Serving Hard Time With Mom and Dad

A 4-year-old who took a loaded gun to his public preschool in a suburb of Oklahoma City has been suspended for a year. The boy didn’t threaten or injure anyone and apparently meant no harm. He had discovered the small two-shot .38-caliber pistol on a table next to his parents’ bed and, assuming it was a toy, put it in his backpack. A teacher at the preschool found it. Now, for his transgression, the lad gets to spend all of the next year in the full-time company of parents who are so stupid they thought nothing of leaving a loaded weapon where a child could pick it up. Many would see that as cruel and unusual punishment indeed.

Every day brings a new story of folly and tragedy involving guns and children. This one, fortunately, didn’t end in sorrow, though it could easily have done so. The pistol was loaded with hollow-point bullets, which flatten on impact and are especially lethal. Playing with the gun, the child could have killed himself, another child, a teacher. The little boy, now deprived by a mandatory suspension policy of the companionship of his schoolmates, was a victim, not a wrongdoer. The real villains are the thoughtless couple he calls Mommy and Daddy.