“A woman in Georgia is questioning her son’s three-day suspension after school officials said the 8-year-old brought a small LEGO creation resembling a gun to class, sparking debate over zero-tolerance discipline policies for young students,” KVUE reported Sunday. “The mother said her son, who has autism and ADHD, did not threaten anyone or behave aggressively.”
It’s hardly the first time that school officials have reacted this way. It’s been going on for a long time.
In 2010, a fourth-grade boy playing with LEGOs during lunch faced suspension “over the two-inch toy gun carried by a standard policeman figure,” NBC 4 New York reported. The official position was made clear for all to heed:
Margie Feinberg, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, told the Staten Island Advance that there is a no-tolerance policy for toy guns in schools.
“Connecticut School Calls Police After Student Builds Lego Gun,” Athlon Outdoors reported, adding:
“This is just the latest example of school students facing disciplinary action over firearms. A high school senior in Woodbridge, Conn. was suspended and arrested in March after posting a photo of an airsoft gun on Snapchat. In Ohio last year, a middle school student received a 10-day suspension for “liking” a photo of an airsoft gun on Instagram. In addition, a 16-year-old student in Alabama was expelled from school last year after she was caught with a toy water gun. Furthermore, a 12-year-old autistic boy was arrested last week for pointing an imaginary rifle at his art teacher.”
Then there was the seven-year-old “Pop Tart gun” boy in Maryland who bit a pastry in the shape of a gun and had his suspension upheld by a judge.
And AmmoLand reported on a three-year-old deaf boy in Nebraska named Hunter, forbidden to use sign language for his name because “the forefinger and middle fingers crossed and extended, slightly resembl[ed] the ASL sign for a gun, or a finger gun that children might make during a game of cops and robbers.”
Many more such examples can be found, but it’s pretty clear what’s going on and what the education establishment is teaching its charges about guns the minute it gets its hands on them. The engineered results are predictable: Ignorance begets fear and fear begets hate.
And, anti-bullying policies aside, the biggest bullies are teachers and administrators enforcing “zero tolerance” policies with no regard to common sense or the effects draconian intolerance has on young people looking to adults for cues on what to believe and how to behave.
Compare all this to countries like Poland, where “Weaponry class is now mandatory in Polish schools and could soon become a favorite,” and “Russian Schools Training Children to Shoot Guns.”
Some states are beginning to come on board with the basics.
“Arkansas, Tennessee and Utah are the first states to enact laws that require public schools to teach children as young as 5 the basics of gun safety and how to properly store guns in the home,” U.S. News & World Report related in 2025. It’s basically avoidance stuff, “but in Arkansas, the law allows parents to opt into alternative curriculums, such as an off-campus firearm safety course that could include live guns.” (It’s still a far cry from the way things used to be, back in the days before school shootings when the Chicago Vocational High School ROTC color guard was equipped with M1s Garands, and the armory with even more.)
None of which pleases the “commonsense gun safety” groups who, in true Opposite Day fashion, object to any form of training, thereby ensuring that if children under their influence encounter an unattended firearm, exploitable tragedy will be the likely result. Meg Beauregard, policy counsel fellow at Everytown for Gun Safety, says leave the kids out of it and “pass laws that hold adults accountable, such as secure storage.”
Mandated ignorance extends to drawings of guns, and quotes from Growing Up in Santa Cruz show what “progressive” mothers demand as a universal rule:
Gina Grajewski, a Santa Cruz parent, agrees that no guns should be drawn in the classroom under any circumstance. “It’s my understanding that this is just a rule. No guns at school. No drawings. Period. No gun play. Period. No guns. Period,” said Grajewski, a PVUSD parent… One Santa Cruz parent, Kathy Vega, also takes the position of no gun pictures in schools. “I agree with the rules of not drawing guns or weapons at school,” she said. “If anything, we should try to educate our children not to touch guns in hopes that they will make that decision if they happen to be in a situation where they have access to one.”
What will happen is they will have no clue about basic rules of gun safety and be in no position to know what danger they are in.
Meanwhile, none of this will have any effect on budding predators who don’t need to build LEGO guns or draw them, as a “study determ[ining] the frequency, prevalence, and turnover in gang membership between ages 5 and 17 years in the United States” makes obvious.
Kids won’t learn how the same “adults” who demand ignorance on guns politically enable and make that inevitable, either. What they will learn is acting like normal kids used to in a simpler time will get them bullied, punished and ostracized by those in authority.
Those people would have had apoplectic meltdowns over some of the old lunchboxes kids used to bring to school.
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About David Codrea:
David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.
