, executive director of Families & Allies of Virginia's Youth. "A 10-year-old is not a fully formed adult by any means. And that kind of situation should be dealt with outside the courts and the justice system."
Robin Ficker, a Bethesda attorney who represented a 6-year-old Montgomery County student who was suspended last month for pointing his finger and saying "pow," said the schools have become terror-stricken.
"That just shows a certain hysteria with the school administration," Ficker said Tuesday. "What is the point? To say that you don't like guns, you don't like the Second Amendment?"
A letter was sent home to parents of all MacArthur students about the incident.
But arresting a ten year old, that the special kind of arrest we're not seeing much of. First of all, he could be having lots of problems. He may have sexual identity issues that kids at school have picked up on. He may not have many Facebook friends and might very well have been rejected by the local Obma for Youth Group for Friemdless Gay kids..
Still, there's nothing much there. But when he started brandishing the genuine-looking fake pistol, that was the time to make the bold, audacious move to close in on him. Brandishers have a 76% chance of using the gun to get their fellow students wet by shooting at them and a 52% chance of using it on bus drivers driving into heavy traffic.
And then when showing it to a friend he NEGLECTED to mention that the toy gun was plastic, a clear violation of the Alexandria Plastic Gun Notification Law that has been on the book or several years and have prevented, students, teachers, bus drivers from getting wet,with a savings of over 300 gallons according to (WWGR) Water Watch Gun Group, a subsidiary of algore's Earth Resources Watch. Water once sprayed gets into the earth's troposphere and ionosphere with tests showing temperature rise of +-0 with every 100 gallons
These brave officers will be honored both by the OPPS Obama Plastic Protection Society and algore's H20 Alert Watch. The student, whose name is being withheld due to his age, is currently undergoing Brandishing Management Classes and Plastic Pronouncement Group therapy because even plastic toy guns can annoy a left-wing liberal gun proponent.
we see many stories like this that show the insanity of government
and democrats want government to control and own everything so that we become slaves of the government idiot goons.
This is a 10-year-old kid. Once it was determined the gun was a toy, it didn’t dawn on anyone in authority to simply explain to him what he should and shouldn’t have done? We’re now charging kids with finger-pointing pistols and pretending to throw hand grenades.
But the ruling regime has given itself the power to fire hellfire missiles from drones at Americans it deems having the potential to participate in future terror attacks.
This country is so f***ed up, I just want to puke.
“The safety of our students is always our first concern,” Sherman said. “We appreciate the quick response and action by our police.”
And he doesn’t even bat an eye over the fact that everyone was perfectly safe from the obviously fake toy gun.
The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed — would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper — the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.
It was always at night — the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night...
-excerpt from Chapter I
In Nazi Germany they had a similar approach called “Night and Fog”. Given them a reason to be alerted bythem ,they simply woke you up walked you of the house into the night and fog.
Parents should start suing these hysterical school officials and cops who keep busting kids for their toys and scribblings. Once a few multi-million dollar settlements and judgments are paid out these folks will stop playing hall monitor for innocent behavior and start going after real criminals like the drug cartels and street gangs.
“Academics” are often the most narrow-minded, reactionary and bureaucratic people I meet.
The cops are not to blame. Most are normal people who think straight. But they are sworn to obey, and they must obey the orders of the corrupt mostly democrat administrations which tell them to arrest kids who draw a picture of a gun on paper and say “bang bang.”
WHAT PART OF “IT IS NOT A GUN” DO ALL THESE MORONS FAIL TO UNDERSTAND?
Disban the NEA and the EPA, asap. Both are run by a group of what..there seems to be no common sense in either department.
I agree with you. This country has gone crazy.
This kid may have violated some school rule or district regulation, but what “crime” did he commit that the police needed to be called?
If he was actually taken into custody by the police AFTER they determined that the gun was a toy and that he did not point it at anyone, then the parents and the kid have a pretty good lawsuit they can file against the school and the police for false imprisonment and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
If they took him into custody, then they are to blame. Before taking a child or anyone else for that matter into police custody, they must have to have developed a reasonable suspicion that a CRIME has been committed.
Unless there is a criminal statute that prohibits anyone from brandishing an obviously toy gun (it had the obligatory orange tip) without pointing it at anyone or displaying it in a menacing manner, then the police were obligated to tell the school to take care of the problem themselves and to leave.
It is discretionary with police whether they take someone into custody, but they must have a reasonable suspicion that a crime has taken place.
If this was my kid, I'd sue the $@#%%^%'s
When I was a kid we brought our toy guns to school in our Roy Rogers lunchboxes and played Cowboys and Indians at lunch. Back then they were made of metal.
I didn’t see your post before I posted mine. :-)
Perhaps the Police put the kid in “Protective” Custody to keep the unreasonable school officials away from him until they could turn him over to his parents.
Publish the Names,Job, and Photo of all od these idiots and see that everyone in town knows these idiots that can’t tell a plastic toy from the real thing.
When I was a kid everyone would exchange gifts at Christmas and sometimes some kid would have a birthday party at school. If this is still going on all the pro-2nd Amendment parents should send toy guns as gifts. Then they can try to arrest the adults.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.