School Shut Down, Student Arrested After Toy Gun Seen in Backpack
In Delaware County, Pennsylvania.
Will this student get an invitation from the White House?
The Delaware County Daily Times reports:
A toy gun brought to school by a Chester High School student sent the school into lockdown Tuesday morning, according to police and school district sources.
The incident occurred at about 10:30 a.m. when school officials received a report that someone had brought a gun to school, Chester Upland spokesperson Becky Taylor said. A student reported seeing a classmate take what appeared to be a gun from their waistband and put it in their backpack. Police and school security officers put the building into lockdown and did a room by room search of the school.
The school district says the issue is a "police matter" now.
Firearms training in high school would go a long way in fighting hoplophobia and preparing students to exercise their Second Amendment rights responsibly, but at the very least a "national conversation" on how far zero tolerance has been taken in schools is long overdue, and shouldn't have to wait until a student of a certain race is mistreated. The Department of Justice, after all, has already warned about the "disparate impact" of zero tolerance policies.
Given the tendency of the most restrictive gun control laws to be imposed in majority-minority neighborhoods (think stop & frisk in NYC or Chicago's war on guns), it shouldn't be surprising the fear of people exercising their right to bear arms would be most acute when it comes to minorities.
While many minorities support gun control laws today, even as some of them oppose the mechanisms by which their local governments choose to impose those laws, the push for more gun control laws in the 1960s came in part from the fear of armed African-Americans.
But the race of this, or any student treated like a criminal because of the zealous application of zero tolerance policies (which, not so coincidentally, also permit school administrators to avoid making judgment calls of their own about safety), shouldn't matter in order to realize that treating students as criminals because of the culture of fear adults have bought into is antithetical to any serious understanding of what education means.