Education

School could expel kid for playing with airsoft gun… AT HIS OWN HOME

Robby Soave Reporter
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School administrators’ anti-gun paranoia has reached a new level of insanity: students can now be expelled for playing with toy guns in their own front yards, miles from any school.

Virginia Beach seventh-grader Khalid Caraballo and his friends were shooting an airsoft gun on his family’s property while they waited for the school bus. The gun fired plastic pellets.

But a neighbor who felt “uncomfortable” because of the airsoft gun called the cops on Caraballo. She told the 9/11 dispatcher that she knew it wasn’t a real gun, but still wanted police to visit the property.

Police declined to charge anyone with a crime. Officials at Larkspur Middle School, on the other hand, took swift action as soon as they found out about the incident. Caraballo and friend Aidan Clark were issued suspended–and may be expelled for the duration of the school year.

Caraballo’s mother was outraged. She said that while her son did not have permission to play with the gun, it was her job to discipline him, not the school’s.

“My son is my private property,” she said in a statement to a local news channel. “He does not become the school’s property until he goes to the bus stop, gets on the bus, and goes to school.”

Accounts differ as to how close the boys were to the bus stop when they shot the gun. The bus stop is 70 yards from the Caraballo home, but Larkspur’s report claimed that one of the kids was struck by a plastic pellet while only 10 feet from the bus stop.

On Monday, Caraballo and Clark attended a hearing to determine whether they will be expelled for “possession, handling and use of a firearm.”

Of course, there’s no firing powder in an airsoft gun.

The verdict is forthcoming.

Officials at Larkspur did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Larkspur’s heavy-handed approach to toy guns is just the latest in a long string of questionable crackdowns. School officials all over the country have suspended or expelled kids for bringing cap guns on buses, showing off ornamental Lego-sized pistols and even merely chewing a Pop Tart into the shape of a gun.

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