Immediately following a tragedy, you'll find people overreacting as they try to be vigilant and prevent the same thing from happening again. It makes sense that schools would be extra alert after 2012's horrific mass shootings. What doesn't make sense are the dumbass ways some schools have reacted. Or rather, overreacted. The ways are still dumbass, though.
For his outgoing voice mail message, 19-year-old Travis Clawson rapped the theme to Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, a song that at no point makes reference to leaving a message. A receptionist at an optometrist's office called Travis to remind him of an upcoming appointment, but instead got his voice mail. Since anything recorded by a voice mail system has the sound quality of a melted cassette tape salvaged from a fire, the receptionist misheard the lyric "and all shooting some b-ball outside of the school" as the much more terrifying "shooting people outside of the school."
The receptionist called school officials, who called the cops, who then put every school in the county on lockdown until Travis was in custody. District Attorney Anthony Berosh probably thought this was going to be his hero moment; he finally had a true villain to deal with. And then he listened to the voice mail and determined that it was, in fact, the Fresh Prince lyrics, and that being a district attorney is way less cool than movies make it out to be.
Pastries will kill you, but, like, eventually -- after many years of regular consumption. A teacher at an elementary school in Baltimore thought differently. When this teacher saw 7-year-old Josh Welch eating a Pop-Tart for breakfast, she lost all semblance of her shit and suspended him for two days.
The teacher thought Josh had bitten the Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun and then said "bang bang."
We should remind you that Pop-Tarts cannot be turned into guns. You can't will or craft a Pop-Tart to be any deadlier than its default level of deadliness. According to Josh, "It kind of looked like a gun but it wasn't." Again, Josh is 7. He's been around the block. He knows some shit. He understands that a Pop-Tart is not, nor shall it ever be, a firearm. He was using his imagination. He wanted it to be a mountain.
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"It'd be so easy to shove my teacher off a mountain."
Pop-Tart mountain? Pfft! Fuck you, Josh. Suspended.
Now we may never know the artistic heights Josh could have soared to if he were allowed to fully explore the burgeoning medium of Pop-Tart impressionism.
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Remember when playing cops and robbers was nothing more than some kids having a fun time with their imaginations, acting out the contemporary archetypal forms of good and evil? Not an elementary school in Maryland, whose stance on imaginary guns formed by a thumb and index finger is "THE KID MORPHED HIS HAND INTO A FULLY FUNCTIONAL GUN! EVERYONE GET DOWN!!"
Two 6-year-olds were suspended after they were playing cops and robbers during recess and were imagining that their fingers were guns. Some little bitch of a fellow student (who probably tried to put an imaginary flower in their imaginary finger gun barrels) snitched on them. Word about the horrific finger-on-finger violence soon spread to the principal, who suspended the two finger gunmen.
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"If we outlaw finger guns, then only outlaws will pretend their fingers are guns."
Parents pressured the principal and the suspensions were quickly lifted. It just goes to show: If you hold an imaginary gun to someone's head, you can get them to do anything.
Luis Prada
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