Pupils support teacher who shot student in leg (pellet gun, Wolverhampton UK)

Sunday Telegraph (UK) ^ | 12:32PM GMT 02 Feb 2014 | (Agencies)

[Olog-hai]

A group of school students are fighting to save a physics teacher who was sacked after accidentally shooting a pupil in the leg during a physics experiment.

Richard West, a popular science teacher at St. Peter’s Collegiate School in Wolverhampton, West Midlands, was conducting an experiment involving a pellet gun when the freak accident occurred.

Now the 17-year-old student on the receiving end of the shooting has launched a campaign to get his favorite teacher reinstated. Ben Barlow was unhurt by the gun pellet and claims that he has been harmed much more by Mr. West’s absence from his classes than by the incident itself. …

[alloysteel]

Now, if he had been watching pornographic material on the Internet on a school computer, he would have been OK, and he could have sued and kept his job.

But tisk, tisk, he chose to direct a relatively low-energy pellet at a kid’s leg, in what COULD have been a situation in which a real gun firing a real bullet might have been lethal.

And that is entirely unforgivable.

[TigersEye]

I hope they win their fight for common sense.

[uncommonsense]

Shop and chemistry classes had no end to the number of potential mishaps. Acid, bases, table saws, lathes, Bunsen burners, acetylene torches, arc welders - all back before seat belts were the law. How did we ever survive?

But I have to say that this accident is probably what you get when your society bans guns - they don't have basic safety drilled into their heads from the age of diapers on...

[marktwain]

It was a low power pellet gun, the pellet bounced off a table leg and did no significant damage. 40 years ago, no one would have raised a fuss.

Western society is becoming a nation of feminized wimps, and it is not by accident. From the article:

“I’m not sure how it happened - but the bullet must have rebounded off the table and it hit me on the leg.

“Everyone was really shocked but I was okay, you’d do more damage with a safety pin. It was a complete accident and Mr West was really worried and concerned.”

The teenager, who said he barely had a scratch after the incident, has written to school governors and pupils have described the teacher’s sacking as a complete disgrace. “

[TigersEye]

I would note that it's Britain but great swaths of America have become just as wussified. An old tagline of mine is apropos...

'This is the age of the death of reason.'