A high school senior went to a NY reenactment of the battle of chancellorsville recently, carrying with him a blue yankee uniform and a musket. For those not firmiliar with civil war era differences, allow me to point them out:

Modern terrorists and criminals use guns which either have a revolving cylinder or a clip because obviously they are fast and easy to load, the same reason responsible citizens use them for respectable purposes. I carry a wheel gun. The shells are metal cased and slip right in and do not take long to work.

Read on and you will find the true absurdity of this situation:

The model 1861 Springfield rifle is a single shot weapon which must go through a process to be fired. It is the standard gun used in civil war era activities. You must pour in black powder, place a ball and push it home with a ramrod, then fit a percussion cap to the ignition point. The rifle has a rather unimpressive accurace by modern standards, loses much volocity in the first few hundred feet, and compared to modern guns is not extremely impressive, although it can take down large game, or a man, one shot at a time. It takes roughly twenty seconds to load, if you are good.

Only an idiot could consider this a serious threat to the public.

The young reenactor put his gear in his car and forgot about it (this is actually a big mistake, but did not need to be dealt with so harshly). He went to school the next day and did not give it much thought.

Evidently a security guard (oh that’s right, he was just doing his job!) saw the gear and rather than having the common sense to realize that (A) this weapon was owned by a student who was not present with it due to being in class and posing no threat to even a bug, (B) this is hardly a gun a thug would even respect, and (C) the appropriate action would be to reprimand the student for breaking a rule and make him take it home at worst.

Instead the security guard contacts the police who show up, cuff the student and haul him off to jail.

Give me a break. The student was performing a historical reenactment for which he should be commended in an age when most students view history with disdain and boredom, and his school should have known better than to treat a regular kid with such contempt. On top of that he will now have a permanent record for carrying a weapon to school.

I must applaud the justice system for this one. And to think we had a student take a civil war pistol to school for show and tell once!