Call it living in Upside-down Land or the realization of the Bible’s prediction of a time when bad will be called good and good, bad, but once again innocent schoolchildren have been persecuted for, well, just being children. This time the offender was Chase Lake Elementary School (CLES) in Edmonds, Washington, where some kids were suspended for using Nerf guns on school grounds. And it’s an all-too-common story. A child will be punished for drawing a gun, shaping his fingers as one and saying “bang!”, merely talking about guns or some other innocuous action. And recently there was a case of a five-year-old boy who brought a cap gun to school to show a friend and then was interrogated for two hours until he wet his pants. It’s all very bizarre and very twisted.
In the Edmonds case, the children were told that they could bring the toys to school, though I’m not interested in individual details but deeper matters. And make no mistake, something deeper is afoot here.
To introduce this, let’s start with another common thread in these cases: the reaction of the persecuted children’s parents. While they’re always upset about the relatively draconian punishment visited upon their kids, their comments often reflect those of Edmonds mother Stacey Leidholm, who addressed her son’s suspension and marred permanent record and said “I do understand that they definitely need consequences, but not that harsh of a consequence.”
Let’s stop right there. Why do they “need consequences”? This isn’t a matter of simply having to respect the rules even if you disagree with them, since “with toy or facsimile guns, discipline is handed out at the discretion of the principal [at CLES],” writes KomoNews.com. Moreover, consequences imply a transgression, but what’s wrong with playing with toy guns? It’s not as if these brightly colored toys could be mistaken for real guns, and playing with them is certainly less likely to cause injury than is playing baseball or most any other sport. So what danger is posed by the possession of toy guns on school grounds?
Before I get to that, a bit of history. Not that long ago it was common for boys to bring guns to school, as they might have target shooting afterwards; this was even the case in New York City in the 1940s and ‘50s, where kids would often ride the subways with their guns. And while this no longer occurred when I attended school in the Bronx in the ‘70s, no school official even batted an eye at our bringing toy guns to school. That was just what little boys did. Clearly, something has changed in society — and it isn’t the availability of guns or little boys’ desire to play with them.
The obvious answer here is that the last two decades’ school shootings and our civilization’s general moral decline have changed the equation. But while this would explain the desire to keep students with real firearms off school grounds, there is no logical reason to apply this to toy guns. Saying otherwise is like claiming that because you wouldn’t trust an 11-year-old to drive the family car to school, you won’t let him bring toy cars with him, either; or that he won’t be allowed to possess toy airplanes because he isn’t ready to pilot a 747 for Delta. The same applies to the argument that bringing toy guns to school makes the leap to bringing real ones that much shorter; it’s as nonsensical as saying that junior is more likely to steal the family sedan if you let him play with Matchbox cars.
Of course, there is the paranoia explanation: The school shootings have made people so fearful that anything smacking of firearms is reflexively rejected. And I’m sure this is a factor — but I’m also sure there’s more to it. What is it?
Conditioning.
Many have posited the theory that the goal here is to raise generations amenable to strict gun control by instilling the young with negative attitudes toward firearms. And how better to do this than with swift and sure punishment for anything that evidences even the thought of a gun? Doodle a firearm, point your fingers like one — anything at all — and, bang!, you suffer for your wrong thinking. Think doubleplusgood thoughts, little boy, about flowers and kittens and rainbows and what gender you want to be. And should a child be a tad recalcitrant, nothing creates negative associations with firearms like a two-hour, pants-wetting interrogation at the age of five.
(By the way, it’s funny how leftists who would outlaw a 30-second spanking will then commit horrendous psychological and emotional child abuse. Hey, nothing convinces a situational-values liberal of the value of punishment like a person in need of reeducation.)
To buttress this theory, please consider this 1990s video of our beloved attorney general, Eric Withholder. He outlines a plan for combating violence and says:
What we need to do is change the way people think about guns — especially young people — and make it something that’s not cool; that it’s not acceptable, it’s not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way that we’ve changed out attitudes about cigarettes…. Over time we changed the way people thought about smoking, so now we have people who cower outside of buildings and kind of smoke in private and don’t want to admit it. And that’s what I think we need to do with guns…. I’ve asked that the creative community in Washington … devote [their] talent in a more constructive way, so we can get at the minds of these young people…. People who have credibility with young people should be on the television, on the radio … and telling these youngsters that it’s wrong to carry a gun…. I’ve also asked the school board to make a part of every day some kind of anti-violence, anti-gun message; every day, every school at every level. One thing that I think is clear with young people, and with adults as well, is that we have to be repetitive about this…. We need to do this every day of the week and just really brainwash people into thinking about guns in a vastly different way. [Emphasis added.]
Now, I don’t imply this is a grand conspiracy. It doesn’t have to be when you have millions of like-minded people who, being fellow travelers, all act in similar ways quite instinctively. Sure, there are puppet masters in the vanguard of these movements who create policy (like the zero-tolerance nonsense) and who purposely effect Machiavellian designs, but they are mere catalysts. Of course, there are many others — teachers and administrators — who instinctively dislike guns, or fear them, and for this reason are inclined to carry out these policies and punish a wrong-thinking child harshly. But theirs is more an emotional reaction, as opposed to the colder, more insidious, Luciferian motives of the world’s Withholders.
But then there are millions of other sheeple, caught in the Matrix, who simply enforce these rules because they exist. As to this, I called CLES and asked someone in community relations the following: “How does the possession of toy guns on school grounds pose a threat?” After giving me a non-answer and then my having to rephrase the question once or twice, the school official seemed genuinely flummoxed and said that she would have to consult the literature and get back to me. An unthinking drone.
But the question is, are the rest of us going to be sheeple as well? If not, there are things we can and should do to counter the schools’ war on guns and tradition. First, parents should organize, pick up their children from an offending school with toy guns in hand, and play a visible shoot-‘em-up game on school grounds. I’m serious. It’s called desensitization. Moreover, it tells the children in the strongest way possible that there is nothing wrong with toy-gun play. And if the schools are trying to condition your kids the wrong way, why not condition them the right way?
Then there is the stick. The reason insanity keeps occurring at schools and elsewhere is that leftists are never held accountable. But here we must take a leaf out of their book. When someone transgresses against their politically correct code — think Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder, Don Imus, or James Watson here — an apology won’t suffice.
The left wants the person destroyed.
So follow suit. Don’t be like a certain popular cable-news host who is wont to say “I don’t want to see ____ (the tyrant du jour) lose his job.” Make sure a school official who commits leftist abuse upon a child never works again. Go for the jugular, for the kill shot; give no quarter. Go Roman. It’s only when thousands of the thought police’s decaying corpses of careers are lining the Apian Way that those in darkness will see the light. The Culture War is just that — a war. And if you want to turn it around, this must be your mindset — every day, every way, every school, at every level.
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