A 10-Year-Old Pointed a Finger Gun. The Principal Kicked Him Out of His Tennessee School for a Year.
A 10-Year-Old Pointed a Finger Gun. The Principal Kicked Him Out of His Tennessee School for a Year.
A 2023 state law requires a yearlong expulsion for any student who threatens mass violence on school property. But some students have been kicked out even when school officials determined that the threat was not credible.
The principal’s action was the result of a new state law that had gone into effect just months earlier, heightening penalties for students who make threats at school. Passed after a former student shot and killed six people at The Covenant School in Nashville, the law requires students to be expelled for at least a year if they threaten mass violence on school property, making it a zero-tolerance offense.
Tennessee lawmakers claimed that ramping up punishments for threats would help prevent serious acts of violence. “What we’re really doing is sending a message that says ‘Hey, this is not a joke, this is not a joking matter, so don’t do this,’” state Sen. Jon Lundberg, a co-sponsor of the legislation, told a Chattanooga news station a week and a half after the law went into effect.
Tennessee school officials have used the law to expel students for mildly disruptive behavior, according to advocates and lawyers across the state who spoke with ProPublica. (In Tennessee and a number of other states, expulsions aren’t necessarily permanent.) Some students have been expelled even when officials themselves determined that the threat was not credible. Lawmakers did put a new fix in place in May that limits expulsions to students who make “valid” threats of mass violence. But that still leaves it up to administrators to determine which threats are valid.
In some cases last school year, administrators handed off the responsibility of dealing with minor incidents to law enforcement. As a result, the type of misbehavior that would normally result in a scolding or brief suspension has led to children being not just expelled but also arrested, charged and placed in juvenile detention, according to juvenile defense lawyers and a recent lawsuit.
The only thing that will stop kids making finger guns is more good kids with finger guns.
The Uvalde cops would still sit that one out somehow.
Wouldn't want to risk getting their eye pocked by accident.
As long as they keep it in their pocket
My five year old got a week out of school suspension and made to go to the kids psych ward because she pretended to shoot someone on the playground as part of a game. The other kid narced on her and it turned into a big fucking thing.
Fuck this bullshit country.
The psych ward doctors said “this is the stupidest thing we’ve ever dealt with”
Also of note, she has diagnosed adhd and THAT turned into a big ordeal. To the point my wife called the diocese (it’s a catholic school, despite us being atheist) and got the principal shitcanned because of how they were treating our kid.
The new principal was bad at first but worked with us and we came up with a plan and system for the adhd.
I had a kid in elementary school claim they had a gun in their backpack and were going to shot them with.
The child reported the threat to their parents after school so the school didn't have a chance to search the backpack.
This was a problem child so this was hardly his first run in with stepping out of line. All that happened was that I got a phone call.
Not all school districts are insane.
Ok, so now we’re just destroying the education of little kids who have imagination. That’s awesome.
🧑🚀👈🧑🚀 Always have been
(Which is not to say this isn't making it even worse, 'cause it is.)
You’re expelled
I'd get in some minor, and I do mean minor, trouble in elementary school and say, "Buh, buh, but I thought..."
"You're not here to think!"
Got that a few times.
My little brother was expelled from school in 1st grade for drawing a gun (which looked far more like a banana) and pointing it at another kid. That was in rural Alabama in 2000. Nothing new here.
Do these freaks really not remember what it was like to be a kid? Kids do crazy shit, it’s how we all learn about ourselves, our boundaries, our values. Punishing a kid for playing around like this will not help anyone, it will simply make it more likely that this kid acts out later because their sense of what’s socially acceptable and what’s not will be completely skewed by these absurd rules.
I played finger guns in school all the time (before active-shooter drills were a thing, to be fair), and it’s part of how I figured out that I hate guns and violence. Punishment first has never been effective, we need to trust ourselves and our kids a little more.
“What we’re really doing is sending a message that says ‘Hey, this is not a joke, this is not a joking matter, so don’t do this,’” state Sen. Jon Lundberg, a co-sponsor of the legislation, told a Chattanooga news station
Yeah guys! We're gonna start taking mass shootings super-seriously now! If you shoot adults and children and then commit suicide at a school in Tennessee, you better expect some serious consequences now, guys!
Wow, ok, gee, american will literally do anything and everything other than control and limit their gun sales.
Adults have the right to bear arms, but kids don't have the right to bear hands? Yup, we live in a dystopia..
School Administrators: "If only we could kick out the students we don't like, but the law states that every kid gets an education"
School shooting -> New law
"Hey, I know just how to selectively abuse this!"
The kid was angry, but you are only making it worse with this punishment. The appropriate thing to do would be to send him to a competent guidance counselor and work through his feelings then send him on a path forward. Not really even a "punishment " but a correction. Before reading what happened I would have said that even that would be too much, but having read it, I don't think it would hurt to counsel him though his feelings. I doubt Tennessee has many competent guidance counselors though.
When I was kid, we regularly played partisans vs nazis and cowboys vs indians, "shooting" each other with home made "guns". Nobody said anything ever... Happier times...
Cause 10 year Olds are known to be up on current laws and to think about the consequences of thier actions when they are mad, or really anytime.
Wow, sounds like the idea of "At Will" for the workplace has spread elsewhere. Making a vague generic rule that can be used to get rid of anyone you feel is a problem. I wonder how many "messages" will have to be sent to keep these kids in line from doing anything kid-related.
I think the 2nd Amendment should cover this.
Bro was bearing literal arms
Let the kids learn to use weapons before their old enough to walk, but don't you fucking DARE use a finger gun 👉
Go play insert any game with guns.
the real solution is for the parents to get all the kids to make finger guns
and when that happens, sue the school for not taking the exact same action
Nicely done 😁
🎵“I’m gonna finger bang, bang you every night”🎶
To kids who hate school, being able to not go for a year might be a reward.
It sets them back a year so I doubt they'd be happy about redoing a grade.
At 10, they probably won't even think of that until the next year. And that's assuming that they actually make them do the grade instead of skip. A lot of schools think it is more important to stay with your age group. And they are probably not wrong.
Gonna be a lot of 21 year old seniors buying booze for their classmate's parties in about 10 - 15 years
School refusal is real.
I went to school in the '90s. My friend and I thought the Game Boy game Final Fantasy Legend II was funny in the way that you fought against terrorists, dinosaurs, ghosts, robots, and germs, using magic and medieval-fantasy-trope weapons alongside muskets, SMGs, chainsaws, and even nukes! (Game devs and translators had to get creative with only seven letters and an item type symbol for the item names, to fit in the tiny amount of memory available.)
Our drawings inspired by this were often battle scenes with the likes of Hussein, Hitler, and Mussolini being shot, impaled, nuked, and/or decapitated by chainsaw. We must have drawn a thousand guns.
We turned out OK.
Final Fantasy Legend spoiler alert
Years later, I played through Final Fantasy Legend 1 and discovered that even the final boss can fall to the Chainsaw (a weapon with a low chance of instant kill). The battle log says "Creator went to pieces!"
Killed God with a chainsaw.
Not the most effective law but it’s interesting to see a state like Tennessee implementing any laws against gun violence in schools.
Yeah that's gonna stop the next school shooter from mowing down whatever class they're going for. They are afraid of school expulsion for sure.
laws against gun violence in schools.
Not really. They're laws that increase lifelong rates of criminality in impacted students.
One year seems too long.
As much as I hate to admit it, I understand zero tolerance policies. But a fucking year? There's got to be some kind of sliding scale based on the offense. Draw a picture of a gun, 3 days. Finger guns, ok, a week. Toy gun, month. Real gun, jail.
Punishing drawing and finger guns just sounds insane to me
😎👉👉 Zoop
expelled
I don’t understand zero tolerance policies.
Seems like a way for school sit be lazy and not actually do anything.
Draw a picture of a gun = 3 weeks of suspension?
What the actual fuck?
A picture? Really?
I mean if the picture was off a kid holding a gun shooting a teacher, maybe get the kid some help.
But a picture of a gun? Again...
What the actual fuck?
As much as I hate to admit it, I understand zero tolerance policies.
What is it that you understand about them? Is it that all extant data suggest that they are not effective in increasing the safety of childhood learning environments? Or that they have a statistically-significant impact on juvenile and adult rates of incarceration and criminality, increasing both (ex. children who are students at schools with SROs are five times more likely to get arrested for disorderly conduct)? Or is it that zero-tolerance policies, while resulting in overall increases in student suspension rates, additionally result in an additional two-fold increase for black children?
https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/rel/Products/Region/midwest/Ask-A-REL/10185
Basically, my point is that zero tolerance policies enable racial discrimination against children of color and has measurable long-term educational and legal implications on children well into adulthood. It is, simply put, state-sanctioned children abuse.
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