The Dreaded Cap Gun of Terror

I do not blame officers of the law for taking seriously the claims that a child has a weapon at school. We have seen too many instances where some immature cretin has suffered some perceived slight only to come back with a weapon to exact revenge.

So, when six sheriff's deputies do a take down on a 10 year old that took a $6.00 cap gun to school, I can understand, especially when there is no way these people could have known at that time that the gun in question was harmless.

What I have a problem with is the way that the supposed adults have handled this situation after having found out what the child had in his possession.

Alandis' gun was a "cap gun," a toy cowboy six-shooter that his mother bought for him.

"We got it from Wal-Mart for $5.96," Tosha Ford said, "in the toy section right next to the cowboy hats. That's what he wanted because it was just like the ones he was studying for the Civil War" in his fifth-grade class at Fairview Elementary School.

"It kind of reminded me of the [soldiers'] guns that I was studying," Alandis said, "because I had brought pictures home of the gun and stuff, and that gun that I had reminded me of the revolver" depicted in his textbook.

Tosha said that Wednesday afternoon, after school, "six police officers actually rushed into the door" of their home. "He [Alandis] opened the door because they're police. And then they just kind of pushed him out of the way, and asked him, 'Well where's the gun, where's the real gun?' And they called him a liar... they booked him, and they fingerprinted him."

The "police officers" were actually Newton County Sheriff's Deputies.

Lt. Mark Mitchell said Thursday that Alandis had used the toy gun to threaten other children on the school bus and in his neighborhood, which Alandis denies.

Alandis was charged with possessing a weapon on school property and with terroristic acts and threats.

"On the school bus," on Tuesday, Alandis said, "when I dug into my bookbag trying to get my phone out, the boy beside me, he reached in my bookbag and got it [the toy gun] and started telling everybody, 'He's got a gun, he's got a gun,' and spread it around the whole bus. So I put it back in my bookbag."

There apparently is a video camera on the bus that is being studied.

This reminds me a lot of the incident where middle school kids were charged as sexual offenders for spanking classmates on the bottom as they ran down the hall. Not behavior to engage in, certainly, but not an activity that should have someone listed on the sex offenders registry either. Is there no room for common sense in this sort of a situation?

So, little Alandis Ford will probably be expelled and is facing terrorism charges for toting a cap gun to school. Because, as fate would have it, none of these charges could have waited until after an investigation to spare the kid some emotional trauma--something had to be done immediately!

Don't you all feel so much safer?

h/t Moonbattery via commenter V the K