Town Hall – by Tony KatzIn California, gun hysteria has reached such fanatical heights that teachers now feel empowered to confiscate student property, disregard their privacy, question their mental state and threaten police action – in front of other students. All have happened to the son of actor and entrepreneur Joseph C. Phillips, at El Camino Real Charter High School in Woodland Hills, CA.
Phillips, best known for his role as Lt. Martin Kendall on The Cosby Show, lives with his wife and three sons in the San Fernando Valley. In addition to being a regular fill-in host for Larry Elder on KABC radio in Los Angeles, he owns Daddy J’s Wingshack, where his 15-year-old son works and earned the money for an Airsoft bb gun. Last week his son brought a digital camera to school to show his friends a picture of the Airsoft.
On my radio show Saturday, Phillips explained that as his son was showing off the single photo, his Social Studies teacher, a Mr. James DeLarme, walked by. As his son described the incident, DeLarme “snatched” the camera out of his hand and asked him about the photo. When his son explained that it was a picture of an Airsoft bb gun, DeLarme declared the police would have to be notified and promptly left the room to confer with another teacher. The two teachers scrolled through all the photos on the camera, finally handing it back to the boy. Then, in front of all the students, DeLarme asked him, “Do you have any animosity towards your classmates?” and “Are you angry at anyone at school?”
Listen to the full interview here.
The school never notified Phillips or his wife. He learned about the incident from his son five days later. Phillips is livid:
…I’m not sure he’s qualified to teach social studies. He certainly isn’t qualified to psychoanalyze my kid. Looking through the photographs…what are they looking for? What are they qualified to determine by any other images on this camera? Tony, it is ridiculous.
It turns out that DeLarme has been public about his opposition to gun ownership. In an interview with the school paper, The King’s Courier, in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, he said “…our country’s position on gun control and violence is what makes such situations probable.”
Phillips spoke of the current anti-gun hysteria:
You see, Tony, and this is the reason I called you… I know there is sensitivity now about children coming into the school, shooting up their classmates. I get that. But at a certain point, people have to stand up and say “Enough with the hysteria! Enough is enough!” We are not going to sacrifice the dignity of our children, our own dignity… What they (the school) did is not keeping anyone safe.
Furious at the way his son had been treated, Phillips wrote a letter to the principal, Mr. David Fehte:
It may come as a shock to Mr. DeLarme, It may even be news to you, but my son is not the only boy in Woodland Hills with a BB gun. There are quite a few boys attending your school who not only own BB guns, but own real guns as well. (Some of them play air soft with my son!) Their fathers, mothers, and brothers also own guns and shoot regularly. Owning a gun is NOT a sign of mental illness. Owning a BB gun is NOT an indication of mental instability! Certainly, showing friends a photograph of a gun is NOT a warning sign that a student is a potential danger to his classmates! I object, in the strongest of terms, to my son being treated as a potential danger and to his being threatened with law enforcement. I further object to not being notified! If Mr. DeLarme truly believed my son presented a danger, both my wife and I should have been notified immediately!
Rather than respond himself, Fehte dispatched a vice principal to answer Phillips’ letter. The vice-principal claimed, according to Phillips, that the teacher had done the right thing to, “secure the safety of the 3,000 students and the 250 faculty members at the school.” Secure their safety from what? A photo?
One wonders how many other El Camino Real High School students are being threatened and humiliated by their teachers, and how many parents are likewise uninformed.
“Those who can’t do…teach.”
Let’s have a look at the operatives of the public school’s system’s child brain-washing system. The average school teacher is a frustrated failure, who in most cases took a teaching job because they couldn’t succeed in their chosen profession. A short career of humiliating defeat sends them back to school in search of employment because no one else will have them, but because the idiot did manage to get a degree from some inferior learning institution, the public school system is happy to hire them for a job that most people don’t want.
Now, all of a sudden, one of life’s losers finally feels like an important and powerful person because he has a room full of babies to rule over with an iron fist, and his bitter frustration is unleashed as despotic control over the only people who don’t know enough to expose him for being the idiot that he is.
His petty desire to feel important, or just less than worthless, is expressed in his new found power over the babies, whom he’s happy to hound over any minor incident that allows him to display his importance.
He’s never the type of person who would defy the administration in the name of common sense, but instead he’ll have his nose up the principal’s vent hole seeking that smile of approval that he’s never been able to receive in any other way.
He’s a pathetic, sycophantic loser whose only reward in life is in his petty power over a gang of kids, and he was hired because he can be counted upon to be exactly that.
So you are a teacher I sounds like!!
DeLarme missed his calling a smidge. He should have been teaching a socialism/marxism/fascism class.
It is the TEACHER that needs Mental Health screening.
Paranoia, Feelings of Grandeur, phobias ….
Teacher is a boiling cauldron of mental issues.
P.S. How are they teaching HISTORY with no pictures of weaponry?!?!?!?!
Simple, ALL weapons are held by other losers in official government
costumes, Police, Soldiers etc…
Is this another form of “racism”? I mean … omg, the teacher acts like if a person owns a gun they are a scurge on society and must sit at the back of the bus or be put away forever. I really, really dislike liberals and their “drama” mind sets!!! They’re so dangerous!!!
. . .
Sacramento’s school situation from a child of the 60’s.
I went to several schools in Sacramento while I never went to El Camino, I had a girlfriend from there. The mainstream schools I did (I did some summer school also) were Luther Burbank and Sac High. There was no such thing as charter schools back then. There were continuation schools which I won’t mention other than I knew many people who went to these as well. A lot of those people are barely making it right now, one is a Prison Guard at Folsom – go figure from street thug on RITALIN to prison guard, he’s actually doing well, but I wouldn’t contract for him, he’s still a thief at heart. A lot of them are dead from stupid mistakes. Back then there were two types of people, those who knew right from wrong and upheld the constitution, and those who basically flipped their nose at everyone and took what they wanted even if they got caught to hell with the consequences. The ratio was I have to say 1000:1 One rotten shit out of a thousand.
Luther Burbank, I remember this school was sunny, had an agriculture class, wood-shop, metal shop classes. Prior to 81, the only INCIDENT at that school that the public ever heard of was one knife. After a tour in the USAF I came back and heard about a “single gun incident” our neighborhoods were deteriorated in places at the time and somehow gangs got this mentality to shoot people as opposed to fists. As the years went on there were more incidents both at Burbank and other schools. By the time the 90’s hit it was common occurrence (every couple years) as hard as that was to believe for us older ones. Look I didn’t work at schools when I did my tour, I worked on very technical electronics, my math was FINE and there were no calculators, today you can’t give three pennies change. Something changed allowing that 1:1000 monkey to break out of the cage for others who normally wouldn’t do such things. Was it when they said you can’t spank? I think maybe it was the bad decision. I myself got belted. I learned respect, honesty and many other neat things. Today they lock the parents up on what is it Bradshaw Rd, a giant “god knows what” likely full of those DSM doctors and CPS with swat teams and missing (as in who gives a shit) warrants. Once you get sucked into that system, it’s very bad. I always wondered in the 1990’s why some people behaved as though their home had no 4th amendment, talking “inspection” ; this explains quite well how people became indoctrinated into not having any constitutional rights.
Sac High. When I first went there I was impressed, beautiful music classes, and auditorium, they had ARCHERY! One Teacher of honorable mention was an Asian Femail who I don’t know here name, I do remember the style of teaching algebra was impossible not to learn. We had just gotten a black principal who had things becoming good from previous neglect, and this principal was well loved by us all. I remember specific people (who aren’t there anymore now that it’s a charter) who asked me to come back and visit. After a tour in the USAF I come back and the school had apparently gone into neglect again and they were switching it over to a charter school, I never really heard much more about it after that. The built a big prison fence around it. A block away a homeless guy stands under the freeway with a sign around 5PM. There’s no way I would visit again with the way it behaves as a prison.
In all I am not very impressed with our schools, and I couldn’t imagine having to deal with post 911 insanity at these schools and their new policies from soda, food, to pictures of guns, it must be hell on earth. I actually had more trouble in the neighborhood than at the schools back then. Riding RT one day some crazy black guy who just got back from Cambodia held a giant bouy knife to my throat on the RT Bus. He got off and didn’t do it, but he also didn’t get in trouble. There are a lot of horror stories in oak park
I could talk about colleges, but … oh well. None of these kids should be doing this the traditional way ever again — lest they want to be a wallmart debt slave. If you have money to burn, then great, do college. Otherwise, I wouldn’t touch a college with a 10 foot poll again unless you need “specific training to accomplish your own goal”
e.g. I’m Henry Ford and I want an 8 cylinder, I need to learn (or even have someone else learn) how to forge. TAKE the class in forging, SKIP the class on management. Afterwards I can teach others how to forge.
There was a work ethic also that I feel has died. I remember one kid grabbed a “career” at kfc so that he could buy a whiles Jeep in a wooden box (er multiple boxes iirc) Dude’s now married with home/kids, doing well. Stranger things happen. I was more of an inventor, contractor myself, so I never fit in to any kind of this bs discipline beyond what the USAF ingrained into me.
My mom and dad (and grandparents) ultimately taught me right from wrong, the school is more of a “suggestion” and todays suggestions are not so swell. I too owned guns all my life, and I never threatened people or took them to schools. Now they want to make us criminals, registration into their databases. I say no more data. All around, full spectrum, you know they are going to use ALL data against you, so don’t give them anything.
I’m so glad I’m not a student in public school these days. I’d probably be in jail. If I was asked, “Are you angry at anyone at school?”, I would have to have answered, “Just you, you f***ing asshole!”
Sending your kids to public school is a mental disoder..turns boys into yes men, and grils into thinking there men.
It’s obvious the cops and “educators” have received a countrywide Mandate to abuse, both physically, and mentally, the “peasants” and their young children…..in every way possible, in order to condition us, CONDITION us to avoid any gun, picture, or actual. THEY want us to sicken and fear a punishment, from a young age.
So that in the future, in the present generation or future generations, we will never imagine a gun, never have a gun even in our thoughts.
This, so that we would NEVER rebel against THEM, the Overlords.
Joseph C. Phillips. Pick-up your baseball bat, go to the school & have a robust discussion with that teacher!
People are having their personal responsibility taken away from them. People behave responsibly when enabled.
Rich want more of what more of us threatens that they lose: money.