David McElroy

Cole Withrow is an Eagle Scout who was on track to graduate with honors this month from Princeton High School in Princeton, N.C. (That’s Cole with his sister in the photo.) But he’s also a fallible teen-ager who made one small mistake Monday morning — and that mistake led to his arrest and expulsion from school.

In a sane world, Cole’s mistake wouldn’t be a big deal and nobody would even know about it. But in the world of “zero tolerance” in schools, his small mistake has become an absurd tragedy.

When Cole got to school Monday morning, he realized that he had an unloaded gun in his vehicle. He had been skeet-shooting the day before and the gun was still there. It wasn’t until he picked up his book bag that he noticed the weapon was there. He would be late for school if he left campus to return home, so he locked the gun in his car and went to the school office to call his mother to ask her for help.

But someone in the office overheard his conversation with his mom and things quickly escalated. Police were called and he was arrested. He was expelled from school and banned from school grounds for one year.

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As 15 teachers sat in a meeting last Friday at their school in Halfway, Ore., two gunmen suddenly burst into the room with handguns. The assailants wore hoodies to hide their faces, and they immediately started firing. Within moments, almost every teacher was dead — or would have been if it hadn’t been a drill.

I don’t know who thought it was a good idea to scare these teachers by making them believe they were being killed, but some of them claim that it was an effective teaching tool. What’s interesting, though, is that these teachers had already received training from the local sheriff’s department about how they could react in the even of an active shooter.

It apparently made no difference when they weren’t expecting an attack. For me, this brings to mind several points.

First, these are teachers, not a team of armed security guards. Just as those on the progressive left are completely unrealistic about the effects of taking guns away from law-abiding citizens, those on the conservative right are just as unrealistic about the effectiveness of arming teachers. I’m sure there are the occasional teachers who would be effective in a firefight, but I’d say they are few and far between. Trying to turn them into security guards isn’t going to work. It’s not their job and they’re probably going to panic if a real shooter shows up. That’s Halfway teacher Dollie Beck in the picture above. Does she look like someone you’d hire as a security guard?

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A Bartow, Fla., high school student was arrested and now faces felony charges after she mixed a couple of household chemicals together in a plastic bottle and put the top on one morning last week.

Kiera Wilmot said she thought the combination would make smoke, but it actually produced a tiny explosion. The girl did her experiment about 7 a.m. while she and other students were waiting around for the school day to start. A nearby student described the explosion as sounding like a firecracker. Nobody was hurt or threatened. Kiera stayed where she was and explained to school employees exactly what had happened.

Then this student with a perfect record was arrested and taken to a juvenile jail and charged with the felonies of “making, possessing or discharging a destructive device” and “possessing or discharging weapons on school grounds.” In today’s schools, there can be zero tolerance for mistakes born of teen-age bad judgement.

Everybody agrees that it was just an experiment that went wrong. Although Kiera called it a science experiment, it wasn’t an official school experiment of any kind. It appears she was just curious. So she did what many of us did as children. She tried it to see what would happen.

The school’s principal told WTSP-TV news that Kiera isn’t a troubled teen.

“She is a good kid,” said principal Ron Pritchard. “She has never been in trouble before. Ever.”

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