Zero Tolerence Equals Zero Intelligence

Over the past 40 or so years I have enjoyed watching movies, TV shows, and cartoons that portray unusual ways to cause bodily harm and death to your adversary. Now wait a minute. Don’t everybody be getting all excited and riled up when I make this admission, because it is not quite what it looks like on the surface.

You see, I’m not talking about really bad, blood and gore movies full of machine guns and explosions like “Scarface” or the “Rambo” movies. I’m talking about James Bond films, cartoons like “The Road Runner & Wyle E. Coyote, and the “Andy Griffith Show” featuring Mayberry’s Deputy Barney Fife.

Ian Flemming’s secret agent James bond always thrilled movie goers with the latest, greatest, often concealed, high-tech weapons that he had at his disposal for use in thwarting the designs of whatever maniacal madman might be trying to take over the world. Wyle E. Coyote could always buy a giant cannon or extra powerful slingshot from the latest ACME catalogue for use in his attempts to capture the Roadrunner. And finally, as everyone knows, Barney Fife had made his whole body into a weapon as a result of his correspondence course in Karate.

Then there is ten year old Porsche Brown of Philadelphia, a little girl that has single handedly managed to threaten the safety of each and every one of her fellow elementary school classmates. She accomplished this act by bringing a pair of 8” scissors to school in her backpack.

Little Miss Brown didn’t actually threaten a classmate by brandishing the scissors in a threatening manner in order to get arrested, handcuffed, and lead away from school in tears. Noooo, the teachers belatedly found the so-called “deadly weapon” in the little girls backpack while searching the children for some missing personal property stolen from a teacher’s desk. If Porsche had actually stabbed someone with her scissors or done an unauthorized haircut on one of her classmates, I could see getting a little worked up, but this is ridiculous. The article makes no mention of whether the missing items were ever found and what punishment was delivered to the culprit. They probably let him go with a warning…

I got to say it Folks. THIS “ZERO TOLERANCE” STUFF HAS GOTTEN ENTIRELY OUT OF HAND!! Teachers and school administrators alike have been allowed to replace intelligent thought and common sense with a ridiculous set of idiotic rules designed in theory to make schools safer. What they are doing instead is teaching kids living in a world full of shades of grey that every situation can be viewed on the basis of black and white, with no room for the application of good judgment or rational intelligent thought when considering any mitigating circumstances that might be present.

Under the guise of keeping drugs and weapons out of school, innocent items like toy guns, Tweety Bird key chains, souvenir 12” baseball bats, pencil sharpeners, and Advil tablets are being hysterically confiscated and the offending child whisked off of the school grounds to jail—much to the relief of the moronic government school imbeciles charged with supervising the process. They don’t have to consider and think any more, they just close their eyes and minds and recite the rules.

Many times, when the legal authorities drop the charges, the school responds by mandating even more severe penalties just to prove their point. In this case, the local police dropped the charges against Miss Brown, but the school still is trying to save face by having a hearing to determine when and if she can return to class. IDIOTS!

Under today’s rules, I wouldn’t have made it past the sixth grade considering some of the stunts I pulled. There would be a Fox News investigation and an episode of “60 Minutes” introducing me to the civilized world as a 12 year old “Hannibal Letcher.”

Here is my problem with “zero tolerance.” You can’t cover every possible situation that theoretically occurs, and you can’t by default eliminate every item that could be used as a weapon from the school ground. A kid could pin another kid on the ground and shove a mechanical pencil through his adversary’s nostril, into his brain, and fatally injure the victim. A big bully could in a matter of a few seconds beat another student unconscious with a metal lunchroom tray. Are we going to ban mechanical pencils and force the kids to eat off of paper plates in order to make our schools safer? I wonder what are they using these days to cut open the belly’s of the preserved frogs and worms handed out in biology class-- spoons and spatulas from the lunchroom? What are kids supposed to use to cut construction paper for class projects--a laser beam?

By the way, why isn’t paper considered a weapon since it can cause a paper cut? I’d like to see that one come up in court…..