Kid Suspended for Bringing an Empty Shell Casing to School

Shell Question: What explosive device presents zero
threat to anyone?

Answer: An empty rifle shell. And yet, a student at Chanute
Elementary School in Chanute, Kansas, was just suspended for five
days for bringing one to school. His mom told The Chanute
Tribune that Principal Gary Wheeler said her son got
off easy. He could have given the boy 168 days to cool his
heels.

(Which sounds suspiciously like a plea bargain made by a corrupt
D.A.)

But anyway: Why would a boy have a rifle shell with him at all,
if he wasn’t some kind of gun-crazed threat to all child-kind?

Carlson said her son, Camron Carlson, was out with her the night
before, Tuesday Dec. 2, where she was sighting a rifle for deer
hunting season with a friend, and he picked up one of the empty
shell casings and put it in his pocket.

Carlson said her son had told his friends that they had been
sighting rifles the night before, and that the shell casing fell
out of his pocket.

“There was no threat,” she said. “My child’s never been in a
fight at school. He was just being a boy and bragging because it’s
cool.”

The reporter, Joshua Vail, does a good job of tracking down the
school handbook, which states that the punishment for a minor
infraction is supposed to be detention, talking to the student
and/or parent notification. Punishment for carrying a weapon or
ammo is 186-day expulsion.

Except a spent shell is not ammo any more than ashes are
fireworks. Who’s the person in this story in need of an
education?

Anyway, if all this
sounds eerily familiar, perhaps you are recalling the 2008 case in
Winchendon, Mass., when Bradley Geslak, age 10, received a 5-day
suspension for bringing a rifle shell casing he got from a vet at
his town’s Memorial Day celebration. In that
incident, according to the local News
Telegram: