Uncle John's Presents Book of the Dumb 2 by John Michael Scalzi Page A

chapter, we’ve got people teaching children very, very poorly. Although to be fair, the kids do their part as well. But hey! They’re kids. They have an excuse. The adults in this chapter, on the other hand, we have to wonder about. How did they get out of high school? (We have some theories, but they’re not very nice.)

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The Class Ended With a Bang
    I n Orlando, Florida, there’s this great program for kids called, “The Game of Life, The Game of Golf,” that aims to introduce underprivileged youngsters to the sport. But an additional part of the class involves teaching kids to make smart life choices—like, for instance, being careful around loaded weapons.
    Enter “Agent Smith,” from the Drug Enforcement Agency (better known to us as the DEA) and his .40 caliber duty weapon. During the class, Agent Smith took out the gun, removed the magazine, and then pulled back the slide to clear the chamber—indeed, he had one member of the audience of about fifty adults and children come up and confirm that there was no bullet in the chamber.
    As a brief interruption, we’d like to say that we don’t know much about handguns and the handling thereof, but we do know not to ever, ever take anyone else’s word on whether a gun is loaded or not. They could be lying, they could be idiots, or they could miss that one last little bullet. Treating every gun as if it’s loaded is the smart way to go. Now, back to the action.
    Once the audience member confirmed there was no bullet in the gun, Smith released the slide—which caused the bullet in the “unloaded” gun (surprise!) to blast out of the barrel and imbed itself in Agent Smith’s thigh (it was only a flesh wound). A spectator who brought her nephew to the class related to the Orlando Sentinel: “My first thought was that it was part of his presentation. I thought it was a blank and he was trying to make a point about how easy it is to fire, to getthe kids’ attention. But then I looked at the agent’s face and he looked surprised.”
    The good news is that Agent Smith’s pain was not in vain since he did get through to those kids about the dangers of loaded weapons, just not in the way he had originally planned. The spectator also noted, “The point of gun safety hit home . . . after seeing that, my nephew doesn’t want to have anything to do with guns.” We suspect Agent Smith doesn’t either.
    Source: Orlando Sentinel, The Washington Times

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Death By Peanut Butter!
    T here’s nothing funny about nut allergies. But in the particular, there’s not a thing amusing about someone having an allergic reaction so instantaneous and severe that their breathing passages constrict, anaphylactic shock sets in, and only a fast jab of adrenaline keeps someone on this side on the Styx (the mythological river, not the band).
    This may be why the South Orange school district in New Jersey suspended a sixth grader for three weeks after the student allegedly threatened a teacher with . . . a package of Nutter Butter cookies. It seems that the teacher had a severe nut allergy, and the student in question had an unopened pack of said cookies in class and had made some untoward suggestions to other classmates regarding the application of said cookies to said teacher.
    For discussing assault with a deadly cookie, you can get suspended these days? Yeesh. We can see how an actual attempt to rub said cookies on the teacher would certainly have been a problem. Hard time for the kid and a refusal of admittance to all the Ivy League schools (well, except maybe Brown) would have been an appropriate punishment. Better yet, if he dove across the cafeteria, peanut butter cookie in one hand, a small bust of noted peanut scientist George Washington Carver in the other, he’d still win points for creativity, but still meet with a suspension, too. But suspending a kid for just talking about