The .30-caliber bullet, he said, is fired into a foot-long, 8-pound block of wood hanging by cords from a ceiling mount. The students take measurements of the block's movement and mass and use that information to calculate bullet speed.
He said he fires the shot from point-blank range with all the students standing behind him, so there is no danger of an accident or ricochet. There has never been an injury or close call, he added.
"I've been doing this for years," said Lapp, who skipped two or three years after Columbine. "The students love it. They ask about it very early on in the year. It's one of the more exciting demonstrations."
Exciting is not the word, said Ted Feinberg, the assistant executive director for the National Association of School Psychologists.
"It's just absolute madness, from my point of view," said Feinberg, one of the founding members of the National Emergency Assistance Team, which has responded to most of the school shootings in the country. "It is not only crazy in concept, in light of the world we live in it is absolutely irresponsible."
Feinberg said he is shocked that a teacher would bring a gun to school in the wake of tragedies like Columbine, regardless of the educational purpose.
"Were there not other ways of illustrating whatever physical principles he was trying to demonstrate?" Feinberg asked. "What's the message we are giving bringing a loaded gun into a public setting and firing it off. It's a terrible model to project on students."
Link.
What a pussy.
How amusing, the psychological horror and disturbance unfurling madly from the delicate, privileged minds of Marin County high school students at the sight of...brace yourselves...a rifle. You know, "in the wake of Columbine".
Of course it's not about Columbine. It's about values. In Marin County guns signify the Other.
