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“I don’t think, in today’s society, you can ever call it a false alarm.”

Elmont Memorial High School Principal John Capozzi

On Tuesday, Long Island’s Elmont Memorial High School was in lockdown all day for no good reason.

Someone called 911 early that morning, reporting … nothing.

There was no “gun,” or even a “fake gun,” as a misleading Daily News headline put it. There was an obvious toy gun, which a hysterical individual called in as a toy gun. A “lime green toy gun,” carried by a “suspicious man.”

Why would someone call 911 upon seeing a Nerf gun?

The toy gun was reportedly painted green and yellow or orange, identifying it as a toy gun. (Some reports have the caller saying she saw a “green gun,” and not identifying it as a toy, but anyone who deals with either real or toy guns knows that real guns are not painted in pastel colors.)

Why would someone call a teenager carrying a toy gun into a school a “suspicious man”? What is suspicious about carrying a Nerf gun into a school building?

Thus, a person saw something perfectly normal, yet called 911. The 911 operator heard something perfectly normal, yet involved her bosses. The bosses heard something perfectly normal, yet they dispatched a SWAT team to the school, and called school officials, to tell them to terrify the kids by acting as if a murderous maniac were walking the halls, armed to the teeth. The school officials called the media, in order to maximize the hysteria. And the media did their job of misleading the public.

The idiot who called 911 should be identified and publicly shamed, along with everyone up the line, who perpetuated the hysteria. That would include Daily News reporters Vera Chinese and Victoria Cavaliere, NBC news reader Darlene Rodriguez, Elmont Memorial High School Principal John Capozzi, and many others.

When I was a kid, all boys played with toy pistols and rifles that looked like the real McCoy. Who wants to play with weapons that don’t look at all believable? And yet, you never heard of people getting held up with toy guns, let alone people getting hysterical about merely seeing kids with toy guns.

But that was before America was enriched by “diversity,” and other forms of infantile behavior exhibited by adults that were not the products of diversity. (Human beings never needed “diversity” to act childishly crazy; we’ve always had more than enough madness to go around, thank you very much.)

All such forms of madness find rich sources of nutrients in schools and school-like institutions. During the 1980s, various parents who were both insane and evil— these are not mutually exclusive categories—joined with opportunistic child sex abuse “experts” and prosecutors to lead a nationwide witch hunt against innocent, dedicated educators, who were railroaded into prison for crimes that had never been committed. To my knowledge, none of the false accusers, “experts,” or prosecutors was ever punished.

This scam of claiming to care about “the children” (like the current gun confiscation crusade against law-abiding whites of the dictator calling himself “Barack Obama”) proved a great way to aggrandize unlawful power and terrorize decent people, because the institutions controlling kids had already spent generations amassing such power, at the expense of innocent adults’ legal rights. Unless someone was very rich, once he was targeted, it was impossible to withstand the “child abuse” juggernaut.

In 2005, I wrote about a fake child molester panic in my neighborhood caused by a hysterical little black girl and a bunch of white adults, the latter of whom all should have known better. Again, much opportunism was at work.

More opportunism and bullying: Since the 1990s, schools across the country, under cover of “zero tolerance” (zero tolerance of what?) policies have been bullying little boys as young as five by suspending them for using their hands as make-believe guns and “shooting” classmates.

Gun hysteria is no less based in opportunism, and has the same effect as other forms of hysteria: The cover story (e.g., it’s “for the children”) is used as a pretext to eliminate fundamental distinctions between real and imaginary “incidents,” illegally repeal adults’ constitutional and other legal rights, and terrorize the innocent. Instead of protecting the official beneficiaries, this leads to full-time confusion, with people of all ages overreacting to non-threats, and then being caught off-guard, due to the confusion and/or hysteria-fatigue, when a real incident occurs.

Diversity also played a role in this. In New York and elsewhere, at some point, black felons took to robbing people with realistic-looking guns. Indeed, sometime during the late 1990s, in a black neighborhood in Brooklyn, a resident called 911 because a black guy was riding a bicycle carrying a “machine gun.” When the cops approached him and ordered him to put down the “gun,” he refused to comply, and they shot him to death.

The “machine gun” proved to be a toy, but the cops had no way of knowing this, and if they had used insufficient force, cops would have been killed down the line, when they held back too long. The same community that had been terrified of the machine gun, now naturally accused the cops of racism, for shooting the idiot.

So, New York State passed a law requiring that all toy guns be made in ridiculous, pastel colors more appropriate to New York City’s gay Halloween Parade than to playing soldier or cops-and-robbers. But it didn’t help, because there is no cure for gun, or now, toy gun hysteria.

Last June, my son’s wonderful social studies/English teacher was retiring, and wanted to do something completely different. The lady was, of course, a socialist, but owing to having been born just after The War, was too old to have learned to associate her socialist ideology with contemporary toy gun hysteria. And so, she assigned her charges to put on a military maneuver, replete with all sorts of realistic toy guns and rifles. (By the way, the list she gave my son cost a fortune!)

None of the weapons the teacher wanted—e.g., toy M-16s—existed. She wanted stuff similar to what my friend, Matthew Bashover and me used to shoot each other with in Long Beach, Long Island, not far from Elmont. (Except that we played with toy rifles made of wood and metal, not plastic!) Unbeknownst to the teacher, that stuff had long ago been decreed illegal by the New York State legislature. Heck, while trying to find the requisite toys, I learned that the feds forbid even sending that sort of stuff across state lines.

I had to settle for overpriced, pastel-colored Nerf toys.

Today, after the phony lockdown, accompanied by SWAT teams, was over, Elmont Memorial High School Principal John Capozzi said, “I don’t think, in today’s society, you can ever call it a false alarm.”

If Principal Capozzi is correct, then I would be perfectly justified in calling 911 for an ambulance and the police, if my son shot me with a Nerf round, and people would be justified in pulling fire alarms without smelling any smoke, or seeing any fire.

After all, there are no false alarms.

The man is a moral imbecile. He caused hysteria among his students, and then lied about it. Unfortunately, he is also typical of today's alleged educators.

Students at Elmont Memorial High School will learn all the wrong lessons from this incident. They will be unable to distinguish between emergencies and normal conditions, or to resolutely deal with real crises. For this, they have Principal Capozzi, the Nassau County Police Department, and the idiot who called 911 to thank.

[Previously on this “incident,” at WEJB/NSU:

“Elmont Memorial High School is on Lockdown, as NBC News Reader Darlene Rodriguez Fights Meltdown”;

“Update on Elmont Memorial High School Lockdown”; and

“More on the Elmont Memorial High School Lockdown (10:32 a.m.).”]

Nicholas Stix
Nicholas Stix, Uncensored

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Biography - Nicholas Stix

Award-winning, New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix founded A Different Drummer magazine (1989-93). Stix has written for Die Suedwest Presse, New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Middle American News, Toogood Reports, Insight, Chronicles, the American Enterprise, Campus Reports, VDARE, the Weekly Standard, Front Page Magazine, Ideas on Liberty, National Review Online and the Illinois Leader. His column also appears at Men's News Daily, MichNews, Intellectual Conservative, Enter Stage Right and OpinioNet. Stix has studied at colleges and universities on two continents, and earned a couple of sheepskins, but he asks that the reader not hold that against him. His day jobs have included washing pots, building Daimler-Benzes on the assembly-line, tackling shoplifters and teaching college, but his favorite job was changing his son's diapers.

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