Child suspended for drawing of water pistol

Only a raving moron would equate a water pistol with a real gun. Nobody but a ranting imbecile would place a drawing of a gun on par with an actual gun. So who in a million years would ever treat a drawing of a water pistol the same as the actual presence of a real gun?

The right-wing wastes of mammalian tissue who run Dennis Township Primary School, a public grade school in New Jersey, that's who.

At this sorry imitation of a school, a 7-year-old student in second grade was suspended because he drew a picture of a stick figure brandishing a water pistol. I shit you not. The school's excuse was that he violated the "zero tolerance" policy on guns.

If they can suspend a second grader over a drawing of a water pistol, they'd have given me the guillotine for some of the stuff I said at school. Once, maybe in 6th grade or so, which would have been around 1984, I wrote a poem about school that said, "If they hit me with a board, I'll go out and buy a sword," and the teacher just laughed. If America's schools then were like they are now, the "board" would probably make its appearance not in the assistant principal's office but at the detention boot camp where I'd quickly find myself. (If you don't think they beat kids at these boot camps, remember our entry about the teenager being beaten and suffocated to death at a facility in Florida.)

When I was in high school as recently as the early '90s (when I attended an inner-city public school), a Civil War buff who was visiting the school gave a presentation for us in which he brang an authentic war rifle to the classroom and fired a blank. Nowadays, if he left the gun in his car parked on the street before going back to retrieve it, they'd do an unannounced, warrantless search of his car and (under a law signed by the elder Bush and later reenacted by a Republican-controlled Congress after the first version was tossed) throw him in the federal pen for 5 years just for having the weapon within 1,000 feet of the school (even though it wasn't loaded with real ammo).

In the recent story out of New Jersey, the student with the water pistol drawing never would have been caught except some whiny conservative soccer parents complained to the school about the drawing when their kid saw it. Gee, don't you feel safer now that the school suspended some 7-year-old kid over a drawing of a squirt gun? I sure as shit don't. Only a screamy little crybaby would complain to the school over a drawing like this.

Right-wing educrats often claim "zero tolerance" policies protect them from lawsuits. They lie. If I was the parent of a 7-year-old who was suspended over a childlike drawing of a water pistol, a lawsuit would be a certainty. I just can't believe there haven't been lawsuits over some similar cases that were less silly than this.

(Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071020/ap_on_re_us/gun_drawing_suspension)