Capped Guns, Cap Guns, Guns

After the recent spate of stories about grade schoolers violating zero tolerance policies with lego guns, pastry guns, itty-bitty sized guns, a  Hello Kitty gun that blows bubbles and unloaded fingers pointed in a gun-like shape, there is relatively unanimous agreement that this reflects a inane over-reaction to gun violence in schools, with the notable exception of school administrators.

But is there a line to be drawn below that of actual weapons?  It’s easy to ridicule the utterly absurd application of these zero tolerance rules as applied to pop tarts, but what about a toy gun that wasn’t created by teeth?  Via The Washington Post :

A kindergartner who brought a cowboy-style cap gun onto his Calvert County school bus was suspended for 10 days after showing a friend the orange-tipped toy, which he had tucked inside his backpack on his way to school, according to his family and a lawyer.

The child was questioned for more than two hours before his mother was called, she said, adding that he uncharacteristically wet his pants during the episode. The boy is 5 — “all bugs and frogs and cowboys,” his mother said.

Many will find this similarly ridiculous, as it was just a toy, notably with the required orange tip so that no reasonably intelligent person would confuse it with a real gun.  When I was a child, playing cowboys and Indians (and cops and robbers, for that matter) was de rigueur for little boys. You may find this sexist (not to mention offensive to native Americans, two words that had yet to meet) and needlessly fostering the violent and aggressive tendencies of children, but that’s how it was. And we had loads of fun.

While everyone can agree that no child should bring a real gun to school, and all rational people can agree that any gun that will cease to be a gun with one additional bite isn’t a threat, what of the traditional American cap gun?

It doesn’t strike me as a good idea that parents allow their children to bring a toy gun to school under any circumstances, but failing to adhere to best practices should produce an explanation and seizure of the toy until the end of the school day, whereupon a reminder to parents that this isn’t really show-and-tell type material.  What, however, could school officials have been doing for two hours as they questioned this 5-year-old about his toy gun?

“I have no problem that he had a consequence to his behavior,” said the mother, who asked that her name be withheld to protect her son’s privacy.


“What I have a problem with is the severity,” she said, and the way it was handled.

Not only did this kindergartner endure a two-hour grilling, sufficiently stern that he peed in his pants, but he was suspended.


If the punishment stands, it would become part of the boy’s permanent school record and keep him out of classes the rest of the school year, the family said. He would miss his end-of-year kindergarten program at Dowell Elementary School in Lusby.

Is this to fulfill a needed general deterrent, that this child must be sacrificed so that others will fear the consequences of bringing a toy gun to school?  Not to harp on the obvious, but while such a reaction to a lego gun is ludicrous, does an actual toy gun mandate this response?

Yet, this response tells only a piece of the story, as this 5-year-old was “fortunate” that he brought only the gun, and not the red string of caps that make it really fun.


The mother said the principal told her that if the cap gun had been loaded with caps, it would have been deemed an explosive and police would have been called in.
Clearly, there are depths still to be plumbed when it comes to how zero the zero tolerance can be. It could be that a cap exploding would cause another child to fear, and the severity of wrongs are deemed exacerbated not only by conduct but by the sensitivities of those who experience it.  More likely, however, the screams for blood would come not from the child whose feelings might be affected, but from the parents who watched in horror as a real person did horrible things to real children.


The case comes at a time of heightened sensitivity about guns in schools across the country.

I get it. You get it. We all share the horror of real tragedies. Dr. SJ despises guns, and refused to allow me to give my son a toy gun to play with. So instead, he became a fencer and we had a half dozen swords in the house. That worked out well.

The question isn’t whether it’s wrong to be concerned about the welfare and safety of children, even though the risk of a crazed gunman shooting up a school remains minuscule.  The question is whether fear, blind emotion, dictates the creation and application of rules that work absurd results when we have the intellectual capacity to distinguish between real and imagined threats.

And the other question, of course, given our deep, abiding concern for the welfare of children, is why we are inflicting harm on 5-year-olds to vindicate unduly emotional adult fears. We have the capacity to think, and thus not engage in this insanity.  Do it for the children.

H/T Jonathan Turley

25 thoughts on “Capped Guns, Cap Guns, Guns

  1. REvers

    We used to bring our cap guns to school all the time. Cap guns, especially the ones that use those plastic caps-on-a-ring (do they still make those?) that are LOUD, make a good game of Cops and Minorities a lot more fun. The 007, Man From U.N.C.L.E., and Agent Zero-M gear from the mid-60s was good stuff, too. But the Mattel Shootin’ Shell guns that shot the spring-loaded plastic bullets were the best, even though if you used them outside you lost every bullet in the grass.

  2. Pete

    This hits too close to home. As a resident of Calvert County with two sons in the public school system, this unthinking overreaction by school administrators scares the daylights out of me. My high school aged son, who hunts with me, fully understands the seriousness of guns and is, I think, politically savvy enough to avoid doing anything that would get him in trouble. My elementary school aged son, on the other hand, spends a great deal of time shooting zombies and super-villains with his many Nerf guns. I have done my best to impress upon him that he must never take a play gun to school or even pretend that a stick or his finger is a gun, but doubt that he comprehends why this is a rule. How can I ensure that a child his age, in the midst of running around and having a great time with his friends on the playground, never forgets this prohibition? It seems to me that I would need to forbid his playing with toy guns at home as well.

  3. nidefatt

    I’d love to know how it got to be this way. You can’t convince me that Columbine led to five year olds with cap guns causing the police to be called, interrogation, and suspension. Some lobby thought this important, and the questions are who and why? Why is the lunatic fringe in charge of our schools? Besides the fact that they’re the only ones that bother voting. Is it the police? After all, they got themselves planted in schools and began immediately creating a pipeline from the classroom to juvenile detention. Now they set out to get the message across to children that guns are not going to be tolerated unless you’re a fellow cop. And school administrators are more than happy to have the police on their side in discussions on student discipline, knowing full well that they are always in the cross hairs of controversy whenever they do anything and wanting back up from the tough on crime crowd. Who’s going to stand up to them? No politicians I can name.

  4. SHG

    I never had one of those guns with the red plastic caps on a ring. Those were for the rich kids.

  5. SHG

    Fear has always been a huge motivator, especially when it comes to parents. No parent wants harm to come to their child, and most will do anything to prevent it, no matter how absurd or unhelpful. No risk is too small, remote or ridiculous.

  6. John Neff

    In addition the parents are unwilling to see things they don’t want to see. For example that the place where their children are most likely to be arrested is at school.

  7. SHG

    It will never happen to their child. Their child is good, and good children are never arrested or hurt by the police. The police are there to protect the good children.

  8. Jim Majkowski

    When I was in high school (there was electricity, but it was a recent innovation) some of the AP chem students discovered how to make ammonium triodide crystals. What fun! Like tiny cherry bombs. No one got hurt, the novelty soon wore off, and the Basilian fathers who ran the school managed not to turn a hair. They had no fear of anything a teenager could do.

  9. John Neff

    We used to mix it with sugar and leave it out for the flies to land on. A mini minefield for flies. Everyone thought that was fun except the chemistry teacher.

  10. John Burgess

    For my group, the ammonium triiodide was just to practice lab skills. Then we got to the better stuff. The stuff that made the labs unusable for a week. It was all a big mystery how that happened, of course.

  11. Dr. Sigmund Droid

    .
    Yeah Greenfield, you say all these negative things and such, but the terrorists didn’t win that day, did they?? . . .

    And the terrorists could have won, you known, — they really, really could have, — but quick thinking by an oft maligned bureaucrat saved children’s lives in ‘Merica on that particular day . . .

    A kindergartner’s soiled underwear and scarred psyche are small prices to pay for the freedoms we oh-so-tenuously still enjoy . . .

    Because if the terrorists do win, you’ll be the one peeing your pants, and then what, Greenfield, then what?? . . .
    .

  12. Dr. Sigmund Droid

    .
    Oh, sorry Greenfield — they did win that day . . . I was thinkin’ of another day . . . I just got confused, that’s all . . . You’re excused from class today . . .
    .

  13. Bruce Coulson

    Silly me; I thought the definition would be simple. If the device cannot launch a projectile capable of penetrating human flesh (to cover nerf(tm) bows and crossbows), it’s not a safety issue. It could be a discipline issue; allowing nerf(tm) gun fights in a classroom could be fun, but undoubtedly disruptive. But that’s an unrelated issue. (Which allows school admins to seize toy weapons, handing them back at the end of the day. Since children are not robots, and get ideas on their own, despite any admonitions from parents.)

    This sort of thing makes a mockery of efforts to genuinely promote child safety.

  14. Bruce Coulson

    Wouldn’t mentioning that fall under the perogatives of the child’s mother, rather than a teacher?

    Not really; it would hurt a lot, and probably put an end to the shooting, but although there’s always a chance of injury from anything (how well padded are the stairs and desks in the school?) at a certain point the probability of injury becomes so negligble as to be non-existent.

    Children will get injured, either by accident or by exhuberant playing. This is a reality we don’t get to change.

  15. Bruce Coulson

    Oh well.

    I wonder if soon kids will be forbidden to make funny faces as well…

  16. Jack

    No way! They still sell them at sufficiently shady 7-elevens. They were less than $5 when I was a kid, and as you can gauge by the totality of my comments here, was not very long ago at all.

  17. Todd E.

    My wife is a teacher (9th and 10th grade English) and a constant issue she’s struggled under at multiple schools is that the Administrators (who are often people who couldn’t pull the teaching thing well, but do “bullying other adults around about things they don’t understand” quite well.

    Administrators are often quite happy to look for reasons to blame teachers for things…

    Because then it’s the teacher’s fault, not the school, and they can’t get sued.

    One expects that this zero tolerance policy runs in the same direction. Even if one family freaks out, and decides to sue, that’s still better than a class action from many parents concerned that the school isn’t taking their children’s safety seriously.

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