Soon showing a picture of a bullet will be illegal too. See them while you can!
MILL VALLEY / Physics teacher under fire for gun experiment / Parent’s complaint raises issue about legality of stunt — Now you can’t even teach physics in American High Schools if anti-gun nuts are in the neighborhood. Let’s find out who the parent was exactly.
Every year, physics teacher David Lapp brings his Korean War era M-1 carbine to school, fires a shot into a block of wood and instructs his students to calculate the velocity of the bullet.
It is a popular experiment at Mill Valley’s Tamalpais High School, where students are exposed to several unique stunts that Lapp performs in his five classes every year to illustrate inertia, velocity and other complex formulae.
Turns out, it also may be illegal.
It is a felony to bring any rifle, loaded or unloaded, onto a school campus without the written permission of the school district superintendent or his designee, according to Marin County District Attorney Ed Berberian.
“I’m hoping that this is not happening in Marin County,” said Berberian, who groaned when informed that it was. “If he just did this in an open classroom with a block of wood, there could be ricochets. That in itself would be a presumption of recklessness.”
The rifle demonstration would not even be an issue if an anonymous parent had not complained.
So now this teacher, for merely teaching physics, might become a felon. Only in America. And ricochet off a block of wood? Oh brother.
found by Rick Salsman
#18 Remember, you are reading the words of a lawyer – and a District Attorney, at that – who is talking on-the-record to a reporter.
What he said was: “If he just did this… ”
Also worth noting:
Possession of a firearm in a school zone can be okay’d by the superintendent [or equivalent]..
Discharging a firearm in a school zone can be okay’d by the superintendent [or equivalent]…
Not having that advance, written permission is what places the teacher in violation of the law.
I find it hard to believe that any teacher in California would be ignorant of the law that specifically prohibits anyone from bringing any kind of weapon into a school zone – for the last 11-years.
Hard to be surprised by anything that comes out of Marin County, which gave us the American Taliban. Shouldn’t they spend their time getting their other students to be able to calculate velocity too? How’s this work anyways? Do they calculate how far the wood was indented?
Pedro, the teacher has been doing this for years…he and the principal checked it out legally…. he has written permission from the principal, superintendent, etc, and has for years.
The school is an amazingly sturdy building…and I’d guess that they use the old ROTC rifle range (in the basement, with solid cement walls) that was also designed to be an AIR RAID SHELTER during the cold war. It’s not “classroom, classroom” but on campus.
I think that showing a kid what a gun really does, and the velocity is a great idea…..since few actually have any clue (in todays world) what the real physics is of ballistics. The tv and movies have it all wrong…people firing guns from those stupid stances, and people getting shot dead…without a LOT of flesh and pulverized organs flying…no. I’d say, physics can’t be overtaught in todays world.
….Now, what Tam High is REALLY known for is the origin of the phrase 420 meaning POT.
21. DA’s are just politicians with law degrees, prone to gassing on like any other pol with a mike in front of him.
there are two kinds of presumptions (1) permissive – the jury is told that if you find that Mr. X discharged a firearm, etc, you MAY find that he recklessly endangered, etc; and (2) mandatory. same, but they SHALL find that recklessness was proved. (1) is constitutional, (2) violates the presumption of innocence.
and yes, if he was going to do something as wacky as firing off a gun in his classroom, he was stupid for not getting permission.
The number of people “assuming” the guy is stupid and needs to be hanged is amazing. I am pro-gun control, but not anit-gun (just want to see a threshhold on what’s okay to own).
But I love the idea of experiential teaching. The guy is what people are yelling is missing from American education, but, because it involves a gun, it’s suddenly maximum stupid?
Try reading about the actual experiment (if you can tear yourself away from watching “MythBusters” doing the same stuff), and drop the self rightous assumption that the guy is too dumb to figure out basic safety, and look at what folks “learn” from this. And I’m really sure that’s not “I’m a gonna take me a gun to school and shoot me some blocks of wood, and then I’m going to go apeshit….”
Physics. One of the cores of economic development to keep the county alive.
Hey folks,
I HAD A TEACHER THAT BROUGHT A GUN TO SCHOOL EVERY YEAR.
They would take a few hundred kids out to the athletic field, and shoot some melons, pumpkins, and such. Being suburban city kids, most of us hadn’t ever seen what a bullet could do.
Sometimes, kids scoffed. They were offered a chance to go punch a pumpkin to prove their toughness. Nobody ever took the offer, probably because the punch wouldn’t be quite as impressive or effective as the bullet.
He retired, and within two years, the school experienced its first gun incident.
Think about that.
Personally…I think gun safety should be part of the curriculum and guess what that means? Guns at the school. I would guess that all of the supposed “liberal” bloggers (or most of them) who contribute to this Dvorak Uncensored effort might agree. Does that confuse the stereotyping issue or not?
The one thing I have to reiterate is that I can’t imagine we’ve heard the whole story on this. If the weapon is discharged in an underground firing range and appropriate hearing protection is worn, then the story becomes vastly different. At that point it’s more an issue of the letter of the law than any real concern for safety. The local school board can deal with the screamers on both sides.
If that level of precaution is not taken, then there’s an issue.
As usual with a story like this, there will be no follow-up, or if there is it will be largely ignored.
And indeed it does say an M-1 carbine, which has a far smaller discharge. I stand corrected. This is WAY SMALLER than my muzzler (heh).
Sag.
Can you gun lovers give up your gun fetish long enough to allow kids and parents to feel safe again in schools? Get a different hobby. Do you “have” to have a gun to feel safe? What are you so afraid of?
John, good luck getting your proposals passed, as Oakland schools wanted to ban guns for COPS coming on campus.
Seth, your comment doesn’t compute.
This is about using a gun for a physics experiment — it’s a particle accelerator. It’s not being used as a weapon, and it’s not being used to make anyone feel safe or threatened. It’s just an inexpensive way to show how to measure the collision of two objects.
Would you feel more safe if the projectile was shaped like a rocket or a baseball? Would you feel more safe if the thing sending the projectile was a black plastic box instead of a wooden stock?
In my school they dropped a junker car from a crane to show the effect of a 35 mph collision. Our physics teacher jumped on the opportunity to have us calculate how high they should lift it and how much force it would impart onto the earth on impact. This is fundamentally the same experiment but with a far less expensive price tag. I don’t think anyone construed the car demonstration as an encouragement to drive unsafely.
That being said, regardless of the method of acceleration, putting that much energy into that small an object is something that needs to be done in a well controlled environment. I would very much like to hear the details on the room this is done in.
Sag.
From the article:
It has recently been done with the full written consent of Principal Chris Holleran.
Although Bob Ferguson, the current superintendent of the Tamalpais Union High School District, was unaware of the experiment, both Lapp and Holleran said they believed the ballistic pendulum experiment was legal.
And, what is probably the key item:
He said he and the former Tamalpais High principal checked the legality of the experiment when he first started doing it around 1992 and determined that there were no laws against it.
The state law which makes what he did illegal was enacted 3-years after he checked the legality of his demonstration…
Unless they can prove recklessness, his only mistake is not performing an annual check for new/updated statues.
#22 — Best guess is that the block of wood is the base of a pendulum, and based upon the combined weight of the bullet and the block and how far it swings “up” (the angular change to the position of the pendulum) they can make a rough calculation of how much energy was contained in the shot. There’s loss due to heat and the like, and I would imagine that the pendulum dumps a bunch of energy into vibration and lateral motion, but that’s about the gist of it. We did a similar experiment with pendulums in cars to determine the g-force when you really stomped on the gas or the brake. It’s an excellent experiment, assuming no one gets shot or deafened of course.
Sag.