Weapons in School

I read a short blurb of a story on the Fox website about a teacher who had been using a live piece of military ordinance as a paper weight on his desk. I qualified with the 40mm grenade launcher when I was in the Army. It makes a neat sound when it propels the payload down range, “thummphhhh”; hardly what I’d expected the first time I fired it off. The grenade spins as a means of arming the firing pin so that when it hits a solid object it can detonate. The idea of picking up a “bad round”, one that somehow didn’t blow up reminds me of those idiots who light the fuse to set fireworks off and look down the tube of an aerial mortar thinking that the fuse must have gone out. “911 Operator, state the nature of your emergency?”

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,190582,00.html

“A teacher who kept a 40 mm shell on his desk as a paperweight blew off part of his hand when he apparently used the object to try to squash a bug, authorities say.

The 5-inch-long shell exploded Monday while Robert Colla teaching 20 to 25 students at an adult education class.”

Having a warped mind, the product of 20 years working the street as a police officer, I will do my best not to jump on this with various lines intended to evoke muffled laughter. “Bugs just get dead with Raid”, “If it had been John Kerry teaching the class he’d have put in for another Purple Heart.”, or other tasteless one liners.

I would like to know why the teacher thought that taking a weapon to school seemed appropriate. Maybe thirty years ago it might have been “kool” to have an old Army grenade on the desk with a sign that read, “Take a number!” attached to the safety pin, or some other inert piece of weaponry; but a piece of recovered ordinance that had never been checked to see if it was live? Maybe he was teaching Darwinian Theory, the survival of the fittest; just a thought.

I read where a Middle School Boy was walking to school the other day in the Indianapolis School District and realized that he’d accidentally taken his Swiss Army Knife along in his pocket. Upon arriving at school he immediately walked to the administrative offices and turned it in for safe keeping. That young man was expelled from school and classified as a trouble maker in spite of the fact that he was an honor student and never had a disciplinary mark on his record. He will now have to attend an alternative school, that place where the undesirable kids are sent, those who are one step away from a life of crime. (linked via title bar)

There used to be a sit-com, Barney Miller, about an office full of detectives. I thought it had some good writers and the show made me laugh. Once they had arrested a young man for having put together an atomic bomb from information gained at the public library. Nobody at the station really believed that it was a bomb, much less one that could blow away half the city as they poked it, shook it and in general discarded common sense. The device was sitting on Captain Miller’s desk when one of the other detectives walked by and casually observed the object, “Hey, where’d you get the atomic bomb?”, as if anyone would have recognized the hidden destructive power inside the interesting device.

What kind of class is adult education anyway? “Tonight I'm going to show how to properly put on a condom, avoid HIV and collect Welfare from as many agencies of government as will hand it out; but first, watch me smash this bug with a dud grenade.”