Guns, Sex and Backlashes

10 year old boy suspended for having a shell casing. The backlash and a contrasting backlash. [Link]

An incident in which a 10 year old boy was suspended from school for having an empty shell casing given to him by a veteran at a Memorial Day celebration has rightfully stirred the wrath of the pro-Second Amendment community.

According to a May 29, Telegram.com article, a uniformed veteran gave the 10-year-old two empty rifle shell casings from blanks used during the town's Memorial Day celebration Monday morning. Bradley gave one of the empty casings to his grandfather and kept the other as a souvenir. The trouble began when he took his souvenir to school the next day.

"He was just playing with it at lunch," explained Crystal Geslak, Bradley's mother. "He wasn't showing it to anyone; he had it in his hand and was playing with it."

A teacher saw him with the harmless piece of brass and confiscated it. Ms. Geslak was then called at work and told to come and pick up her son, who had been suspended for five days!

Yes, and they're talking about assigning the tyke a probation officer.

My initial reaction was that this was another typical example of insane anti-gunners in the school bureaucracy running amok. Which I'm sure it is. But behind every bureaucrat there's usually a law or a statute or a regulation, and when Sebastian of Snowflakes in Hell looked into the story he learned that because of the law, the situation is worse than people realize.

the problem is, if you don't have a license to have a firearm in Massachuetts, you can't even possess ammunition or ammunition components. The truth is, this kid and everyone involved in this situation is lucky that it's only resulting in a five day suspension. Under Massachusetts law, both the kid, the veteran who gave the kid the empty shell casing, and the teacher to took if from the kid could be looking at two years in prison for having ammunition components without a license.

These are the "reasonable restrictions" that the Brady Campaign wants to impose on the rest of the country. And they call us "nuts" and "paranoid" for arguing that these regulations are anything but reasonable. Yet in this case, the following people could be looking at two years in jail:

1. A 10 year old kid.
2. One of our nation's veterans
3. An elementary school teacher

Sound reasonable to you? Me neither.

An empty shell casing is now a crime. This in a country with the right to keep and bear arms.

While this is an outrage, it's the type of outrage that, if reported widely enough, can provoke precisely the type of backlash I've described in several posts.

As a Second Amendment supporter, of course, I welcome the backlash, and I'd say "Bring it on!"