A high-school teacher sent me the correspondence below in response to my piece, "The Schools' Sinister War on Guns." It provides some valuable feedback from the front lines, so I urge you to read it. Anonymous Teacher wrote (edited for style):

I am a high school teacher who teaches at a school with its share of gang and other urban problems. The irony is seeing how the leftists respond when their hatred of guns conflicts with another one of their sacred cows: protecting teenagers from the legal consequences of their actions. So if an administrator finds a student in possession of a gun during a search and feels confident he can get away with it, [he] will quietly dispose of the gun. The student is neither suspended nor reported to the police so he can be arrested. If a school employee claims to have seen the gun, the administrator says it was just a toy gun.

The reasoning is twofold: the administration does not want the bad publicity when a gun-on-campus story hits the news, and they want to protect the student from the consequences of being arrested for a weapons charge. That would result in an expulsion and would stay on the student's record forever and likely prevent him from being accepted into a college. Out of safety concerns, many colleges will not admit students who have been suspended or expelled from a school for bringing a weapon onto school grounds. Finally, the student might end up in the juvenile justice system where he will be unjustly treated for something that was not his fault because he did not understand the consequences of his actions.

Now, if the student brings a toy gun to school, especially one that looks like a real gun, he is treated as if he brought a real gun to school. The student even gets a visit from a police officer for a lecture on the consequences that could result if the toy gun was mistaken for a real gun by a law enforcement officer or if it had actually been a real gun. By the way, we have a zero-tolerance policy for guns, unless of course it is a real gun and had only been carried in a concealed fashion and kept hidden from all but two or three. We do not want to alarm the parents and make them think the school may be a more dangerous place than they believe it to be.

I would like to add something to this. This teacher works in an urban school with gang problems; thus, the student body is likely majority-minority, which means that political correctness and group patriotism will come into play. Minority teachers will be reluctant to "finger" a minority student for the authorities, which are very often viewed in these communities as the enemy and part of a white power structure. And white teachers may not want to open the can of worms of reporting a minority child to the police, with white guilt or even the fear of being called "racist" being the impediment. Also remember that in recent times there have been efforts -- on the part of certain localities and the Obama administration -- to apply quotas to punishment and balance out the suspension and expulsion rates between white and minority students.

And, of course, there is the overarching politically correct notion that minority students deserve a special dispensation from rules and responsibilities due to "past injustices." White-privilege theory is everywhere.

UPDATE:

After reading the above, Anonymous Teacher added:

You are a mind reader, good at reading between the lines, or have a very good understanding of our current public educational system.  The comments you added to mine describe the situation.  I had not realized how just a few years of being on the inside had prevented me from even stating the obvious.  The majority of guns that disappear without being reported come from "students of color" (the PC term).  Yes, we are graded as a school on the percentages of blacks suspended compared to whites.  Administrators get a cash bonus to reduce that percentage gap each year.

About 7 years ago we had district-wide training provided by the Pacific Educational Group on white privilege.  I could go on and on but you know the story.

So now we learn that administrators get a cash bonus -- are paid off, in other words -- to cook the books and reduce the number of blacks suspended relative to whites. Talk about introducing corruption into the system.  Absolutely disgusting.

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