News from the great progressive Northeast, via The Boston Globe:

MILFORD — On Friday, Milford fifth-grader Nickolas Taylor was in line for lunch, just a few hours from the weekend.

But like most 10-year-old boys bursting with energy, he didn’t wait quietly. Instead, he played shoot-em-up by himself to pass the time, pointing his index finger like a ray gun and making “pew-pew” sounds.

As he battled his imaginary foes, he passed two girls in the lunch line. They told the assistant principal, according to Nickolas’s father, Brian Taylor. Later that day, the principal told the boy he was being suspended for two days for making a threat.

Upset over the suspension, Brian Taylor, 40, said he went to the school Monday morning to meet with the assistant principal in hopes of explaining it was just “innocent playing.” But the official said Nickolas had pointed at the girls, which amounted to a threat.

“He just kept saying it was against policy,” the father said in an interview Wednesday at his Milford home. “He wouldn’t see the common sense.”

Taylor said he understood that schools were on heightened alert these days to any perceived threats or potential bullying, but he said the suspension was an extreme overreaction.

“He wasn’t pointing at anyone in particular,” he said. “He was just playing. There were other ways they could have handled it.”

Taylor said his son had never gotten in serious trouble before, and that he was confused by the punishment.

“He didn’t really understand why” he was suspended, Taylor said.

Taylor said he thought the girls must have been annoyed that his son cut in front of them, and he was surprised school officials didn’t simply tell Nickolas not to do it again.

Nickolas loves video games like Minecraft and told him that all the boys play pretend shooting games at recess, shouting laser-like sounds as they chase each other.

We live in a country where SWAT teams shoot little puppies running away from them, innocent victims are assaulted and shot in their own homes by the police, and it’s all okay.  But if a little boy plays like a little boy is supposed to, he has “threatened” little girls.  Notice too the lack of discretion and wisdom on display by school administration.  This reminds me of a comment I made to a younger reader on this same kind of thing, from the perspective of graying hair and many years of wisdom.

You’ve told me what IS, rather than what SHOULD BE. I fully concur with the notion that intent is increasingly disappearing from American jurisprudence due to laws and somewhat [from] prosecutorial discretion. Nothing I’ve said denies this. And in fact, this law would have been yet another example of that lamentable fact, and one of the hundreds of reasons to oppose this bill.

That said, it isn’t disappearing completely, as there is still a difference between manslaughter and first degree murder, and there always will be. Where the secularists can make inroads to English common law, they do. Where they can’t because the people would revolt, they leave it alone.

I know very little about you, but I assume (you can correct me if I’m wrong) that you do not have children of advanced school age (and I have no idea whether you are married). If your children one day attend public schools (I home schooled mine for the last several years except for one), they will find this notion in spades in the school system. Let me tell you how it plays out.

The kids that know they aren’t attending college know the kids who intend to attend college. The school system has given up on the idea of finding facts, finding fault and finding intent. Hence, the kids who have no intention of attending college abuse the ones who intend to attend college. It happens this way, and hundreds of others.

Let’s say that the school lunch line of a five minute wait. The bad kids will break in line and even punch the good kids. The good kids take it, run away, and avoid conflict at all costs. They do this because they know that the principal will make no attempt whatsoever to find facts or intent if a fight breaks out. Fights means that a kid is defending himself, or even that he isn’t and sits in a corner getting the hell kicked out of him. When it’s finally broken up, both kids get suspended, it goes on record, and colleges don’t accept kids with records. End of story. The competition is too high to accept kids with records, regardless of the fact that it’s disputed. All such records are disputed by every student.

My boys could have beat the hell out of anyone who they fought, but one of them needed to attend a scholarly college to do what he does, and for him we simply planned classes to avoid the bad kids, sent him with his lunch, and prayed that he got out without being in a … ahem … “fight.” Daniel, my Marine, just beat the hell out of anyone who accosted him. It cannot be that way for everyone. The ones who needs to go to college behave differently. Daniel is in college now because of the Marines.

You see, smarts comes from books. Wisdom comes from age and experience. I have that. Been there, done that, got the tee shirt. And if you have children of advanced age one day, they will get the hell beaten out of them in school, or they will defend themselves and not go to college, or you will home school them. Welcome to fact-less, intent-less jurisprudence and lack of lawsuits against schools.

“He just kept saying it was against policy.”  Of course it was.  Everything is against policy for little boys.  They are the oppressors.