Compassion in the Case of the Telfair Kid

When I was in the first or second grade, I envied a boy who lived around the block. We were friends and classmates and, in our cookie-cutter neighborhood, his home was the mirror image of my own. I looked up to John because he had something I did not. He had a BB gun.

Little boys love guns. John would set up a tin can on a bench against the exterior wall of the garage. Then he’d stretch out on the grass like one of my little brown plastic Army men and plink away. He was a good shot. Then he let me try. I missed and missed.

At home I begged and pleaded for a BB gun, like the kind advertised in Boy’s Life. Mom and Dad couldn’t be persuaded. But somewhere along the line I’d been told that if I really, truly needed something, there was a special thing I could do. So that night, I did it. I prayed for God to please give me a BB gun.

This was, I realized, a long shot. But I really, truly needed that gun.

*

It can’t be hard for anyone who was ever a little boy, or probably anyone who was a little girl, to have empathy for the 7-year-old gunslinger of Pacoima’s Telfair Avenue Elementary School. He’s the littlest desperado yet rounded up under the Los Angeles Unified School District’s hard-line policy intended to keep guns off school grounds. Obviously, this is a worthy goal. For the school board, the question Tuesday was whether to expel a 7-year-old.

One can only imagine the wonder and awe the second-grader felt after his 10-year-old sister found the 9-millimeter handgun--unloaded, fortunately--in a closed box on the floor of a closet, beneath a pile of clothes. Not unlike a student bringing something to class for show and tell, he decided to share the exciting discovery with friends.

Some classmates told, and soon the law caught up with the Telfair Kid. He was suspended for five days and transferred to another school. Stern warnings were issued to the boy and his parents. In a more innocent time, this would have seemed adequate. But in these get-tough days, the LAUSD’s strict “zero tolerance” policy, a three-member expulsion review committee had no choice but to recommend that the Telfair Kid get the boot. It’s one strike and you’re out.

These days, expulsion is popular. Hector Madrigal, director of the LAUSD’s student disciplinary proceedings, says there are basically two types. Outright expulsions remove the students from the school system for the current and following semesters, after which a reinstatement is possible, but not assured. Then there are probationary expulsions, which involve suspensions and transfers. Since 1989, the district has enforced the stricter measure on more than 800 students, with guns figuring in “the vast majority,” Madrigal said.

The crackdown on guns was escalated during this period, prompted by the 1993 deaths of teen-age boys at Reseda High and Fairfax High. Last year, a sobbing 10-year-old boy standing outside 49th Street Elementary School committed suicide with a .380 semiautomatic handgun. It was reported that he may have been distraught over the one-day suspension he had received from a teacher for using profanity.

Fears over their children’s safety is a central reason many parents remove their kids from public schools. But on April 1, 1992, at a church-sponsored elementary school in South-Central Los Angeles where students were required to wear neat blue uniforms, a 12-year-old girl was critically wounded by a 10-year-old boy.

Sheriff’s investigators said the shooting was accidental. The boy, it was said, brought the gun to school as an April Fool’s prank. He thought he knew how to handle the gun from watching television.

Parents shouldn’t need any more reminders about the need to carefully store guns and keep them unloaded. But this week, as the school board considered the Telfair case, Sylmar High students mourned 14-year-old Chris Mitchell, who was ditching school with some friends when a 16-year-old pal shot him dead, evidently by accident.

Young people are drawn to guns like moths to flame. Guns are dangerous, and danger is exciting. But the primary reason students say they carry firearms is for self-defense.

Most aren’t gang members, Madrigal says. Rather, they are girls who fear leering men and boys who fear bullies. And fear is the reason parents usually have guns in the first place.

*

Faced with the case of the Telfair Kid, the school board blinked. After emotional pleas from the boy’s parents, the board decided, by a 4-3 vote, that the probationary expulsion was sufficient. Opponents talked of how the exception would send the “zero tolerance” policy down “a very slippery slope,” but the opinion here is the majority was right--that, in this case, a crackdown on guns threatened to become a crackdown on innocence.

And innocence needs protection too.