Tacoma teacher who gave toy gun to student should not be suspended

Taken from Wednesday’s edition of The Jason Rantz Show.

An eighth grader in Tacoma apparently got a toy gun as a gift from his math teacher last month, and as you can imagine all hell broke loose.

KING 5 covered the story. The father of the eighth grader tells KING 5 he doesn’t allow his sons to have toy guns, so when he found a gun in his son’s bedroom, he asked him where he got it and was surprised to hear from his son that he got it in math class.

“Especially with all the gun violence in schools and across the country and everywhere, it’s totally setting the wrong example,” says Jawan Campbell, the father of the eight grader.

Campbell tells KING 5 his son would have been suspended for bringing a toy like that to school, so he thinks the teacher should face a similar penalty.

We should preface this by saying, this guy, he seems like a really good father. But his reaction to a toy gun for me seems to go a little bit overboard. We have seen across this county remarkable overreaction to children who bring toy guns to school. He made a little bit of reference to that in that story, where he told KING 5 if his son brought a toy gun to school he would be expelled.

We have seen instances of young kids who are using their fingers to pretend they have a gun and getting suspended for that. We have seen cases of students shooting little rubber bands at each other and then being suspended for using weapons in the classroom. We have seen cases of kids drawing pictures of guns and getting in trouble.

All of those instances are complete and utter overreactions. It is a reaction or a concern I can sometimes understand given the history lately of gun violence in schools. But rather than suspend or expel a student for using his finger to point at another person and pretend to shoot, why don’t you explain to that child why maybe now in 2014 after a number of high profile shootings in schools, it may not be a good idea to do that?

Why don’t you bring the kid in, sit them down, explain what they did and explain what your views are on that behavior. Doesn’t that seem like a reasonable thing to do? Especially when we’re talking about young kids who are first graders or second graders?

But we see all this overreaction. We are hypersensitive to toy guns, to fingers to drawings, to instances where reasonable people can look at what happened, can look at the incident, can look at the kid and know that there is no threat posed. No one is going to accidentally get shot by using your finger. No one will die if someone draws a picture of a gun. We overreact. And that overreaction is happening here with this teacher who might get potentially suspended because a father who is overacting is going to push for it.

Taken from Wednesday’s edition of The Jason Rantz Show.

JS