Physics teacher under fire for gun experiment

[PHOnos]

San Francisco Chronicle

MILL VALLEY

Physics teacher under fire for gun experiment
Parent's complaint raises issue about legality of stunt

- Peter Fimrite, Chronicle Staff Writer
Thursday, May 25, 2006


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.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...AGO0J1C5O18.DTL

[ranchwife]

I admire the guy for trying to do interesting demonstrations and labs in his class, but come on. It is against the law to have a firearm and ammunition on school grounds - let alone to fire it INSIDE the classroom!!! AAAAHHHHHH! It is stupid stuff like this that give people that carry guns and educators a bad name. I have to admit, I would be a little concerned about this whole thing also. I was always taught that guns are to be unloaded in a building and definately not fired. My goodness!

[Farallon]

I took High School physics in the 70s, my instructor used a wood block and a .22 caliber rifle. When I took college physics, many of my classmates saw the same demonstration.

Things have changed, I used to hunt before and after school with a few classmates, during the winter, a biology teacher used to store our gear (including shotguns) and ducks in his store room.

[luvthegsp]

What an idiot!!! It is idiots like this that make the rest of us law abiding gun owners suffer......

[PHOnos]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (ranchwife @ May 25 2006, 07:36 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div>

I admire the guy for trying to do interesting demonstrations and labs in his class, but come on. It is against the law to have a firearm and ammunition on school grounds - let alone to fire it INSIDE the classroom!!! AAAAHHHHHH! It is stupid stuff like this that give people that carry guns and educators a bad name. I have to admit, I would be a little concerned about this whole thing also. I was always taught that guns are to be unloaded in a building and definately not fired. My goodness! [/b]

I use to clean my shotguns in the my Engineering Laboratory at U.S. Divers.

The guys at a Surviair facility on Chesapeake Bay in Maryland use to have a duck blind behind the parking lot and use it at lunchtime.

&#39;Course this was 20 years ago.

[Common Sense]

After I started teaching we use to have a "mountain man" come to our school. He would go to each of the classrooms and show hides, traps, guns, knives... All his firearms were black powder. He showed the kids how to load them and used just a little bit of old rag for wadding, and then "fired" them inside the room (without a bullet). The smoke stayed for a couple of days. He was kind of intertaining and spoke of the three evils of modern life: tobacco, alcohol, and drugs.

[Speckmisser]

Just a note... the guy had the approval of his supervisor/principal and performed this demonstration every year. They were both operating under the impression that they were meeting the requirements of the law. He wasn&#39;t just some gun-happy renegade, despite the best efforts of the uninformed public and media to make him seem that way.

As far as safety and responsibility, everything is calculated and he already knows the outcome. He&#39;s described the safety measures he takes with the students. Risk is minimized.

Actually, given the popularity of BS shows like CSI, this "stunt" is a great way to generate interest in the class and show practical application of scientific principles.

Bottom line, this is rabble being raised by some pea-brained parent (whose complaint is never even directly addressed in the SFGate article) and a bunch of sensationalist "experts" with anti-gun agendas like the guy from the "National Emergency Assistance Team" who said: <div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div>

"What&#39;s the message we are giving bringing a loaded gun into a public setting and firing it off. It&#39;s a terrible model to project on students."[/b]

I&#39;m sorry.. but to me the message is that, "this is physics... this is how it works." If I had to really stretch, I suppose there&#39;s a message about guns too. It would be, "Guns aren&#39;t the pure manifestation of evil, they&#39;re just tools and we can learn from how they operate."

I think back on some of the science demonstrations I witnessed in my school days. Imploding gas cans, floating balls of flame, the actions of strong acids and caustics, and easy access to deadly poisons... yes all, right there in the old schoolhouse. I&#39;m agog at the range of dangerous situations those teachers exposed me to!

And heck, that&#39;s just the physical manifestation of modern education... what about that mind-altering stuff they fed us in Civics, American and World History, and... oh lord protect us all... LITERATURE! That&#39;s right, we&#39;re given role models who enslaved other men. We&#39;re given the recipe for insurgency and rebellion. We&#39;re taught about murderers posing as heroes, and heroes cast as murderers. Guns? Oh, the whole history of the world is based in violent upheaval. We&#39;re taught that the pen is mightier than the sword, and then we&#39;re taught to wield it!

I have an idea. How about we disassemble our educational system? Tear down the schools. Distribute a videotape or DVD containing 12 years of white noise to every household. At the end, provide a multiple choice test with the answers on the back, along with a printable "diploma". When you&#39;re done with the tape, just print your completion document and call it good.

Don&#39;t let the kids touch anything, and don&#39;t let anything touch them. Teachers can&#39;t be trusted. Administrators can&#39;t be trusted. Other students can&#39;t be trusted. School is a dangerous, scary place where you might catch chicken pox or get shot in the face ... one or the other. It&#39;s all the same to us concerned parents.

[Drayton]

Thank you Speckmisser.

You saved me a whole bunch of typing!



I loved physics in high school. Never fired guns but had lots of fun.

[Saycheese]

Speckmisser for President!

[cavey]

What you said Speckmisser !

And we wonder why kids in the US are falling behind the rest of the world. When you put limits on teacher creativity and restrict reasonable teaching methods, more often than not you just limit student learning.

Alternatively, maybe we could just use one way, distance learning; plop your kids in front of the TV at home and have the teacher piped in... Sort of like Sesame Street on steroids -- that way the kids would be really safe, no dangerous interaction - no hands on realism, no creative thinking, no pushing the learning envelope - yep, teach them in a shoebox.
After all kids are the future, why send them out with anything more than the fundamental basics.....

[ranchwife]

You guys really, honestly don&#39;t have a problem with a person breaking the law and bringing a gun to school, even if it is for a demonstration? Come on - it is against the law to have a gun or ammunition on school grounds!! There is no getting around it, unless you are an officer of the peace. Teachers can&#39;t even have weapons in their vehicles if they are parked on school grounds. Our district lawyers would dirty their pants if anyone in our dictrict were stupid enough to do that. I teach 8th grade physical science and I darn well know that there are ways to do the same experiment without bringing a gun to class and shooting it IN class.

If I were to bring a gun into class, most of my students would be okay with it and have respect for a weapon, but then there are the rest of my kids who I simply don&#39;t trust. I would be terrified that one of the kids would somehow obtain the weapon from me and use it while in school - that possibility it simply too real. I teach in a nice school - the worst violence we have here is the occasional fight. But there are many students that I, almost daily, look for heavy objects in their pants or sweatshirt pockets - like the angry 7th grader who talks about his derringer all the time. Being a teacher in a public school, even a small one like ours in remote NE california, is scarry considering how many students have access to weapons. The last thing I would want to do is to bring a weapon, and ammunition, into school. Even if I took all the precautions to ensure that everyone is safe, there is still the possibility that a kid could obtain it and use it to turn my classroom into a Columbine, or Springfield, OR. Come on guys, do you really want to put your child in that position? Is it worth it for a few calculations?

I guess I look at this issue as a teacher in a public school, and as a parent. In both positions, there is no way I see this experiment as safe. There are too many variables that can go wrong.

[BelchFire]

I have to agree with Ranchwife about this one. Speck, I see your point and cavey&#39;s, (and they&#39;re well taken) but it&#39;s not the issue of students and guns, it&#39;s the issue of a gun IN A SCHOOL. If he must do this, field trip the students to a local shooting range, and let them learn more than physics. They can learn firearms safety if only from observance. But to bring a gun to school AND THEN SET IT OFF IN THE BUILDING?!?! If I did the experiment for my own satisfaction, I sure wouldn&#39;t do it in a building; I was taught better than that. This guy must be an absolute loon-job. And the principle? Probably worse.

We&#39;ve had the "mountain man" issue here with black powder guns on display without even bringing powder. The principle went k-nuts just knowing it was on his grounds. If this guys must keep up with his experiment, by all means do, but show some safety sense, and do it on a shooting range. Guns and schools DO NOT MIX.

[ranchwife]

Thank Belchfire! A trip to the gun range would be a good way to get the gun out of the school.

[Tree Doc]

Ahhh yes, the reaches of San Francisco mentality stretch out....just a litle bit further again.

Even on to this forum.

[cavey]

Remember archery class in school?.... ever blow anything up in chemistry class?... (heck, not only did we bring our own bows to school and stow them in our lockers, but we made crossbows in shop class as projects)...... The reality is that life is full of dangers and adversities.... but that is another topic;

Here we are talking about an experiment, an experiment in a physics class. We are not talking about the whole sale distribution of firearms to students in the school. We are talking about an experiment that demonstrates real world physics in a way that is not the typical boring stuff they try to pull by using the "instead" of stuff to supplement learning... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz


Oh sure, someone might get a hold of the gun, and heck the physics class might just turn rogue, steal the gun and take out an English class or two.... but come on,

We are so fearful of what might happen that we have stopped teaching our kids. That gun poses much less of a danger than what any kid "could" bring in from home, given the nature of today’s parents and their children. At least in this case the gun is a known and I would imagine guarded item while in the school.

That experiment is just the kind of stuff that gets kids fired up about physics.

I may be off base here but from what know about bows and arrows they too are considered firearms and there are exceptions for those in schools, I would surely think given the right channels the same would be true for a physics experiment such as this one.

More power to a school system that will not be afraid of the big bad wolf.... and will step up and creatively teach!

[larrysogla]

That teach is in a tight spot given the ZERO TOLERANCE policy in school grounds regarding firearms. I hope he has a GOOD LAWYER. &#39;Nuff said.

[ranchwife]

It is against the law to have a weapon and/or ammunition on school grounds - period.

[Speckmisser]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div>

You guys really, honestly don&#39;t have a problem with a person breaking the law and bringing a gun to school, even if it is for a demonstration?[/b]

Ranchwife, while of course I have a problem with breaking the law, I don&#39;t have ANY problem with a responsible adult bringing a gun to school... nor do I have any problem with the experiment as it&#39;s been described. But I&#39;ve already gone on about my perspective there, and no point repeating the whole thing.

I DO have a MUCH larger problem with these foolish zero-tolerance laws that amount to nothing more than the legislative branch taking control away from the judicial. These laws don&#39;t serve to make anyone safer, or to remove any weapons from the schools except the tiny handful of legitimate hunters who&#39;d like to get in an hour or two before and after work. As you&#39;ve shown in your own post, you still have to be on the lookout for "heavy objects" in the kids pockets and under their shirts. Keeping a physics teacher from performing an innovative demonstration isn&#39;t going to keep your 17-year-old J.W. Gacy Jr. from packing his derringer if he should choose to do so.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div>

It is against the law to have a weapon and/or ammunition on school grounds - period.[/b]

First off, there is no "period" on the prohibition of guns and ammo at school. The requirement is that it must be approved in writing by the administrator. The question that is being asked in real life (not speculation by a bunch of folks in a web forum) in this case is whether the approval of the principal is sufficient or whether the School Superintendent had to sign the approval. It&#39;s looking like someone made a bad interpretation of the law, but that&#39;s hardly tantamount to a Columbine massacre. There may be legal repercussions, but to hear some of you folks go on I&#39;d think I was posting in the Brady-bunch website rather than a hunting/fishing forum.

By the way, while I&#39;m no longer teaching in the public schools, I am a teacher AND a parent. So that card won&#39;t play here.

[doghouse95]

I don&#39;t mean to get nit picky here, but it is not against the law to have a weapon on school grounds. It is against the law to have a firearm on school grounds in Kalifornia. A bow is a weapon and we still teach archery at the high school level here. I will be attending the classes to teach archery in the local schools. It is a different certification than 4H or club instructor cert.
The first time I ever watched a rifle being put together was in high school. My shop teacher was a good machinist and a fair gunsmith.
I hunted in the mornings before school and would catch hell if I was late except for the times I got a deer. I could be late if I was taking care of game. I kept my rifles in my mom&#39;s vehicle, she worked at the school.
Our local high school still has a rifle team. They can not have firearms at school and can not shoot there but they still compete as a high school team.
I do understand not trusting some kids around firearms but they can still get a drivers license while they are in high school and many more thousands die in car wrecks every year than are killed by guns.
I believe it is Utah that allows anyone with a CCW to pack in schools, and this includes properly trained teachers. They believe that having good guys in school with guns is a good thing. When only bad guys bring guns to school they have an unarmed opponent and as Columbine demonstrated it is like shooting fish in a barrel. No law will stop a criminal from committing a crime but a legally armed citizen can.
By the way the rate of violence in Utah high schools is almost non existent so if you want to go by the numbers it would be safer for the teachers and students to have some good guys with guns in every school.

[rabbit hunter]

At my Jr high school we had a small 25 yard rimfire range. 7th and 8th graders got a chance. I think you had to pass the hunter safty test to be able to shot. they had guns or you could bring your own. we became members in the nra and got medals for shoting good scores. This was in Anaheim ca. 1980.....

I wonder if it is still there?

[Ferd Berfull]

My thoughts exactly. Kalifornia is not the rest of the world. It may be against the law in your state but then again so is just about everything. Justice Scalia just gave a speech a month or so ago where he described carrying his rifle to school one day a week ON THE SUBWAY for rifle team. He asked the group what would happen today if someone were seen on the subway carrying a firearm!

I work with a fellow, my age of 52, who went to school in Gilchrist Oregon just south of me. He and his two brothers carried their shotguns to school and hunted ducks and geese before and after school every day during season. Kept the guns at school along with the ammo.

What is wrong with this @#$%!!! politically correct @#$ society.

[Farallon]

Making something illegal doesn&#39;t prevent it, it just makes more criminals. The issue shouldn&#39;t be what is legal vs what is illegal, but rather is it right or wrong.

Too many hide behing "it is illegal" without using common sense. Based on the zero tolerance issues at schools, I get the impression "those" educators are the biggest violators of (not) using common sense.

[gwhunter69]

I am sorry. Approval or no approval this guy is a 100% idiot. I grew up in Marin County and I know that if you so much as say the word gun in a public school you are asking for a world of hurt...but to actually bring one onto campus and fire it? Geez, you might as well invite all the Gronola Eating, Birkenstock wearing hippies to watch because their is going to be an S-Storm over the simple fact there is a gun on campus. That is just looking for trouble in Marin County if you ask me.

[Common Sense]

We read a little story about a lady who drank coconut water, so today I brought three coconuts to school. Had a nail set to punch holes in them so we could get the water out for the kids to taste. After they each got a little cup of the water, I took the hammer and started smashing the coconuts into small pieces for the kids to eat. One little boy said, "wow, if you hit someone in the head with that hammer, their head would bust open like the coconuts."

You suppose those smart fellers in Sacratmento ought to pass a law forbidding me to bring a hammer to school?

[vermonsta]

Strike up the PC Chorus .....bad guns..... evil warped teacher...... They have an excellent teacher who can connect learning with reality and gain kids attention .....keel haul him ! put him in the rack in town square , call the ACLU ! Love the whining weasel who wouldn&#39;t give their name , kids classmates would punish him/her for parents paranoia. Could be another teacher pissed off because kids love the physics teacher for his creativity and his hard work connecting with the kids. Jealous teacher who drones on like Ben Stein repeating the same old same old day in day out. A teacher who can engage and motivate a student is worth a million bucks. Had a few awesome teachers who worked at teaching and being creative and the worthless slackers (with tenure) would always take shots at the teachers the students loved and actually learned from. I guess that a responsible adult doing a repeated controled demonstration/ experement is evil. Send me the silver braceletts , I&#39;m turning myself in I do my hunter ed classes in an elementary school .... but thats ok because I&#39;m not in Marin County Ca.? Alcatraz here I come...my head will be spinning and I&#39;ll be barfing pea soup ....pure evil ......reciting the Pledge of Allegence , and saying my prayers.

[Farallon]

Marin County; an elected Marin County representative (Joe Nathan) introduced a bill to make dove hunting in CA illegal a few years ago. Someone who had never dove hunted, probably never hunted in their life introduced the bill, I suspect because he received contributions to do so. When he pulled the bill, he said something similar to, "I was misinformed".

I took my hunter&#39;s education in an elementary school. We had rifles and archery equipment to handle, we didn&#39;t shoot the guns, nor fling arrows though.