Dumbing down school weapons laws

For years I have chuckled at labels and assembly instructions packaged with consumer products that painstakingly explain or warn against the obvious. You know the kind — labels that say, “Don’t stick your foot underneath the lawnmower deck while the machine is in operation,” or something like that.

Manufacturers of American products have dumbed-down their instruction and operation manuals because they know all too well that some ignoramus surely will stick his foot under the mower and then sue the manufacturer for “failing to warn” him not to do it.

The point is — and this is a shame — manufacturers know that many of us are simply too stupid to use the products we buy and, once we use them improperly, would rather die, it seems, before we would be willing to accept responsibility ourselves. Hence, the absurd instructions.

It is apparent to me that lawmakers should apply a similar “dumbing down” process to the numerous “zero tolerance” weapons laws they have passed for schools over the last few years. Recent examples prove that lawmakers eventually are going to have to explain, line by line, word by word, thought by thought, what the state considers a real weapon.

Here’s the latest example:

Last week the Associated Press reported that a third-grade boy in Pontiac, Mich., was suspended from school by administrators after they had discovered he had brought a one-and-a-half inch “gun-shaped medallion” to school.

It’s important to note that this object was only allegedly “gun-shaped,” and was not an actual gun or even an actual toy gun.

According to AP, school officials — upon discovering this most lethal of “weapons” — justified their actions by arbitrarily interpreting Michigan’s zero-tolerance anti-weapons law when making the insane decision to put a permanent black mark on this kid’s school record by suspending him.

“State law takes precedence and requires us to take action even though it was a toy,” AP quoted Donna Poag, director of elementary education for the Pontiac School District, as saying.

“While Poag said the 1-1/2-inch-long medallion did not pose a threat to students, it could have frightened someone who didn’t get a close look at it,” AP said.

Yes, “state law takes precedence,” Poag asserted. But over what?

Sanity, quite obviously.

I’m still trying to figure out what part of the anti-weapons law was broken. I don’t know about you, but it would take me and 99.5 percent of the rest of the public about one-half of one nanosecond to figure out that a medallion is certainly not a weapon — regardless of what it “looks like” or if it is “frightening.” Good grief.

Similar arbitrary judgments of zero-tolerance laws in other states and other school districts have been made by teachers and school officials recently. Boys have been booted out of school for drawing pictures with guns in them; girls have been kicked out for bringing nail files to school. One girl was booted because officials believed an icon on a necklace she was wearing was somehow akin to a nuclear weapon or an M-60 machine gun, in regards to lethality.

Clearly, this is not getting out of hand — it is out of hand, and lawmakers are just going to have to put some, shall we say, “clarification” into these laws because it’s obvious many of our educators are not educated enough to know what is and is not a “weapon.”

Personally, I cannot imagine that most lawmakers intended for these laws to be abused like this. I believe they mistakenly thought that educated public school officials would be more than able to tell what constitutes a legitimate “weapon” under the terms of the law.

Guess not.

It is an incredible failure of the modern (read: liberal) education system for states to have had to adopt “anti-weapons” laws for public schools in the first place. But I suppose, given the reality of modern America, nobody should disagree that schools probably need such zero-tolerance laws.

However, if we are to have them, lawmakers are going to have to spell out the parameters of “zero-tolerance” in the kind of simplified, dumbed-down terms already adopted by American industry and much of the public-school system.

The ignorance that permeates our public schools is reaching critical mass. If schools aren’t producing mind-numbed ignoramuses, they’re being led by them.