In the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, and all the others popping up since then, there is no room for lack of judgment. Still, people don't need to overreact either. The Daily Caller reports on Thursday, Jan. 3, 2013, that a Washington, D.C. family has retained legal counsel after their six-year-old son was suspended from school for making a gun gesture, pointing at another student, and saying "pow."
The young boy is a student at Roscoe R. Nix Elementary School in Silver Spring, Maryland. He made the universal gesture of a gun with his thumb and forefinger while playing with friends. This incident came a week after Adam Lanza killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook in Newtown, Connecticut.
SEE: Adam Lanza's possible motive in Sandy Hook shooting
With this gesture, the parents of the boy got a letter stating that he would be suspended for one day and it would be served on Jan. 2, 2013. According to WRC-TV, this was the first day that students were set to return to school from winter break.
An attorney, Robin Ficker, representing the family, states that the school overreacted to the gesture. Ficker also insists that the boy is too young to comprehend the significance of his actions in conjunction with Sandy Hook.
"What they’re doing is looking at the worst possible interpretation of a young, naive six-year-old," Ficker added, according to the Washington Examiner.
Ficker went on to say that the school didn't even discuss the situation with the boy's mother and went about it all wrong.
"They could have called the mother in. They didn’t do that," Ficker told the Examiner. "They just said, 'You’re suspended.' Five years from now, when someone in to Montgomery County looks at his permanent record, they're going to see that he threatened to shoot another student."
The school said in the letter that the boy had been spoken to already about a similar incident. Ficker though says that the parents were never notified of any prior issues or events with their son and that the school won't say what the "similar incident" is.
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