The only thing that will stop kids making finger guns is more good kids with finger guns.

My five year old got a week out of school suspension and made to go to the kids psych ward because she pretended to shoot someone on the playground as part of a game. The other kid narced on her and it turned into a big fucking thing.

Fuck this bullshit country.

The psych ward doctors said “this is the stupidest thing we’ve ever dealt with”

Ok, so now we’re just destroying the education of little kids who have imagination. That’s awesome.

Do these freaks really not remember what it was like to be a kid? Kids do crazy shit, it’s how we all learn about ourselves, our boundaries, our values. Punishing a kid for playing around like this will not help anyone, it will simply make it more likely that this kid acts out later because their sense of what’s socially acceptable and what’s not will be completely skewed by these absurd rules.

I played finger guns in school all the time (before active-shooter drills were a thing, to be fair), and it’s part of how I figured out that I hate guns and violence. Punishment first has never been effective, we need to trust ourselves and our kids a little more.

“What we’re really doing is sending a message that says ‘Hey, this is not a joke, this is not a joking matter, so don’t do this,’” state Sen. Jon Lundberg, a co-sponsor of the legislation, told a Chattanooga news station

Yeah guys! We're gonna start taking mass shootings super-seriously now! If you shoot adults and children and then commit suicide at a school in Tennessee, you better expect some serious consequences now, guys!

Wow, ok, gee, american will literally do anything and everything other than control and limit their gun sales.

Adults have the right to bear arms, but kids don't have the right to bear hands? Yup, we live in a dystopia..

School Administrators: "If only we could kick out the students we don't like, but the law states that every kid gets an education"

School shooting -> New law

"Hey, I know just how to selectively abuse this!"

The kid was angry, but you are only making it worse with this punishment. The appropriate thing to do would be to send him to a competent guidance counselor and work through his feelings then send him on a path forward. Not really even a "punishment " but a correction. Before reading what happened I would have said that even that would be too much, but having read it, I don't think it would hurt to counsel him though his feelings. I doubt Tennessee has many competent guidance counselors though.

When I was kid, we regularly played partisans vs nazis and cowboys vs indians, "shooting" each other with home made "guns". Nobody said anything ever... Happier times...

Cause 10 year Olds are known to be up on current laws and to think about the consequences of thier actions when they are mad, or really anytime.

Wow, sounds like the idea of "At Will" for the workplace has spread elsewhere. Making a vague generic rule that can be used to get rid of anyone you feel is a problem. I wonder how many "messages" will have to be sent to keep these kids in line from doing anything kid-related.

I think the 2nd Amendment should cover this.

Let the kids learn to use weapons before their old enough to walk, but don't you fucking DARE use a finger gun 👉

Go play insert any game with guns.

the real solution is for the parents to get all the kids to make finger guns

and when that happens, sue the school for not taking the exact same action

To kids who hate school, being able to not go for a year might be a reward.

🎵“I’m gonna finger bang, bang you every night”🎶

Not the most effective law but it’s interesting to see a state like Tennessee implementing any laws against gun violence in schools.

One year seems too long.

As much as I hate to admit it, I understand zero tolerance policies. But a fucking year? There's got to be some kind of sliding scale based on the offense. Draw a picture of a gun, 3 days. Finger guns, ok, a week. Toy gun, month. Real gun, jail.

I went to school in the '90s. My friend and I thought the Game Boy game Final Fantasy Legend II was funny in the way that you fought against terrorists, dinosaurs, ghosts, robots, and germs, using magic and medieval-fantasy-trope weapons alongside muskets, SMGs, chainsaws, and even nukes! (Game devs and translators had to get creative with only seven letters and an item type symbol for the item names, to fit in the tiny amount of memory available.)

Our drawings inspired by this were often battle scenes with the likes of Hussein, Hitler, and Mussolini being shot, impaled, nuked, and/or decapitated by chainsaw. We must have drawn a thousand guns.

We turned out OK.