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GUNPHOBIA: PRESCHOOLER SUSPENDED FOR HAVING A SPENT .22 SHELL CASING

[3/24/17]  “Guns, hunting, etc., are not subjects that are to be discussed in school,” informed the administrator. So read a letter sent to Collinsville, Illinois, resident Kristy Jackson, the mother of a four-year-old boy suspended for seven days. His offense?

He secretly brought a spent .22 caliber shell casing to school and enjoys turning toys into imaginary guns.

Moreover, the school, A Place 2 Grow in Troy, doesn’t like certain facts any more than it does imagination. When Mrs. Jackson related her woes in a now-viral Facebook post, the school reported her to the Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS) in what she described to The New American as a “revenge move.”

As for the shell casing, it’s not that her son, little Hunter Crowe, had just returned from a gangland hit. His grandfather, a Caseyville police officer, had taken the boy to learn gun safety and do some target practicing over the weekend, and Hunter had secretly picked the casing up at the range. Subsequently, and unbeknownst to his parents, he brought it into school thinking it was a neat show-and-tell kind of item.

The gunphobic officials at A Place 2 Grow (liberal?) didn’t see it that way. Mrs. Jackson reported in the Facebook post that, when she picked Hunter up from school on Tuesday, she was met by a “stone faced teacher” who told her that her son “brought a ‘shotgun bullet’ to school.”

After being escorted to an office, Jackson wasn’t shown a “shotgun bullet,” wholly unsurprising since there’s no such thing. (Shotguns fire “shot,” which contains pellets. The educators didn’t know this; all they knew was they hated guns.) Rather, she was “handed a tiny .22 empty brass casing,” as Jackson related on Facebook.

She explained that she was also “handed a piece of paper. No words, just eyebrows raised in disgust at my son, explaining that his behavior warranted a 7 school day suspension. Which I still was expected to pay tuition for, of course. And a threat that if his enthusiasm for guns continued, he’d be permanently expelled.”

Mrs. Jackson points out that her son doesn’t have access to any weapon at home, that he “never hurt anyone, or threatened anyone,” and that what befell him could happen to any child who found such an item. And, of course, she would have stopped Hunter from bringing the shell casing to school had she known about it.

Yet A Place 2 Grow wasn’t done. Perhaps upset by the bad press, its v.p. of operations, Roy Jarman, sent Jackson an e-mail (which I‘ve seen) stating, “Everything has been saved and sent to our attorney. You won’t remove your post with all the facts, so we will go the legal route. I will also notify DCFS in the morning.”

Mrs. Jackson told The New American that the school did call DCFS, but that she had actually called the department first. She also said that DCFS told the school to “kick rocks,” as she put it, because the case had no merit.