Robin SmithIf your seventh-grade son brought home a note explaining he'd been suspended for 10 days from school, you'd likely want to know the details. What if he told you he had been called into the administrative office and said school officials patted him down, checked for weapons and then told him he was being suspended?
After you quiz your son to find out if there really was a weapon or why anyone would think so, you finish reading the note from school. Turns out that the explanation for the two-week suspension was due to your seventh-grader liking a post on social media that indicated potential school violence.
Doing what? Yes, "liking" a photo of an airsoft pistol on Instagram that was posted by a friend generated a two-week suspension.
What's an airsoft gun? It's a low power "gun" that fires tiny spheres of plastic or biodegradable resin, similar to BBs, via pressurized air.
What's Instagram? It's a social media platform for posting and sharing photos within your "friend" universe that are liked, shared and open for comment.
So, Zachary Bowlin, of Edgewood Middle School in Trenton, Ohio, gets called out, patted down and suspended after he clicks a heart-shaped icon on a social media platform, making no comment or sharing the photo posted by another individual.
Yep. Martin Bowlin, Zachary's dad, was livid and immediately contacted the school. Russ Fussnecker, superintendent of Edgewood City Schools, said in a statement, "I assure you that any social media threat will be taken seriously, including those who 'like' the post when it potentially endangers the health and safety of students or adversely affects the educational process."
It's quite pathetic that such devoted surveillance of children in this school system is deemed necessary. But how far is too far in labeling a child as one capable of "potential school violence?"
Is it now a pathology for a healthy child to have an interest or hobby that involves a gun, targets or a projectile of any size? Will it soon be deemed child abuse for a parent to teach their children gun safety and engage in a sporting hobby with their children?
In Tennessee, the National Rifle Association provides gun safety classes that are frequently taught to seventh-graders and other middle schoolers. Knowing that the emotionally incontinent on the Left were just triggered to flee to a safe space, understand that the courses stress the inseparable need for gun safety that accompanies gun ownership and that anytime a gun is being used, an adult must be present. But, for so many, the only lesson about guns is that they are completely unsafe.
Please don't think that such an extreme response to guns is limited only to schools.
Within the last two weeks, Stacy Washington, an Air Force veteran, a female, black conservative and contributor to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, was suspended as columnist for an opinion she submitted to the paper.
Washington, a gun owner, wrongfully accused of being a paid NRA advocate, wrote a counterpoint argument in response to a journalism professor's guest column in a competing paper where he asserted that the NRA was more dangerous than ISIS. Yeah, University of Missouri's George Kennedy said that legal gun owners shared the same lethality as those of a medieval radical caliphate who believe infidels should be killed, even by beheading.
Good grief, folks! These hysterics are clearly destructive to our culture.
Robin Smith, a former chairwoman of the Tennessee Republican Party, owns Rivers Edge Alliance.