Where we are in 2013 America

Mike at Cold Fury releases some of his writing fury at a Virginia neighbor who called the police to report two boys who were shooting airsoft guns at a target attached to a tree on one of the boys' front yard (a net was attached to the tree in back of the target to catch any errant plastic pellets). In one of his milder expressions of fury, Mike writes,

Instead of seeking professional help for her own mental-health issues, she sics the gendarmerie on a few mildly rowdy boys to deal with them for her instead.

When I was a mere stripling, some kids sometimes brought rifles to school because they were going squirrel hunting after class. It was just kind of expected that sometime around his ninth or tenth birthday, Dad was going to take Sonnyboy out in the backyard or some other place with a dirt-hill backstop and teach him how to shoot the trusty old family .22 and handle it properly. Mine did.

Now, the mere sight of a handful of teenagers playing with pellet guns in their own yard is enough to get them booted out of school, on the say-so of some juiceless freak cowering behind the curtains peeping out her front window to make sure nothing untoward is going on, phone in hand, the first two digits of 9-1-1 already dialed so she can SPRING INTO ACTION at the first sight of someone having some sort of fun that scares her or that she otherwise doesn’t approve of.

Mike reminds us that this occurred in Virginia, the "once noble state that produced George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Robert E. Lee."

Although they were not on school property, the "union protected" school administrator suspended the boys from school until June, 2014.