Before It's News | Popular Politics
Seventh Graders Suspended For Nine Months For Playing With Toy Gun… AT HOME
Parents outraged: “Not a school issue”
Steve Watson
Infowars.com
Sept 24, 2013
Last week, in the wake of the Navy Yard shooting in Washington DC, we predicted that we’d see another wave of knee jerk overreactions to anyone doing anything with any object that even remotely looks like a gun – sadly we were right.
The latest incident occurred in Virginia, where a seventh grader and his friend have been suspended from school for playing with a toy gun, in the boy’s own front yard, outside of school hours.
WAVY-TV reports that while waiting for the school bus, the boys were fooling around with an airsoft replica handgun, shooting plastic pellets at a target attached to a tree, with a safety net rigged up to catch any off target pellets.
A neighbor saw them and called in a complaint to police. The caller even acknowledged that the gun wasn’t real, telling the 911 dispatcher “This is not a real one, but it makes people uncomfortable. I know that it makes me (uncomfortable), as a mom, to see a boy pointing a gun.”
When the Virginia Beach City Public School System got wind of the incident, the principal of Larkspur Middle School, decided to suspend the two boys, Khalid Caraballo and Aidan Clark, for the next nine months, and even recommended that the boys be “expelled for a year” for possession, handling and use of a firearm.
In a letter, the principal claims that the boys “shot at people near the bus stop,” while their parents and the boys strongly refute the accusation, noting that the gun never left the yard and was left there when the school bus arrived. There are also multiple discrepancies between the principal’s claims and the boys’ account of what happened.
“My son is my private property.” said Khalid’s mother, Solangel Caraballo. “He does not become the school’s property until he goes to the bus stop, gets on the bus, and goes to school.”
“How dare he disobey me,” the mother added, “but this is a home issue. It’s not a school issue and it won’t happen again. He will never do this again.”
While maintaining that he has never taken the toy gun to school, Khalid expressed remorse, noting “It’s terrible. I won’t get the chance to go to a good college. It’s on your school record. The school said I had possession of a firearm. They aren’t going to ask me any questions. They are going to think it was a real gun, and I was trying to hurt someone. They will say ‘oh, we can’t accept you.’”
The city code indicates that it is not a violation to fire such airsoft guns on private property as long as “reasonable care” is exercised, and the fired projectiles are reasonably contained. Police would not comment on the specifics of the case, but said that they do not proactively seek out to enforce the code in such incidents involving pneumatic guns.
Caraballo will attend an alternative school, while the other boy, Clark, will now be homeschooled at the behest of his parents. A hearing will be held in January to determine if they will be allowed back to the Larkspur school.
This is the third incident of it’s kind in recent days, with a 9-year-old in Michigan being indefinitely suspended for pretending a plastic toy was a gun, and a 15 year old in Louisiana being jailed for “shooting” people using an iPhone app.
Following last year’s Sandy Hook tragedy, we documented a spate of similar incidents involving bubble guns, lego guns and even food bitten into the shape of a gun.
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Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.com, andPrisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham, and a Bachelor Of Arts Degree in Literature and Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University.
This article was posted: Tuesday, September 24, 2013 at 12:34 pm
Tags: gun rights
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Copyright: Infowars
The Progressive Crusade Against Tax Cuts
By Dr. Paul G. Kengor
Editor’s note: This column first appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
The Progressive Crusade Against Tax Cuts
The Center For Vision & Values
Grove City, PA --(Ammoland.com)- There’s an ongoing effort by President Obama and fellow “progressives” not only to continue to blame George W. Bush for every economic woe facing America — even as every economic indicator is far worse under Obama — but to permanently discredit the value of tax cuts.
Tax cuts are an unmitigated evil that progressive crusaders must forever exorcise.
For President Obama and his allies, this is a project they’re taking back to the Reagan years, starting with an assault on President Reagan’s enormously successful 1981 tax cuts. Their campaign, however, can’t end with Reagan. They need to venture way back to Andrew Mellon in the 1920s.
Mellon was Treasury secretary throughout the Republican administrations that followed Woodrow Wilson’s exit from the White House in 1921. He was a superb Treasury secretary, with few peers before or since.
Unemployment under Wilson’s “progressive” presidency had hit almost 12 percent. In 1921, the newly inaugurated president was Republican Warren Harding. As Harding’s Treasury secretary, Mellon argued against spending increases as “stimulus” for economic growth and, instead, pushed for tax rate cuts. It was a Reagan-like move, with Reagan-like results. By 1923, unemployment dropped to under 3 percent, where it (roughly) remained throughout the 1920s under Harding and his Republican successor, Calvin Coolidge.
Andrew Mellon: He was a superb Treasury secretary, with few peers before or since.
The economy did not begin its crash and sustained slide until the presidencies of Herbert Hoover, a Republican, and FDR, a Democrat. Both Hoover and FDR jacked tax rates through the roof. The federal tax rate on income reached a breathtaking 94 percent under FDR. As historian Burt Folsom shows, FDR actually considered raising the upper rate to 99.5 percent on income above $100,000. (Yes, you read that right.)
FDR, for the record, despised Andrew Mellon. He subjected Mellon to an intense, intrusive investigation of his income-tax returns, pursuing him to his deathbed. FDR had a vendetta against Mellon’s entire philosophy on taxation. It became personal as well as political.
Here’s a Mellon insight that FDR no doubt detested:
“It seems difficult for some to understand that high rates of taxation do not necessarily mean large revenue to the government, and that more revenue may often be obtained by lower rates.”
FDR certainly didn’t understand, though his Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, eventually came to that conclusion.
“We have tried spending money,” said Morgenthau. “We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. … I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. … And an enormous debt to boot!”
Morgenthau figured out what Andrew Mellon already knew. Said Mellon:
“The problem of government is to fix rates which will bring in a maximum amount of revenue to the Treasury and at the same time bear not too heavily on the taxpayer or on business enterprises.”
And so, during the Harding and Coolidge administrations, Mellon succeeded in promoting tax-rate cuts rates across the board, with upper-income rates reduced from 73 to 24 percent. The cuts were very similar to Reagan’s in the 1980s. And like under Reagan — and contrary to liberal mythology — total tax revenue to the Treasury actually increased.
Under Reagan, federal revenue rose from $599 billion to almost $1 trillion. Under Mellon’s stewardship in the 1920s, revenue went from $700 million to above $1 billion. And unlike under Reagan, Mellon’s policies eliminated the budget deficit. (Coolidge was able and willing to cut spending where Reagan did not.)
For President Obama and his fellow liberals, these are inconvenient, unwelcome facts. They believe they need higher taxes to feed and sustain their government class. Democrats are banking on that government class — which they want to expand and unionize — to keep them in power not another four years but another 40 years.
Tax cuts are anathema to our president and progressives. And so is the wisdom of Andrew Mellon.
- Dr. Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College and executive director of The Center for Vision & Values. His books include “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism,” and his latest release, “Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century.”
c 2013 by The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. The views & opinions expressed herein may, but do not necessarily, reflect the views of Grove City College.
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