I agree with scaeages, to a point.

But guns in the paws of Cats certainly are freaky, and I'm glad Gemini Cricket changed his avatar.

Yes-- the school isn't at liberty to discuss punishments, so who's to say there wasn't a history of problems? And no, I don't tend to always trust what parents say. I remember first-hand a boy in my class who picked on me incessantly (worms or pepper in my hair, pushed down into the dirt, etc) and when my mother called to ask his mother for help, she denied her son had done anything of the sort.

That said, if there were no prior missteps, suspension seems pretty ridiculous to me.

Perhaps the teacher should have returned the assignment with a drawing of a paddle?

I probably would have been sent to some psycho therapy camp for my copies of the Faber Book of Murder and the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Serial Killers.

According to Disneyland (when buying tickets) one is an adult at 10.

Kid should have said it was a picture of a Squirt-Gun.

Guns have also done some wonderful things. They've saved lives and freed oppressed people. Sometimes they put holes in people that are hurting others. A gun is a tool. Countless people have committed suicide by jumping off of the Brooklyn Bridge, yet this tool of suicide is not an evil thing.

Is he from a military family? Do they go hunting? Or, perhaps, he watches TV/sees movies/surfs the internet/talks to friends/reads books? Guns are a part of this world, and children are not in bubbles.

If the kid drew a boxing glove, should we worry that he's a bully, or that he's into professional sports? If he drew a whip, does it mean he's a sadomasochist, or a fan of Indiana Jones? If he drew himself flying an airplane, does it mean he's going to fly one into a building?

:snap: :snap: :snap:

I'm talking about the history of guns in schools. It was/is a huge problem. It's about the safety of the kids and teachers. Boxing gloves, whips, airplanes have nothing to do with what I'm saying. I find those examples absurd. A gun was used to kill people in a school in Virginia as recently as this year. I think the school acted correctly in this case. Yes, kids are not in a bubble, part of not being so is realizing the world they're in. A thirteen year old is old enough to know about Columbine or the wacko in Virginia.

I actually think the kid, at 13, is barely old enough to know the implications of a Columbine massacre, just as I wasn't ever old enough to understand that school shooting by Brenda Ann Spencer in 1979. Sure, I was 1 when that shooting happened and he was 4 (?) when Columbine happened, but I just don't think he's going to have the same grasp on the situation as adults, particularly his teachers and counselors.

Unfortunately, school shootings and mass murders have been a part of our lives for well beyond our years. I don't say this to take it lightly, but it's pretty clear to me that in the last 80 years that we, as citizens, they as education professionals, haven't learned an effective way to manage these problems. As these events become more sensationalized, it seems as though teachers, administrators and counselors know how to deal with it less and less, instead of more and more. There's something very backward, to me, about how we - as a country - deal with our youth.

Adolescence is a time where children need as much or more guidance than they did as babies and toddlers. That doesn't mean treating them like babies and toddlers, but to recognize that the buck stops with each and every one of us to solve the problems around us. Whether it was the 1st, 2nd, 10th, 20th time this kid drew a gun on his homework, it just sounds like that kid's school passed the buck onto someone else.

As a collective, we're handling these situations worse and worse each and every time. Of course, we're only hearing about the egregious situations - not the times when a kid was pulled aside and talked with.