Police and School Officials All Spread False Alarm: Toy Gun Hysteria Caused Lockdown at Elmont Memorial High School; School is Now a Toy Gun-Free Zone

 

Elmont Memorial High School 

Above and below: Due to reckless behavior by the authorities, a whole school of kids missed out on a day's classes in sex ed, self-esteem ed, multicultural sensitivity, grammar-free English, conflict non-resolution, revisionist social studies and non-competitive sports. On second thought, maybe it ewasn't such a bad day. And the school employees and cops all got paid, which is all that really matters, anyway!

[Previously on this “incident” today, at WEJB/NSU:

“Elmont Memorial High School is on Lockdown, as NBC News Reader Darlene Rodriguez Fights Meltdown”;

“Update on Elmont Memorial High School Lockdown”; and

“More on the Elmont Memorial High School Lockdown (10:32 a.m.).”]

“I don’t think, in today’s society, you can ever call it a false alarm.”
Elmont Memorial High School Principal John Capizzi

SWAT team on truck in front of school 

Today, Long Island’s Elmont Memorial High School was in lockdown all day for no good reason.

Someone called 911 early this morning, reporting … nothing.

There was no “gun,” or even a “fake gun,” as a misleading Daily News headline put it. There was an obvious toy gun, which a hysterical individual called in as a toy gun. A “lime green toy gun,” carried by a “suspicious man.”

Why would someone call 911 upon seeing a Nerf gun?

The “gun” was painted green and orange (or green and yellow), identifying it as a toy gun.

Why would someone call a teenager carrying toy gun into a school a “suspicious man”? What is suspicious about carrying a toy gun into a school building?

Thus, a person saw something perfectly normal, yet called 911. The 911 operator heard something perfectly normal, yet involved her bosses. The bosses heard something perfectly normal, yet they dispatched a SWAT team to the school, and called school officials, to tell them to terrify the kids by acting as if a murderous maniac were walking the halls, armed to the teeth.

The idiot who called 911 should be identified and publicly shamed, along with everyone up the line, who perpetuated the hysteria.

Nassau County PD cop cars all over school property 

When I was a kid, all boys played with pistols and rifles that looked like the real McCoy. Who wants to play with weapons that don’t look at all believable? And yet, you never heard of people getting held up with toy guns, let alone people getting hysterical about merely seeing kids with toy guns.

But that was before America was enriched by “diversity,” its attendant infantilism, and other forms of infantile behavior exhibited by adults that were not the products of diversity. (Human beings never needed “diversity” to act childishly crazy; we’ve always had more than enough madness to go around, thank you very much.)

All such forms of madness find rich sources of nutrients in schools and school-like institutions. During the 1980s, various parents who were both insane and evil (these are not mutually exclusive categories) joined with opportunistic child sex abuse “experts” and prosecutors to lead a nationwide witch hunt against innocent, dedicated educators, who were railroaded into prison for crimes that had never been committed. To my knowledge, none of the false accusers, “experts,” or prosecutors was ever punished.

This scam of claiming to care about “the children” proved a great way to aggrandize power and terrorize decent people, because the institutions with power over kids had already spent generations amassing such power, at the expense of adults’ legal rights. Unless someone was very rich, once he was targeted, it was impossible to withstand the “child abuse” juggernaut.

In 2005, I wrote about a fake child molester panic in my neighborhood caused by a hysterical little black girl and a bunch of white adults, the latter of whom all should have known better. Again, much opportunism was at work.

More opportunism and bullying: Since the 1990s, schools across the country, under cover of “zero tolerance” (zero tolerance of what?) policies have been bullying little boys as young as five by suspending them for using their hands as make-believe guns and “shooting” classmates.

Gun hysteria is no less based in opportunism, and has the same effect as other forms of hysteria: The cover story (e.g., it’s “for the children”) is used as a pretext to eliminate fundamental distinctions between real and imaginary “incidents,” and terrorize the innocent. Instead of protecting the official beneficiaries, this leads to full-time confusion, with people of all ages overreacting to non-threats, and then being caught off-guard, due to confusion and/or hysteria-fatigue, when a real incident occurs.

Diversity also played a role in this. In New York and elsewhere, at some point, black felons took to robbing people with realistic-looking guns. Indeed, sometime during the late 1990s, in a black neighborhood in Brooklyn, a resident called 911 because a black guy was riding a bicycle carrying a “machine gun.” When the cops approached him and ordered him to put down the “gun,” he refused to comply, and they shot him to death.
It proved to be a toy, but the cops had no way of knowing this, and if they had used insufficient force, cops would have been killed down the line, when they held back too long. The same community that had been terrified of the machine gun, now naturally accused the cops of racism, for shooting the idiot.

So, New York State passed a law requiring that all toy guns be made in ridiculous, pastel colors more appropriate New York City’s gay Halloween Parade than to playing soldier or cops-and-robbers. But it didn’t help, because there is no cure for gun, or now, toy gun hysteria.

Last June, my son’s wonderful social studies/English teacher was retiring, and wanted to do something completely different. The lady was, of course, a socialist, but owing to having been born just after The War, was too old to have learned to associate her socialist ideology with contemporary toy gun hysteria. And so, she assigned her charges to put on a military maneuver, replete with all sorts of realistic toy guns and rifles. (By the way, the list she gave my son cost a fortune!)

None of the weapons the teacher wanted—e.g., toy M-16s—existed. She wanted stuff similar to what my neighbor, Matthew Bashover and I used to shoot each other with. (Except that we played with toy rifles made of wood and metal, not plastic!)Unbeknownst to her, that stuff had long ago been decreed illegal by the New York State legislature. Heck, while trying to find the requisite toys, I learned that the feds forbid even sending that sort of stuff across state lines.

I had to settle for overpriced, pastel-colored Nerf toys.

Today, after the phony lockdown, accompanied by SWAT teams, was over, Elmont Memorial High School Principal John Capizzi said, “I don’t think, in today’s society, you can ever call it a false alarm.”

Elmont: Hysterical Hispanic female 

If Principal Capizzi is correct, then I would be perfectly justified in calling 911 for an ambulance and the police, if my son shot me with a Nerf round, and people would be justified in pulling fire alarms without seeing any smoke or fire.

After all, there are no false alarms.

The man is a moral imbecile. Unfortunately, he is also typical of today's alleged educators. Students at Elmont Memorial High School will learn all the wrong lessons from this incident. They will be unable to distinguish between the crisis and the norm, or to resolutely deal with real crises. For this, they have Principal Capizzi, the Nassau County Police Department, and the idiot who called 911 to thank.

 

 

Toy gun sparks school lockdown on Long Island
Updated at 05:15 P.M. today
WABC Eyewitness News

ELMONT (WABC) -- Reports of a suspicious person with a lime grenn [sic] gun on school grounds prompted a lockdown at Elmont Memorial High School, but police say the gun was a toy. [N.S.: That was surely lime green.]

Authorities said they recelved a 911 call around 7:30 a.m. about a teen with a back pack possibly carrying a lime green gun. Elmont Memorial High School went into lockdown for several hours.

Officers, including a SWAT team, searched three floors, room by room, before determining the school was safe. The lockdown was lifted shortly before 1 p.m.

But parents concerned over last month's mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school that left 20 first-graders and six educators dead raced to the scene to be reunited with their children. A line of about 50 or more parents formed outside the school.

More: Follow us @EyewitnessNYC

"This is really scary," said Norman Spencer, who arrived at the school on the New York City border to pick up his son Darien. "We've seen numerous reports regarding issues like this, but when it happens here, it touches home."

Darien Spencer said an announcement came over the public address system that the school was in lockdown, and students remained calm throughout the incident.

"At no time were any of your children in danger," Principal John Capozzi told the parents. "All your children are safe."

[The man had just spent most of the school day acting as if the children were all very much in danger.]

After an extensive search of the entire building, police found a toy lime green and yellow lever action Nerf gun in a student locker that fit the description of the original call. There were no arrests. [Why would you even say, “There were no arrests”? Why would there be any arrests?] The lockdown was lifted and all students and staff members are safe and secure.

The toy gun was confiscated by school officials and will be returned to the parents.

[Why would a Nerf gun be confiscated from a student?]