The first stunned Ethics Alarms story about a cabal of idiots with education degrees persecuting a little boy for making a crude imaginary gun out of his fingers was in 2013, just as the Post Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck got rolling and the anti-gun hysterics were going off the rails (to which they, obviously, have never quite returned). I wrote of the first incident, which was in Montgomery County,
The NBC story concentrates on “whether the boy understands the implications of the gesture.” What implications of the gesture? That he is about to shoot bullets out of his finger? That he intends to kill someone with all the firepower an unarmed 6-year-old can muster? That he is making a mimed reference to a Connecticut school massacre he probably doesn’t know a thing about? Why should it matter what his “intent is? It’s a hand gesture! It isn’t vulgar or threatening except to silly phobics in the school system.
I concluded that it was child abuse by the school, and that “such irrational fearfulness, bad judgment, panic, disregard for the sensibilities of the young, lack of proportion and brain dysfunction forfeits all right to trust, and such fools must not be allowed to have power over young bodies and minds.”
But the finger gun lunatics struck again the next year, as Ohio crazies punished a 10-year-old boy for wielding an imaginary gun without a license. This time I figured out what was really going on—political and cultural woke indoctrination— writing in part,
The radical gun-hating progressives who disproportionately occupy administrative positions in the schools are willing to endure some ridicule as well as to victimize some children if it helps make guns and gun-related play less attractive, thus pointing to a Nirvana where the NRA is a shadow of its former self, and the only ones who own guns are criminals, the police and the government….Is public school political indoctrination more sinister than the proliferation incompetent teachers and administrators? Yes.
I also should have realized that this was the dawning of The Great Stupid.
Even though the Ohio public school Big Brothers were mocked as much as their Montgomery County fellow travelers, there was another sequel to come. In 2019, The Kansas City Star reported that a 12-year-old girl formed a gun with her fingers, pointed at four of her Middle School classmates, and then turned the weapon on herself. The police were called, and she was taken out of out of school in handcuffs, then charged with the felony of “unlawfully and felonious communicating a threat to commit violence, with the intent to place another in fear, or with the intent to cause the evacuation, lock down or disruption in regular, ongoing activities…”
You would think that the girl would be praised by feminists for venturing into the almost totally male realm of finger guns. (Today, of course, her teachers would have secretly convinced her that she really was male, needed to change her name and pronouns, and demanded “gender-affirming surgery.”) I wrote, “If finger guns are made illegal, only those with fingers will have guns. No, wait..if fingers that can be be made into guns are illegal, only criminals will have fingers. No, that can’t be right…” Silly me: I still was under the delusion that the madding Left could be mocked into submission.
But no.
Now comes “Finger Gun 4,” as inexcusable as other sequels to worthless movies like “Piranha 4D” and “Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives.” Jarrod Belcher’s six-year-old son was suspended from Bagley Elementary School in Jefferson County, Alabama for using his “index fingers as a gun” while playing a game of cops and robbers with another boy at school. Belcher said that he asked the administrator, ‘Well did he threaten anyone?’ ‘No.’ ‘Was there violence?’ ‘No.’ ‘Was there any indication of a current or future threat?’ ‘No.’ ‘I said, ‘Well this kind of seems benign to me, it sounds like two students playing,’ and she said it was but in this climate, this day and age, we have to take all incidents very seriously.”
“In this climate” echoes Montgomery County’s fatuous “implications” drivel. Typical of sequels: they just start copying the original. Here’s the climate: teachers and administrators see their roles as cultural revolutionaries and believe schools should be turned into breeding grounds for future progressive voters who think the United States is racist, abortion is a right, open borders are compassionate, income redistribution is essential, reparations must be made, and guns are evil, along with whites, men, and Republicans. The implications are that no responsible parent should entrust their kids to public school.
Ethics Alarms 
““In this climate” echoes Montgomery County’s fatuous “implications” drivel. Typical of sequels: they just start copying the original. Here’s the climate: teachers and administrators see their roles as cultural revolutionaries and believe schools should be turned into breeding grounds for future progressive voters who think the United States is racist, abortion is a right, open borders are compassionate, income redistribution is essential, reparations must be made, and guns are evil, along with whites, men, and Republicans. The implications are that no responsible parent should entrust their kids to public school.”
And I agree with all of this but I will allow for another interpretation on a case-by-case basis. Schools are afraid of mass shootings – yes, the threat of which has been hyped by the media and anti-gun activists – which can and do happen, unfortunately. They do not want to be held liable for the 20/20 vision that hindsight sadly gives should a middle schooler miming shooting several others and herself later decide to do the same with a real gun.
I feel for them. In some cases, they have only themselves to blame for the wretched environment in which schools operate these days that affect the psychological and emotional health of students. In other cases, it’s the culture as a whole that puts nearly the entire burden of raising healthy children on their shoulders.
When did this idea of schools raising children and being responsible for everything begin?
Hillary Clinton? It takes a village to raise a child? The Marxist tenet that families are inherently anti-Communist and a reactionary threat to the Revolution and the end of history?
Did it really happen that late, though? When did parents start abdicating responsibility for teaching their children certain non-academic skills? When did they start relying on schools to provide non-academic counseling for students? Food service and even medical care for students?
When I was a teenager, the school nurse couldn’t so much as give me a Tums without consulting my parents. Now, they’re routinely leaving parents out of the equation on major issues.
What happened and when did it happen?
Hillary got her start as a young lawyer working on the Watergate committee. No Watergate, and she might have gone in a different direction entirely.
Yes. Funny. Richard Nixon brought us the Clintons.
Tricky Dick begot Slick Willy.
The usually extremely professorial Prof. Turley delivered a really amusing takedown of the latest finger gun incident: https://jonathanturley.org/2023/09/12/a-3-22-threat-six-year-old-suspended-for-using-finger-gun-in-game-of-cops-and-robbers/
I have to ask, was the kid a cop or a robber? If he was a cop, was his pointing the gun lawful? If he was the robber, was his use of force justified given systemic racism and income inequality? Should he have been praised for highlighting a serious social problem? Inquiring minds want to know.
From Jonathan Turley.
What we are not dealing with are stupid rules. A rule against ” threat[s] to do serious bodily harm or violence to another student” is not only perfectly reasonable, but ethically mandated.
What we are dealing with are creative interpretations of reasonable rules that stretch them beyond the point of incoherence.
Just as the laws being politically weaponized to take out Trump aren’t stupid laws.
Abolishing zero tolerance policies will not eliminate the ability of teachers and administrators to come up with creative interpretations of reasonable rules.
my son, who is now 12, got in trouble way back when he was 6 for making “finger gun” (I/we live in Chicago, so we have to deal with brainwashed, woke fanatics all the time). His mom and I did not back down and fought against it. It was a young teacher, recent graduates from one of those “education” indoctrination factories (I mean education colleges).
The principal and vice principal seemed happy to see us fight back. I think there are still a lot of good people left in the education system; they are just fearful of the woke militants, and just want to have parents push back so they can do so too.
There’s been a feminist-wielded campaign against almost all normal male behavior for the last 30 years. I don’t know if it’s become less prevalent, but in the 90’s, 30% or more of 2nd to 4th grade boys were being medicated for being antsy. The statistical possibility of 30% of any given class, and only the boys, actually having ADHD is minuscule. Boys being encouraged to be princesses, engage their feminine sides, be quieter (all kinds of play are fine, forcing it is not). Followed by elimination of playground equipment, dodgeball (SO dangerous!), tag, and cops and robbers. The painting of every male as a potential predatory sexual criminal also proceeded in tandem along with finger, pizza, and pop tart guns, with a 4-year-old being suspended for hugging his kindergarten teacher, another suspended for snapping the waist band of a classmate’s pants, to cite just two examples.
Hardwired male behavior has been deemed dangerous and inappropriate. These so-called educational experts don’t seem to realize that boy energy, their physicality, and imaginative play as heroes and good guys all have a purpose in development. ‘Toxic masculinity’ is now the term being tossed around. I see it as the continued stifling of male expression and emotion that males have long suffered (‘boys don’t cry’, ‘man up’ etc), just from a different direction (‘here, I’m helping you’) because outright condemnation didn’t work. The end game is the same; keeping males in their place, shouldering the lion’s share of society’s dangerous work, with expressing discontent labeled as toxic. I’m curious as to how many of the kids being encouraged by educators to be trans are male-to-female. I’m willing to bet they outnumber the opposite…liberal feminists dream of turning all males into females come true!
Comment of the Day, Crella.
Thank you, Jack .
It is as if people think finger-guns are a gateway drug to hard -core gangbanging and drive-by shootings!
Some courts seem to be ruling more often against efforts to sidestep constitutional rights because “reasons”. Maybe downstream effects from Bruen? A 9th circuit panel just blocked a recent California law against firearm marketing attractive to children (really a 1A issue more than 2A), and we know NM governor Grisham has been stymied in her attempt to suspend gun rights.
Schools have more leeway in controlling expression, but perhaps these and other cases should be used for defense and/or lawsuits against schools using tissue thin justification to justify their overreach on suppressing or punishing protected speech and actions.
N.B.: Jefferson County, AL is essentially Birmingham…a blue canker in a red state, like Jackson, MS, Houston, TX, & etc., so no surprise there.
And, just for fun, we should remember the incident of the weapon even more deadly than the finger gun:
https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/01/kindergartner-suspended-over-bubble-gun-threat
To be fair, the situation did include the tangential involvement of a cat, albeit a cartoon one, so there may have been some actual danger arising from that…you can never tell with cats.