{"id":61960,"date":"2020-11-19T11:18:51","date_gmt":"2020-11-19T17:18:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=61960"},"modified":"2020-11-19T11:18:51","modified_gmt":"2020-11-19T17:18:51","slug":"61960","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=61960","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Was That A Toy Gun In Your Living Room?<\/a><\/p>\n

How bad has the anti-gun hysteria gotten among some in our educational system? So bad that a grade-school student from Colorado Springs, Colo., was recently suspended for having a toy gun\u2014in his own home!<\/p>\n

Isaiah Elliott, who is 12 years old, was home last August participating in an online class. His school was closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Isaiah was sitting on his living room couch with his laptop computer. He was next to a friend who was also doing online class work with a different teacher. During his second-period class, Isaiah\u2019s art teacher noticed the friend was holding a \u201cgun\u201d and asked Isaiah to move it off screen.<\/p>\n

Isaiah then took the green toy pistol\u2014which had the words \u201cZOMBIE HUNTER\u201d emblazoned on one side\u2014from his friend and placed it out of the teacher\u2019s sight.<\/p>\n

Afterwards, the art teacher informed her superior that a student had what looked like a gun. The school official called the police.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey said they called the police for my son\u2019s safety,\u201d said Dani Elliott, Isaiah\u2019s mother. \u201cBut, if they were so concerned about him and if they really thought his life might be threatened, why didn\u2019t they call me immediately? And why did the police take four-and-a-half hours to get to our house?\u201d<\/p>\n

As was widely reported by local and national news media, Widefield School District 3, Isaiah\u2019s school district at the time of this incident, repeated its \u201cstudent-safety\u201d mantra to explain the school\u2019s reaction. The district also claimed Isaiah had violated school policy by bringing a \u201cfacsimile\u201d firearm to school. Because of this, he was suspended for five days.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut he was not at school,\u201d said Elliott. \u201cHe was in our living room. Apparently, they have the right to dictate what goes on in our own home, over a Nerf gun no less!\u201d<\/p>\n

Elliott did receive an email from the school about an hour after the incident. She called the school and told them it was a toy gun. Bodycam footage (available on the internet) shows an El Paso County Sheriff\u2019s office deputy at the school to take the complaint from school staff. The video shows one staffer admitting it was most likely a toy gun as they laughed over the incident.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt really scared Isaiah when the deputy sheriff showed up,\u201d said Elliott. \u201cAnd I believe the school suspended my son to save face, to pretend they actually had some policy in place to cover this. They don\u2019t. It\u2019s our home, not the school building.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elliott soon pulled Isaiah out of the Widefield School District 3\u00a0and put him into a new school.<\/p>\n

\u2026 \u201cstudent safety\u201d was given as the reason the police were called. The principal insisted that the school had \u201crules\u201d concerning guns, rules which had to be followed whether in an actual classroom or online.<\/span><\/p>\n

Isaiah\u2019s parents do own firearms, which are stored in a gun safe. Elliott and her husband are also strong supporters of the Second Amendment, and she is concerned that student safety is being used as a smokescreen for the fact that some on the school\u2019s staff dislike guns.<\/div>\n

\u201cAre they really that anti-gun?\u201d she asked. \u201cAs extreme as their reaction was, I have to wonder.\u201d<\/p>\n

Actually, schools and educators have a history of participating in what the NRA-ILA has called a \u201ccultural campaign to label firearms and firearm ownership as socially unacceptable.\u201d This goes back to at least 2014, which is when NRA-ILA noted: \u201cThe cultural campaign to label firearms and firearm ownership as socially unacceptable claimed another victim \u2026 when a \u2018virtual\u2019 school demanded that an elementary school student remove an image of a firearm from his online profile.\u201d<\/p>\n

The 2014 incident centered on Wisconsin Virtual Learning, a Wisconsin public charter school that provided elementary- and high-school students with the opportunity to attend school online from home.<\/p>\n

As part of his online school profile, an 11-year-old student named Matthew uploaded a picture of a pistol on top of an American flag. A school official contacted Matthew and told him to change the image, saying, \u201cNo guns in school, even virtual schools.\u201d<\/p>\n

Matthew was also told he could not use the Second Amendment as a school paper topic.<\/p>\n

More recently, police searched the home of a fifth-grade student. After this student attended a virtual class in the Baltimore County Public Schools, the principal informed the police that the student was seen with \u201cweapons.\u201d Those \u201cweapons\u201d were actually BB guns on a peg board behind the student.<\/p>\n

As Fox Baltimore noted, \u201cstudent safety\u201d was given as the reason the police were called. The principal insisted that the school had \u201crules\u201d concerning guns-rules which had to be followed whether in an actual classroom or online.<\/p>\n

Just two weeks after Isaiah\u2019s ordeal in Colorado, a fourth-grader enrolled at Woodmere Elementary in Harvey, La., \u201cwas taking a virtual class in his bedroom when his younger brother came into the room and tripped over a BB gun,\u201d according to the New Orleans Advocate.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 9-year-old leaned away from his English test, grabbed the unloaded BB gun and put it next to his chair, away from his brother but in view of the computer camera that showed the scene to his teacher and classmates.\u201d<\/p>\n

The result? A six-day suspension for the child.<\/p>\n

As the NRA-ILA noted in the Wisconsin incident, these calls to the police, suspensions and other punishments meted out to the students, \u201care a form of political activism and social engineering designed to promote the idea that firearms and firearm owners are deviant and inherently threatening.\u00a0Such censorship may also\u00a0infringe upon\u00a0constitutionally protected freedom of expression.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Dani Elliott said, \u201cSo, a bright green Nerf gun with an orange tip is a threat that brings the police into our home? What\u2019s next? Are these people going to start boycotting the toy gun industry? It\u2019s ridiculous.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Was That A Toy Gun In Your Living Room? How bad has the anti-gun hysteria gotten among some in our educational system? So bad that a grade-school student from Colorado Springs, Colo., was recently suspended for having a toy gun\u2014in his own home! Isaiah Elliott, who is 12 years old, was home last August participating … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crap-for-brains","category-education-schools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61960"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61960\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61961,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61960\/revisions\/61961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}